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Michael Hsu, the acting head of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), said tokenization of assets is a serious advance into the future of finance, but decentralized blockchains may be too problematic to handle that movement.
Achieving decentralization, security and scale all at once “is not possible with a public blockchain,” Hsu said at an American Bankers Association event on Friday.
“As a result, the crypto industry remains largely self-referential and disconnected from the real world,” he said. The sector is “immature and rife with risks, despite several years in the mainstream spotlight, billions of dollars of venture capital investment and millions of hours of code commits.”

From U.S. Banking Watchdog OCC Makes Case for Tokenization, Just Not on Public Blockchains.

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Project Rosalind explored how a universal and extensible application programming interface (API) layer could connect central bank and private sector infrastructures and facilitate retail CBDC payments.

From Press release: Project Rosalind develops a prototype application programming interface layer for retail CBDC systems and explores ecosystem innovation:

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Today, we’re adding PIX, the most used payment method in Brazil, as a payment method for Spotify Premium. Getting access to on-demand ad-free offline music streaming in Brazil has never been so easy. Now, users can pay once and recharge whenever they want—without automatic renewal.

From Spotify Brazil Expands Payment Methods With PIX — Spotify:

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The best scenario would be to end up with 10+ “too big to fail banks” instead of the current 4, complemented by several dozen “specialist banks” to serve specific niches.

From Generative AI Is the Attila the Hun That’s Going to End the Banking System as We Know It – Bain Capital Ventures:

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An honest chatbot at a retail bank would simply say, “Right now, we pay you 1.2% on your deposits, but you could get 4.85% at CIT Bank. You are paying 10.5% on your auto loan, but you could get an 8.75% rate at Lightstream. You paid $450 in fees in the last 12 months in fees, but with a Capital One 360 checking account you would have paid $0 in fees. RUN!”

From Generative AI Is the Attila the Hun That’s Going to End the Banking System as We Know It – Bain Capital Ventures:

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“They proceeded to the self-service checkouts and scanned multiple Clubcard vouchers on a smartphone, ultimately reducing the price of the goods to zero,” the prosecution counsel claimed.

From Tesco: Students accused of scamming NI stores with TikTok Clubcard – BBC News:

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The great paradox in financial services is that money is really really really important to us, yet we still choose to spend more time deciding what movie to go see, what restaurant to eat at, and what video game to play than we do managing our money.

From The Apple Vision Pro’s Impact On Banking:

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For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere – it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps.

From Vision Pro — Benedict Evans:

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Indeed, the Vision Pro actually looks a bit more like the original Macintosh, which was over $7,000 (adjusted for inflation) when it launched in 1984, and most people didn’t know why they needed one.

From Vision Pro — Benedict Evans:

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While working at the morgue, Lodge allegedly stole parts of cadavers donated to the school, often by the deceased’s kin, to sell them to collectors, and even let Maclean and Taylor into the morgue to peruse the bodies and parts and choose what they wanted to buy.

According to the indictment, from September 2018 to July 2021, Taylor transferred 39 electronic payments to a PayPal account operated by Lodge, totaling $37,355.56, in payment for human remains he’s stolen. One of the transactions, for $1,000, came with the memo “head number 7.” Another said, “braiiiiiins.”

From ‘Braiiiiiiiiins’: Alleged Harvard Human Remains Trafficker Left PayPal Notes.

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