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The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (Boston Fed) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Currency Initiative (MIT DCI) are collaborating on exploratory research known as Project Hamilton,

From Project Hamilton Phase 1 Executive Summary – Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

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Despite using ideas from blockchain technology, we found that a distributed ledger operating under the jurisdiction of different actors was not needed to achieve our goals. Specifically, a distributed ledger does not match the trust assumptions in Project Hamilton’s approach, which assumes that the platform would be administered by a central actor. We found that even when run under the control of a single actor, a distributed ledger architecture has downsides. For example, it creates performance bottlenecks, and requires the central transaction processor to maintain transaction history, which one of our designs does not, resulting in significantly improved transaction throughput scalability properties.

Well, I imagine that the core of their discovery was that a blockchain is a very specific solution to the problem of forming consensus in the presence of untrusted third parties but in a Federal Reserve digital currency of any kind there would be no such parties.

 

 

 

CBDC design choices are more granular than commonly assumed. Currently, CBDC designs are categorized as direct, two-tier, or hybrid models, with “token” or “account” access models 1 2 7 12 15. We found these limited categorizations lacking and insufficient to surface the complexity of choices in access, intermediation, institutional roles, and data retention in CBDC design 10. For example, wallets can support both an account-balance view and a coin-specific view for the user regardless of how funds are stored in the database.

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One surprise the researchers found is that the blockchain technology underlying cryptocurrencies was an inferior platform, creating bottlenecks as it requires a complete record of transactions in the order in which they were processed.

From Boston Fed, MIT Test Digital Dollar | PYMNTS.com.

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Nonetheless, an interesting story emerges: Most NFT wash traders have been unprofitable, but the successful NFT wash traders have profited so much that, as a whole, this group of 262 has profited immensely overall.

From Crime and NFTs: Chainalysis Detects Significant Wash Trading and Some Money Laundering In this Emerging Asset Class – Chainalysis.

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An artificial intelligence tool developed by Google beat thousands of seasoned programmers in a series of coding competitions.

From Google DeepMind’s AlphaCode system beats thousands of human experts in coding contest | News | The Times.

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most of the bitcoin associated with the Bitfinex hack is widely tracked and blacklisted. Thus, hackers will have a tough time cashing out on prominent centralized exchanges.

From Hackers Move $3.55B Worth of Bitcoin From 2016 Bitfinex Hack:

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In one post, a fake account for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who is closely aligned with Trump, shared a fake story on a fake Fox News website about a fake tweet by a fake Elon Musk, falsely claiming that Tesla’s CEO would soon accept Trump coins as payment.

From How Trump Coins Became an Internet Sensation:

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“Because so many cross-border transactions have a dollar leg, unilateral US sanctions would achieve 75 per cent of combined US-European sanctions,” reckons Brian O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think-tank.

From Shutting out Russia from Swift system would not be a surgical strike | Financial Times:

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In 1955, onions made up 20 percent of the commodities traded at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Two traders, Sam Seigel and Vincent Kosuga, saw an opportunity. The pair began buying onions and onion futures in huge amounts, cornering the market—by that fall, they ended up with roughly 98 percent of all the onions in Chicago

From The Great Chicago Onion Ring: Why Selling Onion Futures Is Against Federal Law – GOOD:

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When prices began to rise Kosuga offered onions to small-scale merchants across the country. He sold around 9 million pounds of onion to small-scale merchants and realized profits from high onion prices. Following this, he sold all his commodity holdings and made bets on the decline of retail onion prices.

From The biggest scam in human history! | Thinking Global:

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Gerald Ford, then a Congressman from Michigan, sponsored a bill outlawing the trade of onion futures—a very specific bill aimed at preventing this very specific type of endeavor. The commodities trading lobby, of course, opposed the bill, threatening litigation if it were signed into law. President Eisenhower called their bluff, signing the Onion Futures Act in the summer of 1958. The Mercantile Exchange sued, and lost. The trading of onion futures is banned in the United States to this day.

This why the price of onions is far more volatile

The results and consequences of such a high volatility for producers are so disastrous that even the son of one of the onion producer who lobbied the congress 60 years ago wishes futures contracts were in places:

“There probably has been more volatility since the ban […] I would think that a futures market for onions would make some sense today, even though my father was very much involved in getting rid of it.”
Futures are not simply tools for traders. They also constitute a very effective way to decrease price volatility and secure the revenues of producers.

From The Onion Paradox or Why Futures are Good for the Economy – BSIC | Bocconi Students Investment Club:

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Authorities took notice. In 2018, the European Union amended an existing anti-money laundering directive, adding art dealers and auctioneers to the list of professionals required to verify the identity and source of funds and wealth of a client before entering into a cash transaction worth more than $11,100. If the dealer considers the transaction suspicious, they must report it to the authorities.

EU member states and the U.K. implemented the directive according to their national legal systems, leading to what some experts consider a patchwork of laws.

The U.S., with its $21 billion art trade, the world’s largest, still hasn’t adopted many of the recommendations.

From From Banksy to Picasso, offshore world awash in valuable art – ICIJ.

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Formerly known as Libra, Diem initially sought to create a digital coin backed by a basket of real-world currencies. But in an attempt to appease US regulators, it narrowed its vision in 2020 to focus on launching a coin backed one-for-one by the dollar, known as a stablecoin, and hired former HSBC legal chief Stuart Levey as its first chief executive.

In another last-ditch effort to win regulatory approval in May, it shifted its operations from Switzerland to the US and announced that Silvergate would become the exclusive issuer of its planned stablecoin and would manage its reserves.

Nevertheless, the project still failed to gain approval from US regulators and David Marcus, the initiative’s founder, left Facebook at the end of last year.

From Facebook gives up on crypto ambitions with Diem asset sale | Financial Times.

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