Snippings

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A new study from Juniper Research has found that revenue for digital identity vendors will exceed $53 billion globally in 2026; doubling from $26 billion in 2021. Digital identity revenue includes third-party and civic identity apps, centralised identity schemes, and digital identity verification.

From Juniper Research: Digital Identity Revenue to Exceed $53 Billion Globally by 2026, as Verification Becomes Critical | Business Wire.

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The company built Novi, a digital currency wallet, in order to hold the Diem coin. However, Novi was launched as a small-scale pilot in October using a coin from an external provider, the Paxos Dollar.

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

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If Web3 is to become a general purpose financial system, or a general system for decentralized trust, it needs to develop robust interfaces with the real world, its legal systems, and the operating economy.

From Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 – O’Reilly.

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I have written before (eg, here in Forbes) that one of the great attractions of building a new digital cash infrastructure to implement a digital currency, instead of just laying a simple peer-to-peer protocol on top of the existing digital money infrastructure, is that it would add to diversity to the infrastructure and therefore resilience to the payment system, which is vital national infrastructure.

 

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DCash — the digital currency used by seven Caribbean nations — has been down for the last two weeks and it’s unclear when it will be back online, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank said Friday.

 

From Caribbean Digital Currency, DCash, Remains Offline for Second Week.

 

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It’s not just that CBDC must work offline, but that it must work independently from he existing electronic money infrastructure.

 

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Many Kazakh citizens rely on traditional digital payment methods like debit cards to buy food, but without internet connections, these were rendered useless. Local media have reported long queues for ATMs and withdrawal caps because of shortages of cash.

For central banks, the situation in Kazakhstan shows both the importance and the limitations of cash. The crisis makes it clear that it will not be enough for central banks to develop an online digital currency transaction network while treating cash as the offline back-up.

From Kazakhstan unrest highlights importance of offline payment functionality – OMFIF.

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This one of the aspects of digital currency that fascinates me. Some innovative thinking will required to deliver a genuine cash alternative into mass markets and my strong suspicion is that it will depend on the use of secure, tamper-resistant hardware. Writing [here a year ago], Vipin Bharathan talked about Visa’s proposed Offline Payment System (OPS) which implement digital currency using digital signatures generated in this hardware, in the form of Trusted Executions Environments (TEEs) in mobile phones and laptops and so on. This is only one of the solutions being proposed but it illustrates the general class of most-likely implementation rather well: since these chips cannot be cloned, they provide a means to prevent the subversion of transactions even when they are device-to-device with no blockchain or database in sight.

These TEEs are chips (just the like chips on bank cards or the SIM cards inside mobile phones) that cost next to nothing.

China 

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DCash — the digital currency used by seven Caribbean nations — has been down for the last two weeks and it’s unclear when it will be back online, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank said Friday.

From Caribbean Digital Currency, DCash, Remains Offline for Second Week.

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digital identity startups applied digital credential and distributed ledger technology to mitigate forgery and certificate counterfeiting in supply chains. This sounds less exciting than it is, because the goal is to trust digitally native data associated with imports in order to stop fake goods from entering the country

From DHS SVIP Program offering funding for biometric wearables | Biometric Update:

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While some tokens backed by Coinbase and Andreessen have produced big returns for traders who bought on listing day, on average they have underperformed bitcoin and ethereum after joining the exchange

From The Coinbase model: profit from the crypto assets it lists | Financial Times.

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DESO, as the token is known, is one of at least 20 cryptocurrencies that Coinbase has listed for trading while holding an investment in a related project

From The Coinbase model: profit from the crypto assets it lists | Financial Times.

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The Onion Futures Act of 1958 was brought in after two onion traders, Sam Seigel and Vincent Kosuga, cornered the onion market and made huge profits, at the expense of Americans for whom there were subsequently shortages of onions in many states, and particularly for onion farmers, many of whom went into bankruptcy due to Seigel and Kosuga’s actions. The law is still in effect to this day.

From Web3: A terrible idea that is ignorant of history and technology | by Antsstyle | Jan, 2022 | Medium.

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Jonah Erlich, a member of ConstitutionDAO, which tried to buy one of the original copies of the US Constitution at auction, has likened a DAO to a group chat with a bank account.

From What are DAOs, or decentralised autonomous organisations? | The Economist.

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