Snippings

My good friend Simon Taylor from 11:FS set out eight key benefits that a new financial infrastructure based on decentralised finance technologies might deliver and there are two of these that I think are particularly important, because of what they mean for innovation: programmability and composability.

Programmability: AKA “Programmable money” or “Programmable Assets,” bake in the rules about the transaction to the asset itself. For example, a US Dollar automatically deducts tax in the transaction. Or art that manages its royalties every time it’s transferred.

Composability: Any project can be a building block for another. For example, one DeFi protocol can use another to price its assets. Imagine if Citi built a capability, and Wells Fargo could immediately use it. This dramatically increases the pace of innovation as ideas compound.

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Fintech filled the gaps in product and experience, then abstracted the underlying infrastructure, but it never remade the infrastructure.

From Fintech 🧠 Food – Jan 2nd 2022 – Can DeFi fix Lending? India’s new Neobank and Messari’s 2022 Crypto Predictions are 🔥.

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He discovered that the amount had been sent from his Coinbase wallet to a temporary address provided by Chivo from which it sends money to final recipients, but within the hour it had been removed from there. And the money never arrived in his wallet.

From After Identity Theft, Salvadorans Now Report Funds Disappearing From Chivo Wallets.

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Tencent, one of China’s biggest companies and most active tech investors, has built a significant global fintech portfolio, with deals in recent years including stakes in Argentine personal finance app Ualá, French start-ups Qonto and Lydia, and South African challenger bank Tyme.

Its investment in Monzo is part of a $100m top-up to a $500m round led by the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund, first reported by the Financial Times in early December.

From China’s Tencent takes stake in UK digital bank Monzo | Financial Times:

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On the one hand, the idea of programmable money is very attractive.

Lee calls this combination of tightly coupled electronic money and accompanying programming code “coherent.” The purpose of this combination of code and data is that anyone can see the code and interested parties can agree that the smart contract is valid. An obvious problem is that one cannot guarantee that all mistakes or bugs in a particular set of code have been detected and removed.

From CBDC – How Dangerous is Programmability? – The FinReg Blog:

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EtherWrapped announced the airdrop from a now-deleted Twitter account. The team, whose identities are unknown, also verified the token contract on Etherscan, which made it look genuine.

The team used the airdrop as bait to lure traders into buying its token, and later sold off its share.
YEAR has crashed to near zero and the team can not be traced.

From Ethereum Project Airdrops Scam Token, Then Pulls the Rug – Crypto Briefing:

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Austin Baker, Assistant Professor at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS), and  J. Remy Green, who teaches at Boston University School of Law and Baruch College at the City University of New York, wrote a very interesting paper about this for the Columbia Human Rights Law Review (vol. 53, issue no. 1) in which they argue that the common notion that every person has a single, clearly defined “legal” name is “a kind of collective delusion we all seem to share (emerging somewhere in the late twentieth century), but is not grounded in legal or social reality“.

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Specifically, our attacks use hydrogel, which is a popular smart material in 4D printing. A hydrogel can achieve 4D printing effects by absorbing water and swelling to increase its volume by 400% [33]. By carefully designing 3D structures with hydrogels, the desired 4D effects can be achieved when stimulated [6].

From Physical Logic Bombs in 3D Printers via Emerging 4D Techniques.

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Soon they were struggling to find a store to change the cash in West Palm Beach — where “they don’t accept hundred-dollar bills”, Shawn explained.

From ‘Money is no object’: Ghislaine Maxwell trial shines light on class divide | Financial Times:

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 Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Jordan should know the difference, after all. The IEEE Fellow is one of the world’s leading authorities on machine learning. In 2016 he was ranked as themost influential computer scientist by a program that analyzed research publications,

“People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.”

From Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says – IEEE Spectrum.

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Simply put, if ad-driven platforms like Facebook can’t track how people interact with other apps, they’ll work more to keep people in their apps as much as possible, especially for activities that involve money like shopping. Eric Seufert, an influential ads industry analyst and consultant, calls this phenomenon the rise of “content fortresses.”

Since these changes by Apple and regulators largely don’t restrict how apps collect data about their own users, that first-party data is now more valuable. If a Facebook user makes a purchase without leaving to complete it in another app or website, Facebook can provide that information to the advertiser who paid for the ad that led to the purchase. Advertisers, in turn, pay more money when they know their ads work.

From Super apps are coming, and they’ll never let you go – The Verge.

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