Snippings

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‘The people whose data was exposed were those who did their market securities KYC,’

From CDSL Data Breach: 44 million investors’ personal data like PAN, Demat details leaked | Technology News | Zee News:

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“The most important thing for Taproot is…smart contracts,” said Fred Thiel, CEO of cryptocurrency mining specialist Marathon Digital Holdings. “It’s already the primary driver of innovation on the ethereum network. Smart contracts essentially give you the opportunity to really build applications and businesses on the blockchain.”

As more programmers build smart contracts on top of bitcoin’s blockchain, bitcoin could become more of a player in the world of DeFi, or decentralized finance, a term used to describe financial applications designed to cut out the middleman.

From Bitcoin taproot upgrade: What it means for investors:

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PwC, for example, say that 90% of banks’ useful customer data comes from payments.

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While the Consensys CBDCgo solution, in association with Visa, allows users to spend CBDCs without needing to change their payment or acceptance network, the Criteo, Secretarium and Intel Atomic CBDC solution supports anonymity and privacy for small transactions and offers traceability for large transactions for anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism purposes. Finally, G+D Filia provides a means of payment that is inclusive and enables participation in the digital economy without a smartphone or a bank account.

From Singapore Fintech Festival 2021: MAS global CBDC challenge winners revealed.

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Th heart of cyburbia

Online or offline, we are never very far from the insinuation that whilst we might be upstanding examples of high moral virtue ourselves, others can’t be trusted – to have the right opinion or vote the right way. If we can’t trust them, we need to control them. What we need, as the argument goes, is a system of control that will engineer social cohesion – a way to guarantee that all of us abide by the right moral behaviors – for the common good.  Untrusting of our peers, we’ll look to the State to tell us what is permissible or not. And just like that, with some help from global corporates as enforcers, we’ve got ourselves a Digital Morality Machine.

From The Digital Morality Machine.

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She is one of thousands of people who have seen savings swept away this year by an unprecedented wave of online bank fraud hitting Britain, where you’re more likely to be a victim of online fraud than any other crime.

The country is the global epicentre for such attacks, according to five of the biggest British banks and more than a dozen security experts who said scammers were buying up batches of consumers’ personal details on the dark net to target the record numbers shopping and banking online since the pandemic.

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The country’s super-fast payments infrastructure, relatively light policing of fraud-related crime, plus its use of the world’s most widely used language English, also made it an ideal global test bed for scams, the banks and specialists added.

From Welcome to Britain, the bank scam capital of the world | Reuters.

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Utah Department of Alcohol and Beverage Control (DABC) will accept the mDLs for alcohol purchase at its Saratoga Springs and Farmington locations, and about 10 others by the end of the year… Get Mobile Administrator is overseeing the mDL service, which gives users full control of their data as they can choose to share only information that is necessary to get them through their transactions at the liquor stores.
DABC employees at participating stores will use GET Mobile Verify to contactlessly authenticate that a customer is over the age of 21 without having to touch the customer’s phone or ID card.

From Mississippi plans digital ID, Utah’s GET Group mDLs accepted for booze | Biometric Update.

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The term was coined by Angela Strange at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who also asserted that in the future “every company will be a fintech company” because every company will be able to embed financial services.

And they have good reason to.

It’s reported that brands expect Embedded Finance to add an additional €720.78bn in revenue over the next five years.

From Why every company won’t be a fintech company – AltFi:

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Riksbank published the results of its solution  xxx

In a new report the e-krona pilot project presents the lessons learned from the first phase of the project, including:

The technology provides new possibilities, but requires further investigation. The technology gives the possibility to create uniquely identifiable e-kronor, but is untried when it comes to processing retail payments in the magnitude and with the safety level required by a central bank digital currency.
Different forms of storage of tokens and keys provide different properties. The way the money is stored should ultimately be determined by which functions are given priority in the e-krona. One important question is whether the e-krona will function even without access to the internet, what is known as off-line functionality, a possibility the project has not yet tested.
A parallel network makes the payment system more robust. A solution based on blockchain technology and tokens means that one creates an infrastructure that to a great extent functions parallel to today’s payment infrastructure.

From Sweden central bank publishes CBDC pilot results, next steps will investigate distribution, storage and off-line payments – Finadium:

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The Bronx was seen as an ideal location for a postal banking pilot because of its demographics. While 9.4 percent of New York City households have no bank account, in the Bronx that number nearly doubles to 17.7 percent, according to 2019 data from the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. These would be precisely the people attracted by a postal banking option.

But the Baychester Station is located in the Northeast Bronx, and the demographics there have none of the precarity of the South Bronx

From Postal Banking Test in the Bronx Yields No Customers – The American Prospect:

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