Snippings

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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Game Blockchain User count (last 30 days)
Alien Worlds WAX 759,600
Axie Infinity Ethereum, Ronin 602,210
Splinterlands Hive 597,980

From • NFT games with most users 2021 | Statista:

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The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, wrote recently that while many national governments are “inefficient and slow-moving” in adjusting to changes in the needs of populations (and, I might add, environments), cities and states have the potential for more flexible and dynamic responses. He looks in particular at cities, observing that there are great cultural differences between cities and therefore it is easier “to find a single city where there is public interest in adopting any particular radical idea” that it is to find, or convince, whole nations.

This is a fascinating perspective, and one that I have much sympathy for. In my 2017 book “Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin” I suggested that the multiple monies of the future will be linked to the multiple communities we will inhabit and I wrote that there were reasons for thinking that the city identity would be the most important. I remember reflecting on Dan Hill’s Europe has functioned via urban centres for much, much longer than it has functioned as a collection of nation states and think that (as in some many other ways) the money of the future is going to look more like the money of the past.

Cities as well as being the focus for economies and economic growth are above physical locations and, as I recall the futurist Gill Ringland suggesting in her financial services scenarios for 2050, the ability to enter, do business and reside in desirable cities will become a valuable right and the basis for one of a number of demographic asset classes. I remember an FS Club discussion about this last year, where the even more expansive view that cities might begin to dictate the policies and trajectories of the nation state was put forward.

In this context, Gill’s prescient narrative of the “C50” (the organisation of the 50 richest city-states that will replace the G20 as the mechanism for “managing” the world economy), forms a solid narrative around the future economic organisation of a successful, functional world. As the respected commentator Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times some years ago, “this is the age of cities, not of national economies” (going to say that “it is high time London became a true city state).

City-Centric

I find these views very interesting, because they surely imply that the money of cities will become the most important kind to the average person. In a world in which the public have abandoned Sterling for London Lolly and US Dollars for New York Notes and LA Loonies, city currencies might be a key medium of exchange in a the future economy that grows into the metaverse but has deep, deep roots in the universe. In that universe, most transactions remain local and even at the supra-national level in a single market, only 1%-2% of European transactions are cross border and an even smaller proportion are national. Even in the proto-metaverse e-commerce world, still nine in ten European transactions are local.

These ideas have been around for a while. In the Havas “14 trends for 2014” Marian Salzman wrote about post-nationalism, countries breaking up and London becoming independent from the UK. These views may have seemed fanciful to readers then, or indeed now, but I am not so sure they can be easily dismissed. CityCoins, which is a startup backed by Balaji Srinivasan and others, is launching a MiamiCoin, a token that raises money for the city while allowing its holders to earn mining and staking fees. According to the company, MiamiCoin has already raised $21 million and there are plans to launch an NYCCoin as well.

(MiamiCoin isn’t quite the kind of city currency that those writers were predicting, because it’s not actually issued by Miami or backed by assets that Miami controls. While, as noted in the Financial Times, there is a long history of city-states producing their own money that production came with sovereignty — the ability to control quality and volume. Miami is a different experiment, branding money that it doesn’t control for the purposes of signalling.)

Breaking Free

Some crypto billionaires want to go even further and create their own cities (in, for example, Nevada) but the link between cities and currencies is not confined to rich first world enclaves. The noted rapper Akon is about to begin building another crypto city in Africa.  He already started work on a city in Senegal and the new one will be in Uganda. Both of these cities will run on Stellar rails using the “Akin” cryptocurrency.

Cryptoassets and token trading aside, there are plenty of communities beginning to experiment in this way. Last year, for example, in virus-ravaged Italy the town of Castellino del Biferno in southern Italy’s Molise region started to issue its own money (the “Ducati”), redeemable at local merchants only, with a 100% reserve in euros. This money (strictly speaking, a “currency board” rather than a “currency”) was intended to keep value circulating within the local economy but there’s no reason why an actual local currency might not circulate over a wider area. In the north of Italy, to continue with this particular theme, anti-euro Lega nationalists and the alt-Left Five Star Movement were at one time planning to go around the euro and create a rival payment structure based on ‘IOU’ notes (a course of action I may well have helped to stimulate).

If the economy shifts and people find themselves in a depression, then more regions may well decided to decouple themselves from national and supra-national currencies in order to manage their own monetary policy on the road to recovery. In a world before mobile phones, tokens and de-fi this would have seemed unimaginable! Imagine trying to print and distribute and maintain and manage a Miami Metro Moolah, with Miami Moolah cards for residents and pretty bills for visitors. A hurdle, for sure. But frankly it would take five minutes to create such a money today and the ability to creating city monies that would compete to the benefit of consumers and businesses is no longer beyond the abilities of the average City council. Pretty soon, they’ll be able to download a new currency are shareware.

Is Vitalik on to something? I think he is. Would such competing currencies really be a big problem? If I live in London and use London Lolly for the train, for lunch and at the supermarket, is it such a big deal to convert it to Chicago Cabbage or Bronx Bucks to buy something online? Especially when your phone does it for you and an AI f/x bot is vigilant on your behalf to get the best prices? I don’t think so.