Snippings

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To be clear, I am not against stablecoins, but they do have to meet the test of singleness of money. I am not against Central Bank Retail Digital Currency, but I question why it is needed if innovation proceeds as I think it should.

That said, you may detect from what I have said that I do think commercial banks need to step up to the challenge of digital money provision.

From: Central Banking in extreme adversity – speech by Andrew Bailey | Bank of England.

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The third area of difficulty concerns a challenge that does arise nowadays, namely whether we have over-protected the banking system via excessive regulation, and in so doing pushed more risk into non-banks which would be more safely housed in banks. Put another way, have we increased overall financial stability risk by raising the bar too high in banks?

From: Central Banking in extreme adversity – speech by Andrew Bailey | Bank of England.

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The Bank for International Settlements said stablecoins fail the three main tests of any money because they are not backed by central banks, lack sufficient guardrails against illicit usage and do not have the flexibility of funding needed to generate loans.

From: Stablecoins ‘perform poorly’ as money, central banks warn.

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For years, media companies have leaned on two business models: advertising and subscriptions. But both have limits. Ads fatigue users. Subscriptions are saturating the market. Viewers are seeking better experiences.

From: The Third Wave: AI And Web3 Are Changing Commerce At Amazon & QVC.

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Boulter believes a lot of the abuse she is sent is from people who have placed bets on her matches, given it comes after victories as well as defeats.
She says she has become better at moving on from it, or simply not looking at her direct messages, but the impact is clear.
“As far as death threats, it’s just not something you want to be reading straight after an emotional loss,” she says.
“A lot of the time you get it after you win as well.”
Statistics shared exclusively with BBC Sport demonstrate the level of abuse aimed at players through social media, and what is being done to try to address it.
The figures – provided by data science firm Signify, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) – show that in 2024, about 8,000 abusive, violent or threatening messages were sent publicly to 458 tennis players through their social media accounts.
A significant proportion of abuse stems from betting, according to Signify, which has been working with tennis authorities on detecting abuse through an artificial intelligence-led detection system called Threat Matrix.
More than a quarter of all abuse (26%) was targeted at five players.
The most prolific account sent 263 abusive messages, and 15 accounts were escalated to law enforcement.
Nine of the 10 most prolific accounts – the majority of which were related to angry gamblers – were either suspended or had content removed.
Details of 39 account holders were shared with the tennis authorities and betting industry for further action.
Across the year, angry gamblers sent 40% of all detected abuse, with messages clearly related to betting activity because of the timing or content of the abuse.

From: Katie Boulter: British tennis player reveals social media abuse she has received – BBC Sport.

I hadn’t really thought about this because I assumed that most of the online abuse that celebrities received came from people who were generally deranged and who had nothing else to do. I would’ve guessed that the typical person sending horrible messages to a female tennis player would be an Ince in his mother’s basement, so this whole thing about sports betting as a Corre cause of OnLine abuse was surprising. It’s also very interesting, because I’m sure it reveals something about the nature of society that is horrible and depressing but has some useful lessons for us as well. Anyway, the story is about the abuse of female tennis players were accompanied by the usual causes to end anonymity on social media. Well, this may at first seem to be a solution to the problem, I can assure you that it isn’t. The people who have abuse at celebrities online I generally speaking not Master hackers who hide their identity between layers of VPNs, disposable email accounts and Burner phones. As I’m sure those figures will reveal, most of the abuse as referred to law-enforcement were easily track down.

 

What is more important than.

 

I think it’s important to understand the distinction between identifying people on social media, which in some cases is necessary for example example people listing items for sale on Facebook marketplace) and knowing that people are identified. I’ll explain the difference. If I am interacting with somebody on social media, I would like to know that they are, for example, a real person. More than that, I’d like to know that they are a real person that someone else has identified and can testify to their relevant characteristics. Relevant characteristics, of course mean characteristics that are relevant to the conversation at hand and different conversations may need different characteristics. So let’s say I’m in a chat room for people who have stayed at Hilton hotels, then I would like to see a “blue tick” next to their name to indicate that they have been cryptographically verified to have stayed at Hilton hotel. I don’t need to know their name or any other personal identifying information. I just need to know that somebody (Hilton? American Express American Express?) Can provide a cryptographic secure, verify credential to attest to the specific attribute that is required to obtain membership of the group.

 

One of the interesting things about the spectrum of cryptographic technologies that we have available to us now, but we did not have available to us at the Dawn at the Internet, is that we can prove facts about people (and for that matter companies and for that matter) without requiring them to disclose the eFax themselves. I can obtain a cryptographically verified credential about somebody that proves that they’re over 18 without having to see their age or date of birth or anything else.

 

This can open up a new kind of online discourse which enhances both the privacy and the security of participants.

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Coinbase x402 is less about charging your card or your wallet with biometric authentication and more about your AI agent paying an API $0.001 to fetch real-time data. It is a really fit-for-purpose for the emerging Agentic economy. Unlike closed platforms, e.g., Stripe or PayPal, it is composable and open.

It is open-source (Apache 2.0), built for machine-to-machine payments, designed for developers, not consumers. Coinbase x402 is backed by an ecosystem of tech allies that includes AWS, Circle, Anthropic, and NEAR.

From: Coinbase x402: The Protocol Power Play That Could Reshape Stablecoin Payments.

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Visa became one of the first major payments networks to settle transactions in stablecoin when it piloted enabling clients to fulfill their settlement obligations in USDC. To date, over $225 million in stablecoin volume has been settled through Visa across participating clients.

Visa has since stepped up its investment in the market, taking a stake in stablecoin infrastructure platform BVNK and undertaking a partnership with Stripe-owned Bridge to help bring stablecoin-linked cards to more people in more places.

From: Visa says every institution that moves money will need a stablecoin strategy.

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Alessandro Hatami, 

Conversely, CBDCs — while slower to develop — are gaining momentum, backed by central banks and benefiting from regulatory clarity. The digital Euro is leading the way in Europe, with clear progress on design, governance, and regulatory frameworks. However, CBDCs still face hurdles in building public trust and demonstrating real utility beyond the wholesale banking sector.

Ultimately, the rules of the game will determine the outcome. Well-governed, asset-backed stablecoins could complement fiat currencies, particularly in cross-border payments and digital commerce. But coins without strong foundations are unlikely to survive.

From: The Big Themes from Money20/20: Why Banks Are Back, AI Is a Risk, and Financial Inclusion Finally Matters | CFI.co.

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Speaking after her round-of-32 defeat to Francesca Jones at the Nottingham Open on Tuesday, British number four Harriet Dart called for the introduction of identification measures when creating social media accounts.
“The amount of abuse that we all get is pretty mind-blowing,” Dart said.
“The WTA are obviously trying to do something about it with the Threat Matrix system, but until Instagram verify ID or something, sadly, people can keep reopening accounts.”

From: Katie Boulter abuse: Tennis players call for social media ID after online abuse – BBC Sport.

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Obviously, the main topic of conversation at Money 20/20 Europe this year in Amsterdam was artificial intelligence (AI), and when people weren’t talking about artificial intelligence they were talking about stablecoins, but the first interesting talk that I went to was Simon Taylor’s look at the state of open finance.

Simon’s view was that while open finance has delivered some positives, where robust regulation exists open finance hasn’t lived up to its promise. In Europe, has says, it’s regulated but not solved. Similarly in the UK, it’s been nearly 10 years since we went live with open banking we are only now getting commercial variable recurring payments (31 companies have agreed to fund a new entity that will setup and manage this standard). In the US, it was the Wild West, but it sort of works better. He pointed out that without clear regulation, the market created solutions anyway. “Plaid became so ubiquitous we use it as a verb”. US open finance is far from fixed, but market competition has driven relentless improvement in conversion rates, connectivity, and user interfaces that regulatory-first markets haven’t matched. My view is that while everyone seems to agree that open finance is necessary to support the goal of better financial health for the population as a whole and everyone seems disappointed by the impacts so far. But I still think that open finance is central to the evolution of the financial sector. In the UK at least we still don’t have the basics in place: too many API calls fail and the use of those APIs for anything other than basic account information is limited. Of course, open finance by itself won’t transform anything but in combination with AI and stablecoins as noted, I expect to see real innovation and real change.

It’s not a hard prediction to make that AI is going to change our industry just as its going to change every other industry. But I think it’s important to note that this is about more than saving a few people in the call centre or making slightly better credit decisions. The industry is going to be shaped by what customers do with AI and the evolution of agentic finance will lead to a very different kind of industry. If you look at agentic finance right now you will see that the entrepreneurs working on next generation services are already using stablecoins to do real business. So, while a lot of people talk about stablecoins in the context of cross border payments, I think it’s also important to look at where they are stimulating innovation.

During my fireside chat abour agent-to-agent payments on stage with Debbie Gamble from Interac, we also touched on the idea of digital public infrastructure (DPI) for both human and non-human use and I think this is a very fruitful way of thinking. AI agents need a means to pay and get paid, they need to recognise each other and their respective credentials, and they need to be able to exchange data with organisations. I can’t help but feel that the evolution of this robot DPI will shape many corporate strategies over the coming couple of years. This has particular implications for digtial identity, a field where we are advising glibal clients (as for payments and for smart mobility). Digital identity infrastructures must be able to accommodate the “ABCs”: Know-you-agent, know-your-business and know-your-customer!

(On that particulart issue of the emerging “know-your-agent” sector, I will be onstage at Money20/20 in Las Vegas to discuss this fascinating area with, amongst others, Citi and Mastercard.)

One more point about stablecoins. While it may be anecdotal evidence only, from many of the discussions at the event I formed the opinion that stablecoins are alrwady more widely used than many in the incumbent organisations realise, because the usage is not visible to them. And if you look at the raw numbers, the growth of the stablecoin trading implies that (unlike cryptocurrency trading, which is purely speculative) individuals and businesses around the world are already using stablecoins as an alternative to traditional banking rails. Ran Goldi from Fireblocks, Neetika Bansal from Stripe and Job van der Voort were on the interesting panel “Every Company Needs a Stablecoin Strategy” where they discussed how there is real momentum globally. Bansal talked about Stripe’s $1 billion acquisition of Bridge as a way to unlock broader access to digital commerce, and this is surely an area where there will be real innovation worldwide.

That’s all a long way of saying that I agree with Money20/20 themselves when they said identified the themes from the show as the accelerating momentum behind stablecoins and digital currencies, AI’s fast-moving impact on fraud, identity, and personalised finance, and open banking’s evolution into an open data economy!

Overall, my colleagues and I really enjoyed the event. It remains one of the premier industry networking events and the opportunity to catch up with friends and customers both in the halls and at the streer party (!) will bring us back again next year!