Snippings

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Swift this week issued a paper with Accenture, which has a bank consulting practice, that argues central bank digital currencies should use existing payment rails

From Financial firms confront the threat of central bank digital currencies | American Banker.

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Facebook-backed cryptocurrency Diem is abandoning efforts to gain a payments licence from Swiss regulator Finma and instead switching its focus to the US

From Facebook Diem shifts operations from Switzerland to US.

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Nine million people are missing from the electoral roll, there are glaring loopholes in our lobbying laws and online political adverts still don’t have to say who paid for them.

From Voter ID: An Expensive Distraction – Electoral Reform Society:

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It’s not clear how non-photographic utility bills would tackling any of the alleged problems.

From Voter ID: An Expensive Distraction – Electoral Reform Society:

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Binance Halted Withdrawals of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin https://buff.ly/3bhUxQE. It’s an odd coincidence that scheduled maintenance often coincides with prices going down, but nothing more than a coincidence.

In another coincidence, Coinbase went down too.

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In a congressional hearing Thursday, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler called for more regulations for U.S. crypto exchanges. Bitstamp CEO Julian Sawyer explains why he would welcome such regulation and sees Gensler’s comments as positive for the industry. Sawyer also discusses plans for major expansion in the U.S., where one of the oldest crypto exchanges now seeks to triple its staff.

From Bitstamp CEO: Regulation is ‘Absolutely What the Industry Needs’ – CoinDesk.

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Now, as I have written and presented about numerous times, there are many and diverse reasons to implement digital currency as a form of electronic cash that runs in parallel with, not on top of, the legacy electronic money infrastructure of payment networks, interbank transfers and bank accounts (and, indeed, banks). It makes eminent sense to create a more robust and flexible payments infrastructure to the benefit of society as a whole by choosing to create a richer payment ecology.

Apart from the obvious need for the electronic cash for the online world that has been missing from day 1 of the internet, the fact is that the existing infrastructure cannot be made bulletproof. This is not hypothetical issue. Last year we saw the complete failure of all payment transactions within the European Target2 system for several hours on Friday, with backup systems and contingency modules also unable to function. 

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Swift this week issued a paper with Accenture, which has a bank consulting practice, that argues central bank digital currencies should use existing payment rails

From Financial firms confront the threat of central bank digital currencies | American Banker.

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The Bank Policy Institute (BPI) is a nonpartisan public policy, research and advocacy group, representing the nation’s leading banks. Our members include universal banks, regional banks and the major foreign banks doing business in the United States.

From About Us – Bank Policy Institute.

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The only major obstacles to such a system are government regulations on anti-money laundering, countering the financing of terrorism and sanctions enforcement.  They could be reformed tomorrow in a way that preserved their effectiveness but allowed money to flow faster.

From The Dollar, the Yuan, and CBDCs: What Talks, What Walks – Bank Policy Institute.

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The US government issued emergency legislation on Sunday after the largest fuel pipeline in the US was hit by a ransomware cyber-attack.
The Colonial Pipeline carries 2.5 million barrels a day – 45% of the East Coast’s supply of diesel, petrol and jet fuel.

From US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack – BBC News.

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n addition, the U.S. has also occasionally imposed secondary sanctions, which authorize the President to forbid U.S. companies from transacting with non-U.S. companies that themselves transact with a sanctions target.  It is a nice power to have, but it has created significant friction, particularly with our European allies.  While there are no signs that it will lead the world to abandon the dollar in favor of the yuan or the euro or some other currency, for those who worry about such things, this looks like a more potent threat than whether a dollar cross-border payment clears in a second versus an hour versus a day.

So, for those concerned about the threat of China economically and militarily, perhaps it’s better to spend time and resources building a strong economy, maintaining fiscal discipline and working more closely with our allies on sanctions policy, rather than hastily developing a new form of U.S. currency.

From The Dollar, the Yuan, and CBDCs: What Talks, What Walks – Bank Policy Institute.

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A Treasury Department unit aims to tap commercial, online tools for tracking virtual currency transactions, such as those involving Bitcoin, recorded on a blockchain.

Within its Office of Foreign Assets Control or OFAC, which carries out economics- and trade-based sanctions, is the Office of Global Targeting, or OGT. That group captures intelligence on and builds cases against individuals, entities or organizations that might appear on the Specially Designated Nationals List and generally blocked from conducting business with Americans.

According to a recently published sources sought notice, OGT wants vendor-provided solutions to analyze and track blockchain-based transactions to gather attribution information on involved parties that are under consideration to be put on the SDN List. Entries on that list have generally been formally deemed detrimental to U.S. national security.

From Treasury Office Seeks Tools to Trace Cryptocurrency Linked to Sanctions List – Nextgov.

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