A library of snippets
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Yet potential property claims of prior owners could hinder the use of stablecoins as digital money.
Legislation is much needed. The US Congress is considering two bills that will regulate stablecoins: the Senate’s Genius Act and the House’s Stable Act. However, neither clearly define the use of stablecoins as money under private commercial law, tax law, and accounting rules.
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Last month, a working paper from the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank for central banks, cranked up the volume on that warning. In it, Rashad Ahmed and Iñaki Aldasoro calculate that when stablecoins (of which tether is by far the biggest and most impactful) draw in funds, and churn them into reserves, that has a marked impact on the value of short-term US government debt.
That is a reassuring sign that stablecoin operators are indeed buying reserves to match their inflows. Still, this is a substantial and little understood market force. According to the researchers, large inflows of $3.5bn over five days can place enough upward pressure on the price of short-term US government debt to pull down yields by up to 0.025 percentage points over 10 days.
That does not sound like much, but the paper says it is “comparable to that of small-scale quantitative easing on long-term yields” — in the same ballpark as central bank efforts to stimulate a flagging economy
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It is therefore time for the US to address three simple but hard questions: how to future-proof the dollar for a world of competing digital networks, how to maintain the dollar’s world reserve currency status and, perhaps most importantly, how to preserve the universal values for which the dollar has historically stood.
Designed properly, digital instruments based on the dollar and other democratic currencies should run on systems that are operationally transparent, providing independent assurance about technical function and security. They should also reflect democratic values of freedom from unwarranted surveillance, censorship and control by both governments and commercial firms.
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Dave Birch, published author and Top 100 Global Fintech Influencer, moderated speakers Jean-François Mazure, global head of cash clearing services, Societe Generale and Simon McConnell, managing director and global head of European clearing, Citi Services as they discussed levelling up payments products in banking.
From: EBAday 2025: How can banks achieve excellence in payments?.
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The lawyer denied using AI but admitted that she might have inadvertently done so while researching on the internet in preparation for her case.
From: UK judge sounds alarm on AI misuse in courts – POLITICO.
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The ECPA has released a white paper which shows that in 2024 there were over 263 million European Card Scheme (ECS) payment cards in circulation, which made 31.5 billion transactions last year alone.
However, the payments space is dominated by Visa and Mastercard, who between them process 65% of euro area card payments, while US tech giants such as Apple, Google and PayPal are also gaining popularity.
From: European Card Payment Association calls for EU payments sovereignty.
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Android, via Credential Manager’s DigitalCredential API, now natively supports OpenID4VP and OpenID4VCI for digital credential presentation and issuance respectively.
From: Android Developers Blog: Announcing Android support of digital credentials.
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The successful candidate will be the first female head of the service in more than a century since the SIS was founded. She will take up the role this autumn when the current head of the agency, Sir Richard Moore, steps down following a five-year term. Moore has been an advocate of greater diversity in the appointments process and has previously pledged that he would be the last “C” to be selected from an all-male shortlist.
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Nationwide believes that simply having the choice of coming into a branch is helping it win customers of all ages. Its famous promise to keep all of its sites open until 2028 at least means it is literally the “last bank in town” in 135 locations around the UK. Nearly 200,000 more customers have used its branches year-on-year, and 40 per cent of Isas are opened in person (these tend to carry much higher balances than Isas transferred online).
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For an hour yesterday (June 5, 2025), we were treated to the spectacle of the US House Judiciary Committee, both Republicans and Democrats, listening – really listening, it seemed – to four experts defending strong encryption. The four: technical expert Susan Landau and lawyers Caroline Wilson-Palow, Richard Salgado, and Gregory Nejeim.
The occasion was a hearing on the operation of the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (2018), better known as the CLOUD Act.
The lawmakers reserved particular outrage for the UK’s audacity in demanding that Apple provide that backdoor access for *all* users worldwide. In other words, *Americans*.
From: Nephology – net.wars.
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