A library of snippets
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Large language models will happily engage in role-play if they think that is what a user wants. Research released by AI start-up Anthropic in 2023 found that the LLMs that underpin chatbots often prioritised agreeing with a user’s perspective over being truthful.
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There’s also demand among Visa and Mastercard’s issuers. Forty-seven percent of banks say their institution’s clients were asking for general information about cryptocurrency, while 35% said clients were asking for the ability to make payments using cryptocurrencies, according to research from American Banker. Another 27% of banks report customers are asking for institutionally provided custody of digital assets.
From: Mastercard, Visa make deals to jolt stablecoins | PaymentsSource | American Banker.
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Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab said on Monday some of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes in the Middle East conflict, disrupting cloud services and making a recovery “prolonged”.
From: Amazon cloud unit’s data centers in UAE, Bahrain damaged in drone strikes | Reuters.
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OpenClaw’s channels are excellent at delivery. A2H adds the trust layer: proof that a human approved, proof of what they approved, and proof of when they approved it.
From: How to Use the Agent-to-Human Communication (A2H) Protocol with OpenClaw | Twilio.
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Bungling Gibbs gave away his identity by using a Lime bike to travel to the shop – booked via his bank account.
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Today I read a piece from Noelle Achesonon “tokenized money market funds get more money-like” talking about what see calls a “seemingly small technical regulatory tweak with a potentially huge impact”, which is the SEC exemption for WisdomTree’s tokenized money market fund WTGXX that allows it to be traded by an authorized broker-dealer at $1.
Why is this a big deal? Because it means the fund can change hands without requiring an underlying the portfolio adjustment, removing an arguably unnecessary point of market friction. And since any sale or purchase of WTGXX does not need to wait for end-of-day pricing, it can trade at any time.
What’s more, since WTGXX accrues yield continually throughout the day – unlike typical MMFs that get returns calculated once a day – investors can use the token for intraday yield.
For now, this is only available to institutional investors, but the firm has plans to roll it out for retail participants later this year.
From: (7) Tokenized money market funds get more money-like | LinkedIn.
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Naturally I went to see what Mike Chambers made of this and he helpfully highlights some of the key initiatives.
Here are the thirty initiatives that feature in the Payments Forward Plan along with the primary objective for each initiative.
Top 8 (in my opinion):
Retail payments infrastructure design and delivery programme (including with Design Authority and Delivery Company). Objective: To design and deliver the next-generation retail payments infrastructure in line with the National Payments Vision and the Payments Vision Delivery Committee’s strategy.
Short-term enhancements to existing retail payments infrastructure. Objective: To proportionately implement short-term enhancements to the current Faster Payment System and the Bacs Payment System to improve resilience and better support innovation, including in account-to-account payments.
RTGS and CHAPS settlement hours. Objective: To improve efficiencies for domestic and cross-border payments, reduce settlement risk and support innovation.
Open Banking. Objective: To establish Open Banking on a commercially sustainable basis, which will allow the CMA order to be revoked and help advance the government’s ambition of making account-to- account payments ubiquitous. This will support delivery of better outcomes for consumers and businesses by enabling secure, simple options for payments e.g. peer- to-peer transfers, flexible bill payments, and point-of-sale payments (including ecommerce).
Contactless payments. Objective: To give greater flexibility to banks and other payment service providers to determine their approach to contactless payments. This additional flexibility could foster innovation and thereby support growth, while still requiring payment service providers to maintain low levels of risk.
Access to cash. Objective: To assess whether the Access to Cash regime has maintained reasonable access to cash in the UK. This will help ensure the rules are working effectively to support financial inclusion.
Wholesale cash. Objective: The Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 established a new statutory oversight regime for wholesale cash distribution by inserting Part 5A into the Banking Act 2009. Under this framework, the Bank of England’s overarching objective is to manage risks to the effectiveness, resilience and sustainability of the wholesale cash distribution industry.
Enhancing cross-border payments. Objective: To support efforts to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more transparent and more accessible, including the implementation of practices that enhance safety and security and improve the detection of financial crime.
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When I was at the Financial Times Crypto and Digital Asset Summit in London back in 2023, I really enjoyed listening to an informed panel discussion about stablecoins their potential to bridge the gap between traditional finance and “crypto” markets. Staci Warden, CEO of the Algorand Foundation, made a really interesting point about the tokenization of money market funds in passing and I wasn’t sure that the audience picked up on the significance of her comment. What she said was that a token for a “sliver” of such a fund is “indistinguishable from money”.
She is right, of course, and I said at the time I would have made the point even more strongly. I would have said that such tokens remove the need for money completely. If you can keep all of your wealth in assets all the time, and you can trade those assets in 24/7 liquid markets, then why would you “cash out” into fiat currency or stablecoins or Bitcoin or anything else?
Noelle Acheson commented on
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This move is a step towards money market funds themselves being considered a settlement asset.
From: (5) Tokenized money market funds get more money-like | LinkedIn.
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Today I read a piece from Noelle Achesonon “tokenized money market funds get more money-like” talking about what see calls a “seemingly small technical regulatory tweak with a potentially huge impact”, which is the SEC exemption for WisdomTree’s tokenized money market fund WTGXX that allows it to be traded by an authorized broker-dealer at $1.
Why is this a big deal? Because it means the fund can change hands without requiring an underlying the portfolio adjustment, removing an arguably unnecessary point of market friction. And since any sale or purchase of WTGXX does not need to wait for end-of-day pricing, it can trade at any time.
What’s more, since WTGXX accrues yield continually throughout the day – unlike typical MMFs that get returns calculated once a day – investors can use the token for intraday yield.
For now, this is only available to institutional investors, but the firm has plans to roll it out for retail participants later this year.
From: (7) Tokenized money market funds get more money-like | LinkedIn.
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First Horizon, Huntington Bancshares, KeyCorp, M&T Bank and Old National Bancorp will pilot the Cari Network in the third quarter ahead of a planned roll out for their customers in Q4, says the venture’s CEO and former Comptroller of the Currency Gene Ludwig.
The network aims to let regional and community banks offer their clients similar functionality to stablecoins. However, with deposit tokens mirroring normal banking liabilities, the tokens will be subject to bank regulations and be FDIC insured.
According to Bloomberg, the network will at first be used to move money between the participating banks’ own customers. However, Cari could later be connected to other networks.
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To your point, this guidance does appear to be a boost for Tokenized MMF. Because tokenized money market funds offer yield while offering the same blockchain transferability as stablecoins, they can drain low-cost deposits away from banks and into the asset management sector. Asset managers like Federated Hermes and BlackRock view this tokenization trend as a potential “huge boost” to money market fund inflows, capturing capital that might otherwise sit as deposits on commercial bank balance sheets.
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