Snippings

Jo Levy, a partner at The Norton Law Firm in California and Chair of the Alliance for Responsible Data Collection (ARDC), who was speaking in Geneva this week at the UN’s “AI for Good” Global Summit, says that “xxx”.

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Stablecoins have established their value as a medium of exchange within the land of decentralized finance and cryptocurrency investing. Today’s total stablecoin market cap is about $255 billion (of this, 99 percent is in USD-denominated stablecoins). With all the new regulatory and industry activity in the space, market participants and industry leaders appear to be expecting large-scale stablecoin adoption for use in domestic and international payments. Yet, stablecoin usage is complicated for consumers, and large-scale adoption would entail macro-financial risks.

From: Stablecoins are trending, but what frictions and risks are getting overlooked? – Atlantic Council.

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Via the partnership with SmartUp, identity-bound agents are authenticating business users and customers, using biometrics and privacy-preserving credentials to bind agents to these identities, authorizing specific tasks by way of scoped identity tokens and integrations with orchestration platforms, and providing real-time auditability and zero-trust across workflows.

From: Anonybit Partners with SmartUp to Introduce Digital Identity Solution for AI Agents – Finovate.

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On June 17, 2025, the U.S. Senate passed the GENIUS Act by a vote of 68-30.  As explained in my recent paper, the GENIUS Act is a deeply misguided bill that poses grave and unacceptable dangers to our financial system, economy, and society.  The GENIUS Act would allow nonbanks to sell uninsured stablecoins to the public without the essential safeguards provided by federal deposit insurance and other regulations governing FDIC-insured banks.

From: Congress Must Reject the GENIUS Act and Remove the Dangers Posed by Nonbank Stablecoins.

This is true, of course, but to my mind it does not matter. If stablecoins are properly regulated with a 100% reserve then when a provider goes down, none of the coin holders will be affected. There is a handy case study in the UK.

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Wirecard Card Solutions (WCS), the UK subsidiary of Wirecard, has quietly become a crucial part of the British fintech scene, providing the technology to enable consumer-facing start-ups, such as Pockit and Curve, to issue prepaid cards and process payments before they were regulated to do it themselves.

From: UK consumers dragged into Wirecard’s collapse.

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Meanwhile, over on the Global Markets Strategy desk at JPMorgan, they’re firmly in the realm of probability:

We find forecasts for an exponential expansion of the stablecoin universe from $250bn currently to $1tr-$2tr over the coming years as far too optimistic and we are looking for a more moderate expansion to $500bn by 2028.

The starting point for analyst Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou and team is to look at what exists now rather than what doesn’t. There won’t be much appetite to hold zero-yielding assets whose value is eroded by inflation, they say in a note published today, so it’s more useful to look at how stablecoins’ role as “lubricant” in the crypto ecosystem might evolve.

Currently, that describes an estimated 88 per cent of demand:

From: Stablecoins might revolutionise payments, but what if they don’t?.

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Stablecoin optimists point to the rapid adoption of the e-CNY, China’s central bank digital yuan, which has grown to a more than Rmb300bn market cap from Rmb13.6bn at the end of 2022. There’s no comparison, JPMorgan says:

First, the digital yuan is a central bank liability and thus it effectively replaces banknotes in circulation.

From: Stablecoins might revolutionise payments, but what if they don’t?.

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In the existing world of traditional finance, or home loans or title insurance, or whatever, the identity of the other party is the singular most important piece of information.

From: Crytpo: There’s just no legit use case for it. But, man, are these bros lobbied up..

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AI governance requires a constructive conversation between AI developers, firms, consumer rights activists and governmental entities to recognize emerging risks and build shared resources. Algorithmic auditing also requires credentialing, impact assessments, training and risk mitigation practices. Initiatives such as regulatory sandboxes allow authorities to engage firms to test innovative products or services that challenge existing legal frameworks.

From: Algorithmic Accountability Is Like The Game Of Clue.

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Today, we open sourced our Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries, fulfilling a promise and building on our partnership with Sparkasse to support EU age assurance.
Open sourcing these powerful cryptographic tools will make it much easier for private and public sector developers to build their own privacy-enhancing applications and digital ID solutions, meeting an urgent need.
In layperson’s terms, ZKP makes it possible for people to prove that something about them is true without exchanging any other data. So, for example, a person visiting a website can verifiably prove he or she is over 18, without sharing anything else at all.

From: Now open source: our Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries for age assurance.

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The US has a critical mass of financial skill and available capital at almost any level. This has a complicated relationship with the dollar’s status as a reserve currency; if your career revolves around doing interesting things with money, you’ll have more things to do if the money you choose is the dollar.

From: Ode to America – by Marc Rubinstein – Net Interest.

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