Stablecoin
Aussie banks ANZ and NAB won’t ‘endorse’ retail speculation on crypto
Executives at two of Australia’s “big four” banks have ruled out allowing retail customers to trade cryptocurrency on their platforms, with one reasoning that customers don’t understand “basic financial well-being.” Speaking at the Australian Financial Review Banking Summit on Tuesday Maile Carnegie, executive for retail banking at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), said that from speaking to retail customers, she believed “the vast majority of them don’t understand really basic financial well-being concepts.” “Are we really going to make it easier and less friction and implicitly endorse speculating on crypto when they don’t understand basic financial well-being? The answer was no.” Carnegie said ANZ had considered a cryptocurrency product from as early as 2017, adding she was...
MoneyGram partners with Stellar to build a stablecoin-fiat transfer platform
The US-based financial service company is intent on capitalising on emerging market’s potential as most remittance recipients are out of the country The growth in demand for stablecoins matched with the increase in supply over the past year could be a likelihood of success The cross-border payments and money transfer giant MoneyGram has revealed its ambition to bridge the gap existing between traditional finance and crypto by providing money transfer services. The firm announced on Sunday a strategic partnership with the Stellar blockchain to build a platform that will allow users of the Stellar wallet to send the USD Coin to other users who can then cash out in fiat. This stablecoin-based platform provides users an avenue to convert stablecoins to fiat currencies. In an interview with Blo...
UN agency head sees ‘massive opportunities’ in crypto: WEF 2022
The United Nations is smitten with distributed ledger technology (DLT). In a conversation with Cointelegraph at WEF 2022, United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC) director Sameer Chauhan explained the “massive opportunities” he sees in cryptocurrencies. [embedded content] A former traditional finance executive and head of the UNICC since 2018, Chauhan has seen the rise and fall of cryptocurrency markets. He shared that groups such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) do not want to “miss the boat” when it comes to DLTs. Chauhan explained that cryptocurrencies are neutral technologies: “It’s a tool. You could use it for good or you could use it for profiting—which is not bad. […] In the future, crypto will be a very strong component of how the world interacts a...
Fed vice chair inclined toward the coexistence of a CBDC and stablecoins in future
Leal Brainard floated a potential future of coexistence of stablecoins and CBDC She said that UST’s recent de-peg calls for a robust regulatory framework It has been just over four weeks since the Senate approved Biden’s nominated pick for Federal Reserve vice-chair Leal Brainard. Following her confirmation Leal Brainard, who sits alongside chair Jerome Powell in regulating monetary policy, last Thursday gave her opinion on CBDCs and stable coins. In an appearance before the House Committee on Financial Services, the economist explored the various risks and potential benefits of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) and stable coins. Coexistence is an option Brainard defined that in the coming days, money will potentially coexist in a fragmented payment system in the US. She said th...
Terra (LUNA) 2.0 relaunches according to Do Kwon’s revival plan
Do Kwon, the co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, confirmed the relaunch of Terra’s new chain, Terra 2.0, which aims to revive the fallen Terra (LUNA) and TerraUSD (UST) ecosystem. Kwon’s revival plan for Terra involves hard forking the existing blockchain and reissuing LUNA tokens to existing investors based on a snapshot before the death spiral bled the LUNA and UST markets — effectively resulting in unrecoverable losses for investors. Pheonix-1 mainnet is now live and producing blocks – public node services, wallets and explorers should be going live shortly. pic.twitter.com/cpxiNKl6aX — Do Kwon (@stablekwon) May 28, 2022 Dubbed Phoenix-1, the Terra 2.0 mainnet went live today, May 28, as per the original timeline set by Terra developers and started producing blocks. ...
WEMIX gains 200%+ after stablecoin and boosted staking rewards announcement
Blockchain-based gaming, also known as GameFi, is an up-and-coming sector that could potentially be one of the primary catalysts for kickstarting the mass adoption of blockchain technology. WEMIX, a gaming protocol that operates on the Klaytn network, aims to get in on the GameFi revolution and this week, the project’s native token (WEMIX) rallied even as the wider market continued to sell-off. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since hitting a low of $1.27 on May 12, WEMIX price climbed 269% to hit a daily high at $4.70 on May 25 as its 24-hour trading volume increased to $652 million. WEMIX/USDT 1-day chart. Source: TradingView Three reasons for the price reversal for WEMIX are the upcoming launch of WEMIX 3.0, a series of project launches and partnershi...
Two key takeaways from Nansen’s UST stablecoin depeg report
As the dust settles on the cataclysmic collapse of the Terra ecosystem, an on-chain deep-dive carried out by blockchain analytics firm Nansen highlights two major takeaways. The cryptocurrency ecosystem was awash with varying speculatory theories around the cause of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST’s decoupling from its $1 peg. The who and why seemed a mystery but the outcome was catastrophic, with UST dropping well below $1 while the value of Terra’s stablecoin token plummeting in value as a result. Nansen undertook an investigation leveraging on-chain data from the Terra ecosystem to the Ethereum blockchain in an effort to chart the chain of events that led to the UST depeg. [embedded content] It is worth noting that the report does not include potential off-chain events that cou...
‘Other flavors of Tether’ will bridge users to USDT: Paolo Ardoino
Tether’s decision to launch a new digital asset pegged to the Mexican peso will be a boon to crypto adoption in the Latin American country by providing more onramps to the USDT stablecoin, according to Paolo Ardoino. In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum summit, the Tether and Bitfinex chief technology officer said the reason he came to Davos was to showcase the utility of cryptocurrencies. “I didn’t participate in Davos to meet CEOs of big banks,” he said. “We are here to send our message [that] there is a big world out there that needs crypto in a safe way.” Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino said that the increase in crypto demand in the Latin America region pushed their decision to expand. https://t.co/Ig7Y524VT2 — Cointelegraph (@Cointel...
Polkadot parachains spike after the launch of a $250M aUSD stablecoin fund
Crypto prices have been exploring new lows for weeks and currently it’s unclear what it will take to reverse the trend. Despite the downtrend, cryptocurrencies within the Polkadot (DOT) ecosystem began to rally on May 24 and have managed to maintain gains ranging from 10% to 25%, a possible sign that certain sub-sectors of the market are on the verge of a breakout. Here’s a look at three Polkadot ecosystem protocols that have seen their token prices trend higher in recent days. Acala launches a $250 million aUSD ecosystem fund Acala (ACA) is the leading decentralized finance (DeF) platform on the Polkadot network, primarily due to the launch of aUSD, the first native stablecoin in the Polkadot ecosystem. Following the collapse of Terra’s LUNA and TerraUSD (UST), traders we...
Enforcement and adoption: What do UK’s recent regulatory aims for crypto mean?
In April, the United Kingdom’s Economic and Finance Ministry, also known as Her Majesty’s Treasury, announced its intention to put the United Kingdom at the forefront of technology by bringing stablecoins under the country’s payments regulation — a bold move that looks especially intriguing in contrast to the recent shock, caused by TerraUSD’s (UST) depegging. Later, in May, during the annual Queen’s Speech, Prince Charles informed the Parliament about two bills that will support “the safe adoption of cryptocurrencies” and “create powers to more quickly and easily seize and recover crypto assets.” Taken together, these initiatives give an impression of the nation’s growing interest in digital assets, which comes as no surprise, given the inevitable competition for innovation with the Europ...
Law Decoded: The long waves in the aftermath of UST’s crash, May 16-23
It’s been two weeks since the shock of the TerraUSD (UST) depegging, but the long waves of this event are still coming in. The Congressional Research Service described the UST crash as a “run-like” scenario and claimed that the crypto industry has not reached the same level of “adequate regulating” as the traditional finance market. Michael Barr, former advisory board member of Ripple Labs and United States President Joe Biden’s pick for a vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve, definitely agrees with that. During the confirmation hearing, he mentioned “some significant risks” that innovative technologies and cryptocurrencies, in particular, bring along. It’s not only in the U.S. where the regulators got concerned about stablecoins. The executive director of markets ...
Do Kwon shares LUNA burn address but warns ‘LUNAtics’ against using it
The recent Terra revival plan announced by Do Kwon, the co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, received mixed reactions as many questioned the effectiveness of a hard fork in reviving the fallen prices of Terra (LUNA) and TerraUSD (UST) tokens. Instead, the part of the community recommended burning LUNA as the most plausible way to achieve a comeback. Kwon’s proposal to preserve the Terra ecosystem involves hard forking the existing Terra blockchain without the algorithmic stablecoin and redistributing a new version of the LUNA tokens to investors based on a historical snapshot before the death spiral. However, several crypto entrepreneurs, including Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, opined that: “Reducing supply should be done via burn, not fork at an old date, and abandon everyone who tried to rescue ...
