It is like sitting at the front row watching history unfolding itself.

• A century of technology innovation
• Two monetary worlds
• Three phases of cryptocurrencies

The time has come as institutional investors are coming to town building bitcoin treasuries in public listed companies.

On the other hand, competition is heating up in the CBDC space.

Chinese government presumably aims to have the first-mover advantage by being the first global jurisdiction to adopt a CBDC.

China Finance, a magazine run by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), published an article stating that the rights to issue and control a digital currency would become a “new battlefield” of competition between sovereign countries.

Meanwhile in Japan…

• Senior Japanese official fears China being ‘first-mover’ in digital currency
• Bank of Japan to begin digital currency proof-of-concept in 2021
• Financial giant SBI to run its first security token offering in October

Digital Currency / CBDC In Case of Forces Majeure

The BoJ report notes that a core feature of the digital currency must be resilience in the face of infrastructure disrupted by forces Majeure.

The report gives no details on how providing against such events might be achieved, although there are solutions that address potential electrical or network failures for Bitcoin (BTC) and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.

These include the development of mesh networks based around long-wave radio transmitters, and Blockstream’s satellite network, which broadcasts Bitcoin transactions via space.

#CBDC #BIS #BISDigitalCurrencyResearchGroup

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Research Suggests STOs Are Better at Financing Startups than ICOs

A security token is a digital representation of an investment product, recorded on a distributed ledger, subject to regulation under securities laws.

STOs can be issued both early in the lifetime of a firm as equity tokens or later as fund tokens. Researchers found that corporate governance is another factor for success.

South Korea Might Soon be Spending Billions on Blockchain Development

The South Korean government plans to invest over $48.2 billion in Blockchain and other Industry 4.0 technologies by 2025. The nation’s goal is to promote the digitization of all industries in the coming post-pandemic era.

“The fourth industrial revolution and digital civilization are the future of humanity that has already begun… It is possible to jump from the older economy to the leading economy…Our society has already entered the face-to-face digitization, and the society where data is competitive, AI and the network have become the food of the future.” ~ President Moon Jae-in, Korea

Japanese Banking Giant to Issue Its Own Stablecoin in Late 2020

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, or MUFGt, the fifth largest bank in the world, is reportedly planning to issue its own digital currency in the second half of 2020.

Initiated back in 2015, the digital currency project was originally designed to run on a blockchain network and facilitate instant peer-to-peer transactions. Following multiple delays, the initiative is now scheduled to be rolled out no later than 2020.

MUFG is the largest financial company in Japan. It was prospectively set to become the first Japanese bank to issue a digital currency. In September 2019, MUFG participated in a $14 million investment round for Coinbase-backed token issuance protocol, Securitize, alongside Banco Santander and Nomura Holdings.

PayPal Letter Seems to Confirm Crypto Capability Rumors

Since the project’s inception, PayPal has taken unilateral and tangible steps to further develop its capabilities in this area, and therefore — without questioning the value of the project — took the decision not to participate in the Libra Association and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities to democratize access to financial service.

… the payments giant admitted to “continuously monitoring and evaluating global developments in the crypto and blockchain/distributed ledger space,” stressing that it favors a “harmonized” regulatory approach that wouldn’t compromise innovation.

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