FIDELITY JOINS THE FRAY: Fidelity Investments has announced that it plans to launch a new digital asset trading platform.
The goal is to attract institutional investors to the platform, forming the latest Wall Street effort to get into the digital asset trading space. The company has been experimenting with the technology for some time, including an in-house mining operation that formed part of an effort to better understand how blockchain and cryptocurrencies work.
"Our goal is to make digitally-native assets, such as bitcoin, more accessible to investors," Abigail Johnson, chair and CEO of Fidelity Investments, said in a statement. "We expect to continue investing and experimenting, over the long-term, with ways to make this emerging asset class easier for our clients to understand and use." Full Story
TETHER TROUBLE: The price of the controversial "stablecoin" USDT, created by crypto startup Tether, has collapsed to an 18-month low -- that is, below $1.
As of press time, the cryptocurrency, which is intended to act as a kind of synthetic dollar, is trading at roughly $0.93 on Kraken, which operates a USDT market against the U.S. dollar.
Some observers -- including long-time critics of USDT -- contend that the price decline represents a lack of faith in the claims from Tether that each USDT token is backed by $1. Tether itself has long been dogged by controversy, as well as the crypto-exchange Bitfinex, to which it is linked.
Others contend that the recent price decline in USDT is connected to the proliferation of other stablecoins, including those that are now actively being traded against Tether's token. Full Story
PBoC EXIT: The People's Bank of China (PBoC) HAS lost their trailblazing digital currency head, Yao Qian, to the China Securities Depository and Clearing Corporation (CSDC).
In an update on the CSDC website, Yao was named as a general manager. While it's unclear who will fill his shoes at China's central bank, the PBoC plans to continue on with its central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiatives.
Qian’s move may not be as surprising to those who have been following the CSDC.
For years now the CSDC has expressed its interest in blockchain, partnering with its Russian counterpart in 2016 on the tech. More recently, the CSDC's Shanghai branch supported a domestic commercial bank using a blockchain to issue asset-backed securities (ABS) worth $66 million. Full Story | 
