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THE BOTTOM LINE
XRP holders should be celebrating the latest redistribution program, the Fed is rushing ahead with its payments platform, Russia's largest bank is going in on blockchain and so is Goldman Sachs. Here are the stories:
Ripple's massive redistribution program raises eyebrows Ripple plows ahead with an ambitious project. With the launch of its recent XRP reallocation plan, loyal hodlers of XRP are set for a big earnings day and are expected to receive up to 20% on their full XRP balance with some users reporting even greater gains in the early days of the program. Heard it here first, folks.
Fed Now! The Federal Reserve is working to get its FedNow payments platform up and running. Board Governor Lael Brainard said the U.S. central bank will debut its instant payment service "as soon as practically possible,” in 2023 or 2024. FedNow is being developed in response to private-sector, real-time, gross settlement initiatives. "By creating that neutral platform, banks in partnership with these other companies will be able to offer much more innovation services, services that we may not even be imagining," Brainard said.
Banking Coins Sberbank, Russia’s biggest consumer bank, is launching a blockchain platform built on Hyperledger Fabric and mulling a stablecoin. The blockchain will be used for trade finance and potentially other existing lines of business. It’s an open system, with other banks or tech companies able to spin up nodes and build their own smart contracts. Anatoly Popov, Sberbank’s deputy chair, was quoted Wednesday saying the bank hopes to launch a ruble-backed stablecoin. The bank is waiting for a new digital assets law to come into force in January 2021, and after that will make the final decision. In similar news, Binance’s USD stablecoin has been green-lighted by New York’s financial watchdog for use by banks and other financial institutions.
Funding the Future OKCoin is awarding its largest individual grant yet to Bitcoin Core maintainer Marco Falke, the second-most prolific contributor in the software’s history. Awarded an Independent Developer Grant, “equivalent of a developer salary for the year,” Falke will continue maintaining the code base, help organize geographically dispersed developers and ensure updates are merged. “I am proud to see what Bitcoin Core is today and how everyone’s contributions shaped Bitcoin Core for the future,” he said. OKCoin has previously awarded grants to Bitcoin Core contributor Amiti Uttarwar and to open-source payment processor BTCPay.
Upcoming crypto derivatives exchange Alpha5 raises more than $1.5 million in seed round (The Block)
OneCoin lawyers persuaded UK’s FCA to take down scam warning (Decrypt)
Uniswap sees 15-fold uptick in web traffic during DeFi boom (Decrypt)
The White House’s plan to purge Chinese tech from the internet is just bluster — for now (The Verge)
AT STAKE
Yesterday, Goldman Sachs announced it has hired a new global head to oversee its growing digit assets division.
Mathew McDermott, an internal hire, told CNBC he envisions a world where the entire financial system resides on distributed ledgers. What’s more: he sees this happening within the next decade.
“In the next five to 10 years, you could see a financial system where all assets and liabilities are native to a blockchain, with all transactions natively happening on chain,” he said.
Tasked with preparing the bank for this imminent future, McDermott is doubling his team’s headcount and mulling the creation of the bank’s own “fiat digital token,” colloquially known as a stablecoin. He reportedly snagged one of JPMcoin’s architects from the rival firm.
While the news shows more than one Wall Street titan is thinking seriously about the commercial viability of blockchain, it’s also an inside look into the black boxes that banks have become.
"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” Matt Taibbi wrote of the bank in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
Just a few months ago, a leaked slidedeck showed Goldman analysts didn’t consider bitcoin and other cryptos investment grade. Now it seems the bellwether bank is keen on the underlying technology.
Goldman’s clients apparently ignored the bank’s own advice anyway: “We’ve definitely seen an uptick in interest across some of our institutional clients who are exploring how they can participate in this space,” McDermott said. “It definitely feels like there is a resurgence of interest in cryptocurrencies.”
Not Baroque, Rococo Parity Technologies’ Polkadot has launched a testnet, Rococo, of the protocol’s first parachain specification, according to a blog Thursday. Parachains underlie Parity Tech’s vision of a “protocol for protocols.” The Proof-of-Authority (PoA) network will enable three parachains attached to a “Substrate,” or a building kit for other blockchains to interoperate as a Polkadot parachain. This is the first test of this inter-blockchain communication.
OP-ED
Patronage Over Parsimony Nic Carter, a CoinDesk columnist and partner at Castle Island Ventures, thinks Bitcoin’s unofficial and piecemeal system of funding developers is one of its strengths. “For those versed in the dynamics of open source, Bitcoin’s patronage system as a funding model should come as no surprise. Bitcoin works in ways that are not short-term expedient, but pay dividends in the final analysis. Of course, a protocol-derived pool of rewards with which to pay developers would have been much more convenient, but it would have completely undermined the political neutrality of the monetary system,” he writes.
