The paper rejects conventional wisdom that limits are needed to avoid supplanting the banking system.
A digital euro system shouldn’t limit users’ holdings, a paper produced for the European Parliament said, arguing that the risks to financial stability of people deserting conventional banks are overstated.
The paper turns on its head central bankers’ conventional wisdom that individuals shouldn’t be allowed more than a few thousand euros worth of the central bank digital currency (CBDC) to prevent them from using it as a savings vehicle.
The banking industry issued a sigh of relief when the European Central Bank’s Fabio Panetta said individual users of the putative currency would be limited to holding around 3,000 euros ($3,317) worth at a time because he wants the CBDC only used for day-to-day payments.
Panetta’s goals for the project are wrong, said the report produced by academic Christian Hofmann at the request of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.
“The key role of a digital euro consists of the important role it can play as a store of value option for the public,” said Hofmann, who is an associate professor at the National University of Singapore. “All of this requires that the public’s access to a digital euro is unlimited.”
Though the study doesn’t bind the parliament, some lawmakers are thinking on similar lines.
“I have strong doubts about the restrictions” on holdings, socialist Dutch lawmaker Paul Tang told the chamber in an April 19 debate, arguing the CBDC should compete with banks. “A digital euro should be viable – why use something you can hardly hold?”
Central bankers such as Panetta have warned that a mass exodus from commercial banks could choke lending to the economy and damage financial stability.
The ECB is due to decide later this year whether to continue with the digital euro project, and the Bank of England has said that holdings of its own digital pound could also be limited to 10,000 pounds ($12,480).
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More than six billion IOT tokens have been minted since Helium migrated to Solana.
Helium’s newly-issued IOT token has risen by over 370% in the past 24 hours following the protocol’s successful migration to the Solana blockchain last week.
IOT is the protocol token of Helium’s internet-of-things network, it is mined from Helium’s hotspots – the hardware infrastructure behind the IOT network.
The tokens will always be backed by Helium Network’s HNT token and can always be converted to HNT, with the redemption rate being set algorithmically by its treasury swap contract.
With a maximum token supply of 200 billion, there are around six billion tokens in circulation, according to Solana’s block explorer.
Solana-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Kamino Finance revealed that it had opened two Helium vaults that lets investors stake their IOT and HNT tokens for a yield.
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The token is currently trading at $0.00248 with a fully diluted market capitalization of $495 million. However, based on circulating supply the current market cap is around $15 million.
The stablecoin has upgraded its market infrastructure after losing its peg during the crisis.
AUSTIN, Texas — The USDC stablecoin has emerged from March’s banking crisis stronger and safer, Jeremy Allaire, CEO of issuer Circle Internet Financial, said Wednesday.
USD Coin, a critical rail for moving money through the crypto industry, lost its dollar peg in mid-March after Silicon Valley Bank’s failure temporarily imperiled billions of dollars of its cash reserves. Though it quickly recovered ground, the event spooked investors and sparked massive outflows from the second-largest stablecoin.
“We’ve successfully navigated this crisis, and have actually upgraded the market infrastructure behind USDC to be by far the strongest, safest digital dollar on the internet today, hands down, there’s no question,” Allaire said onstage at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Austin.
He drew a contrast between USDC and other “alternatives we don’t know much about.” That unspoken competitor was Tether (USDT), long the stablecoin market leader despite some critics’ misgivings about its banking relationships and backing.
But the market disagreed. Since March’s banking crisis, USDC’s market cap has fallen to $29 billion from $39 billion, according to Nansen. Tether, meantime, has grown in size.
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Still, Allaire said USDC needs to become safer still. He said that can only happen with legislation at the Federal level.
The round was led by Spartan Group and included participation from Robot Ventures, Maven 11, Alchemy Ventures, HashKey Capital, Circle Ventures and Superscrypt.
Cata Labs, a blockchain infrastructure startup, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding at a “mid-eight figure valuation,” the company announced Wednesday.
The fundraising round, which closed in March, was led by crypto venture-capital firm Spartan Group and included participation from Robot Ventures, Maven 11, Alchemy Ventures, HashKey Capital, Circle Ventures and Superscrypt, among others.
Cata Labs is building Catalyst, a cross-chain bridge that aims to make it easier for blockchains to communicate with each other. At present, popular layer 1 blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana cannot easily transact with other blockchains, creating a spurt in bridging projects like the Jump Capital-backed Wormhole and Andreessen Horowitz-backed LayerZero.
“It’s become stupidly easy to make new blockchains,” said Jim Chang, co-founder of Cata. “There are ways where you can click a button and make a new blockchain. It doesn’t really make sense to have all these blockchains if they can’t talk to each other.”
Chang, who was previously a product manager at decentralized-finance protocol Aave, is working with Cata co-founder Alexander Lindgren to launch Catalyst.
Catalyst is different from existing bridges in that it can come already integrated into blockchains that opt into its ecosystem, forgoing the laborious and manual integration process characteristic of bridges such as Wormhole.
Catalyst’s thesis is that the future will hold thousands of modular blockchains that will need to communicate with each other. Modular blockchains are easier to deploy than traditional blockchains and break down the core functions of a blockchain into several different specialized blockchains.
“With the proliferation of rollups and app-specific chains, liquidity fragmentation is becoming a significant pain point and we have yet to see a unified liquidity layer that allows users to trade native assets seamlessly and efficiently cross-chain,” said Kelvin Koh, managing director of Spartan Group. “We believe Catalyst is in a great position to solve this pain point.”
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A major challenge for the modular thesis, however, is attracting user activity onto its blockchains. “At the end of the day, all of these bridges are in a winner-takes-all race to build network effects,” Chang said.
Titled, “The Future of Digital Assets: Identifying the Regulatory Gaps in Spot Market Regulation,” the hearing will take place on Thursday afternoon.
The House Subcommittee on Commodity Markets, Digital Assets, and Rural Development has provided the witness list for Thursday’s hearing examining regulatory holes in crypto spot market regulations.
The panel notably includes former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Timothy Massad, who is currently a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and director, M-RCBG Digital Assets Policy Project.
Other witnesses include Purvi Maniar, general counsel at institutional crypto trading platform FalconX, and Nilmini Rubin, head of global policy at decentralized proof-of-stake ledger Hedera. Rounding out the panel are Daniel Davis, partner at law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, as well as its co-chair, Financial Markets and Regulation and Joseph Hall, partner at law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP.
The hearing is set to begin Thursday at 2 p.m. ET.
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Todd Groth of CoinDesk Indices shares some thoughts on how macro analysis works in crypto.
One thing I like about macro investing is the scope.
While financial analysts and their respective crypto degens counterparts are looking at balance sheets, earnings statements, Solidity code and social media sentiment, macro strategists get to think about the consequences of exogenous things.
Put another way, while the analysts examine the forest tree by tree, macro investors sit on a hill, surveying the whole valley and considering which parts of the forest will be nourished or threatened by rainfall, forest fires, changes in land use and other factors outside of the idiosyncrasies of the micro analysis.
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Being macro in digital assets means considering historical environments in which cryptocurrencies have thrived as well as more challenging environments, such as 2022.
Last year, digital assets were clearly sensitive to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tighten financial conditions. There are many ways to measure financial conditions, but to keep it simple we can simply use trends in nominal and real yields, U.S. dollar exchange rate baskets and corporate credit spreads. From these measures we can create a financial conditions indicator and see how it relates to the historical risk-adjusted performance of digital assets, as proxied by bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH).
To estimate trends in these financial-condition proxies we utilize a trend signal similar to the one used in the Bitcoin Trend indicator (BTI) released recently by CoinDesk Indices.
To represent nominal yields (“NomRates”), we use two-, five- and 30-year U.S. Treasury yields; we subtract the five-year breakeven inflation rate derived from TIPS to create a proxy for two-, five- and 30-year real yields (“RealRates”). U.S. dollar denominated baskets of advanced and emerging economy currencies are used alongside a broader basket as three proxies for the dollar (“FX_USD”). And option adjusted spreads (OAS) for high-yield corporate bonds rated BB and CCC are used alongside an investment-grade index to represent U.S. credit conditions (“Credit_OAS”).
Trend signals are generated from the data within these four macro indicator buckets, then averaged to result in a positive, neutral and negative score for the financial condition regime. Risk-adjusted return ratios (annualized return per unit of volatility) are calculated on BTC and ETH within each regime and compared to an unconditional buy-and-hold strategy (“BuyHold”) shown in the figure below.
(CDI Research, St Louis FRED)
From this preliminary macro regime analysis it’s clear that financial conditions matter when investing in digital assets. Keeping a pulse on market conditions, particularly real and nominal interest rates and credit conditions, can help to navigate the crypto cycle better by offering a better risk-adjusted return than a simple buy-and-HODL approach.
In summary, as investors in cryptocurrencies we’d all benefit from taking a broader macroeconomic and market perspective to not miss the forest for the trees.
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P.S.: See you in Austin this week at Consensus 2023. Come meet the CoinDesk Indices team at booth #1306!
The cross-chain transfer protocol seeks to improve liquidity of the major crypto payments rail.
USDC issuer Circle Internet Financial on Wednesday released a new method to move the major stablecoin between blockchains that it says is faster, safer and cheaper than the so-called “bridges” that pervade decentralized finance (DeFi).
Called the “Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol,” the technology debuts for USDC transfers between Ethereum and Avalanche, with more chains coming in the second half of 2023. DeFi apps can integrate the relevant smart contracts to make it easy for users to move their stablecoins about.
The tech attempts to break down the barriers currently fragmenting USDC’s $30 billion market cap across many different blockchains. Though Circle issues “native” USDC on many top ecosystems including Ethereum and Avalanche, those asset tranches were more or less partitioned; those who wanted to “bridge” the divide had to engage in complicated and sometimes expensive cross-chain transfers.
Circle’s new method seeks to replace bridges, which solved that problem by creating another: a derivative token called a wrapped asset. CCTP works by destroying USDC on the source chain and re-creating it on the destination chain.
The process could pay the biggest dividends when it comes to asset swaps. It could be used to move cross-chain and cross-token transfers behind the scenes.
“With CCTP, developers can simplify the user experience and their users can trust that they are always transacting with a highly liquid, safe and fungible asset in native USDC. This milestone makes USDC a natively multi-chain digital dollar,” Joao Reginatto, VP of Product said in a press release.
Wallet company MetaMask, bridge operator Wormhole and bridge aggregator LI.FI are among the infrastructure providers with CCTP coverage at launch.
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Circle could not immediately be reached for comment.
The U.S. Department of Justice last year charged three members of a Miami crew in a crypto-related scheme from 2020.
The leader of a Miami crew charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with defrauding banks in a 2020 cryptocurrency-related scheme has pleaded guilty, an official notice from Wednesday said.
Esteban Cabrera Da Corte was one of three individuals arrested in relation to the crime, and was accused of “participating in a scheme to steal millions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency and trick U.S. banks into refunding the millions used to purchase that cryptocurrency, in part by using personal identifying information stolen from other people.”
The scheme saw U.S. banks processing more than $4 million in false reversals, while a cryptocurrency exchange lost around $3.5 million worth of digital assets, the DOJ’s notice said.
Cabrera, a 26-year-old from Miami Florida, pled guilty to “one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud,” which comes with a 20-year prison sentence, and has agreed to pay restitution of $3.6 million – with an additional forfeiture of $1.2 million.
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Changes to the protocol’s “Chef” contracts are intended to make the protocol more decentralized and secure.
SushiSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX), is one step closer to adopting a new tokenomics model that will promote its adoption of Uniswap version three (v3).
The model will probably go to a community-wide vote in late May, Head Chef Jared Grey told CoinDesk. The changes, if approved, will include overhauling the protocol’s “Chef” contracts to improve the code that underpins its activities following a multimillion-dollar hack earlier this month.
“V3 helps us make tokenomics more efficient [and] vice versa. With v3’s improved capital efficiency and improved and sustainable tokenomics, we will scale growth across our more than 30 supported networks,” Grey said.
The changes will also increase decentralization, improving the protocol’s security, Grey told CoinDesk.
The exchange is attempting to beef up security in the wake of the exploit, which drained $3.3 million from the platform’s wallets earlier this month. The hack exploited a vulnerability in SushiSwap’s Route Processor 2, a smart contract component that aims to execute trades more efficiently while boosting liquidity provisions. Some funds have since been recovered.
SushiSwap has patched the bug, and has stealthily introduced version three (v3) of its router on some networks to support Uniswap v3 adoption, Grey tweeted. The router will launch on more networks soon.
SushiSwap’s team also plans to roll out a series of changes to the protocol’s interface that aim to facilitate cross-chain swapping, according to Grey’s tweets.
The sushiswap (SUSHI) token is trading at $1.08, up 5.4% in the past day, CoinGecko data shows. The price has increased by roughly the same percentage over the past month.
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At CoinDesk’s annual Consensus conference, CEO Jenny Johnson said cryptocurrencies like bitcoin were a “distraction” from the benefits of blockchain technology.
AUSTIN, Texas – Grousing about the state of crypto regulations in the U.S. has become the norm for many industry players, but Franklin Templeton’s CEO Jenny Johnson said she thinks it’s important for the industry to accept that more regulations are coming – whether they like it or not.
Speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus Festival on Wednesday, Johnson said that the future of the industry “will be regulated,” and that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin were a “distraction” from crypto’s real innovation, blockchain technology.
“Bitcoin is the greatest distraction from the greatest disruption [coming to the financial system], and that’s blockchain,” Johnson said.
Read full coverage of Consensus 2023 here.
“I can tell you, if bitcoin ever became so big that it became a threat to the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency, the US would limit…the use of bitcoin. Currencies are very important for governments…to manage their economies,” said Johnson. “They will not cede their currency to this concept of a global currency.”
Johnson added that it’s better for companies to engage directly with regulators as they develop new products. Johnson added that Franklin Templeton, which manages $1.5 trillion in assets, has been in close contact with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as it developed its newly-launched blockchain-based mutual fund.
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Johnson added that the firm, which has offices in over 30 countries worldwide, is used to working with regulators outside the U.S. as well.
“I can tell you, different areas in the world are more advanced than others, more comfortable with it than others,” Johnson said, naming Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UAE as examples of crypto-friendly jurisdictions.
Johnson said that regulators, both in the U.S. and outside of it, are nervous about passing regulations that could have unintended consequences.
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“This is a complicated space, and the regulators are trying to be thoughtful,” Johnson said.
Regulatory uncertainty aside, Johnson is still bullish on the potential for crypto and blockchain technology to disrupt the financial industry. Blockchain technology could, according to Johnson, open up investment opportunities for asset managers by reducing friction and eliminating “toll takers” that currently waste resources.
