Digital Currency
So today it was the turn of the US House Committee on Financial Services putting Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency, libra, under the microscope, and it was a vast improvement on yesterday’s hearing in the Senate. If you haven’t read the key takeaways from that hearing, you can find them here. Full disclosure: I had to run […]
The Riksbank has published a new report recommending that the central bank advances a project to develop its own central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The report proposes that the bank begins to design a technical solution for an e-krona in order to test which solutions are practicable and realisable; draws up proposals for legislative amendments needed to clarify the Riksbank’s mandate and an e-krona’s legal standing; and continues investigating the financial aspects of an e-krona.
Sweden’s central bank says that while it has provided the general public with money for 350 years, as the use of cash is continuing to decline in Sweden, “we need to think in new ways”.
Digital currency exchange, Coinbase, has raised $100 million in Series D funding.
The round was led by IVP, with participation from Spark Capital, Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Section 32 and Draper Associates. Founded in 1980, IVP has invested in more than 300 companies, 106 of which have gone public. Notable IVP investments include companies such as Dropbox, Netflix, Twitter, Slack and Snap.
“Coinbase experienced unprecedented growth over the last year, and we have now exchanged over $25 billion of digital currency for our customers. We’ll be using this new funding to continue scaling even further,” says Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, in a blog announcing the news.
The bitcoin blockchain has officially forked, meaning that a subset of bitcoin miners have started to operate a different software to create a new blockchain, but one that shares a transaction history with bitcoin.
This means that where once there was just bitcoin, a single, decentralised digital currency, now there will also be “bitcoin cash”, which shares the same historical blockchain as the original bitcoin but will now diverge from it.
This fork in the original bitcoin blockchain to create this new version of the digital currency is the result of a long-running dispute about how the blockchain should operate, which Profit & Loss has previously covered.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has issued an order granting LedgerX, an institutional trading and clearing platform for digital currencies, registration as a derivatives clearing organisation under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA).
LedgerX will be the first US federally regulated exchange and clearing house for derivatives contracts settling in digital currencies.
Under the order, LedgerX will be authorised to provide clearing services for fully collateralised digital currency swaps. LedgerX, which was also granted an order of registration as a Swap Execution Facility (SEF) on July 6, 2017, initially plans to clear bitcoin options.
