Archive for  May 2022

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The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision said a regulatory framework on crypto-assets for banking institutions will be created this year.
Last year, the committee proposed rules that required lenders to hold $1 of capital for every dollar in cryptocurrency.
However, banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank opposed such a rule. They found such a standard too complex.
“Recent events have further underscored the importance of having a global minimum prudential framework to mitigate the risks associated with cryptoassets,” the committee said in a statement.
The remark implied the collapse of TerraUSD (UST).
“The committee plans to issue another consultation document within the next month with the goal of completing prudential treatment sometime later this year,” the statement said.
Since 2008, the committee has steadily tightened capital requirements for banks to avoid a repeat of the financial crisis.

Europe’s largest cryptocurrency company CoinShares has recorded a loss of £17 million ($21.4 million) due to the collapse of Terra UST.
“We recorded an exceptional loss from our DeFi operations, it was £17 million on the liquidation of our stake in UST,” said Jean-Marie Mognetti, the firm’s CEO.
Mognetti also added that the situation was a “humiliating lesson” for the company.
Throughout 2021, CoinShares’ net loss increased from £1.4 billion to £2.4 billion.

The Optimism (OP) management token will be listed on centralized exchanges today. This is reported by The Block.
Specifically, the token will be available on OKX, LBank, MEXC and AAX.
The Optimism Layer 2 network allows Ethereum applications to perform faster and cheaper transactions while maintaining the security of the underlying blockchain.
In March, Optimism raised $150 million in a funding round led by Paradigm. As a result, Optimism reached a valuation of $1.65 billion.

The U.K. government has published a consultation document outlining a risk mitigation strategy for investors holding stabelcoins.
The proposal follows the collapse of the algorithmic TerraUSD (UST) stabelcoin.
The government recommends changing existing legislation to give the Bank of England the power to appoint administrators to oversee bankrupt steiblocoin issuers.
“Since the initial commitment to regulate certain types of stablocoins, events in the crypto-asset markets have further underscored the need for appropriate regulation that will help reduce risks to consumers, market integrity and financial stability,” the Treasury Department proposal states.
The consultation document will be reviewed until August 2, after which it will be considered by Parliament in due course.

Fidelity Digital Assets, a subsidiary of financial institution Fidelity Investments, plans to double its staff this year to meet growing demand for the cryptocurrency from institutional investors. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports this.
The company plans to hire 110 more engineers and developers with blockchain experience.
The new staff will work on building the infrastructure for Ethereum trading. So far, Fidelity Digital Assets has only offered bitcoin trading.

The company had previously announced its intention to offer cryptocurrency investments for retirement plans (401k).

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has launched the Project Guardian initiative. It will focus on testing tokenized digital assets.
Regulated financial institutions such as JP Morgan, DBS Bank, Marketnode and SGX will participate in the project.
The Project Guardian initiative will be led by Deputy Prime Minister and Economic Policy Coordinating Minister Heng Swee Keat.
He will oversee how MAS explores decentralized finance (DeFi) applications in wholesale finance markets, creating a liquidity pool of tokenized bonds and deposits to execute loans and credit in a public blockchain-based network.
According to Dr. Sopnendu Mohanty, director of MAS’s Financial Technology Division, Project Guardian’s findings will inform the regulatory framework that is needed to use DeFi.

Bank of America (BoA) CEO Brian Moynihan said the company has many patents on blockchain technology, but the institution can’t use them because of regulatory concerns.
“The reality is that we do payment business on our platform. It’s trillions of dollars a day, and almost all of it is digital. If you think about blockchain, we have hundreds of patents on blockchain as a process, as a tool and as a technology. But frankly, we can’t work with it. Because we’re regulated, and the regulators have forbidden us to do it. They said, ‘You have to ask us before you work with blockchain, and by the way, you don’t even have to ask us,’ was the tone,” he said.
However, Moynihan said BoA’s research team is already working on introducing cryptocurrency transactions and the bank will be ready to start working in the industry as soon as there is proper regulation.

Cryptocurrency storage service Copper announced that its Swiss unit has received regulatory approval to operate in the country from the Financial Services Standards Association (VQF).
The VQF is a self-regulatory organization recognized by FINMA, the main Swiss regulatory body.
“As Copper expands globally, being licensed by the VQF underscores our commitment to working with regulators around the world and the standards set in multiple jurisdictions. We are doing this to become the world’s leading provider of digital asset storage and infrastructure services,” said Copper General Counsel Carly Nuzbach Lowry.

The Mirror Protocol deFi-application, based on an older version of the Terra blockchain, was exploited in October 2021. The attack resulted in $90 million being withdrawn from the protocol, but the hack went undetected until last week.
Mirror Protocol allowed customers to trade shares of companies using synthetic assets.
The attack was reported by a Terra community member with the nickname FatMan. His assumption was confirmed by analytical company BlockSec.

The analysts found that when a user wanted to open a short position in Mirror Protocol, he had to bail out for at least 14 days. Once the user stopped trading, all assets could be returned back to the wallet. An identifier generated by the smart contract was used to recognize the owner of the assets. However, there was a bug in the code that caused the smart contract not to check, the identifier.
In 2021, the attacker was able to use the same identifiers and take a total of about $90 million out of Mirror Protocol.
BlockSec said the attack was not known about simply because less attention has been paid to data analysis on the Terra blockchain than other popular networks.
The Mirror Protocol developers fixed the bug in May, the same time the UST detachment occurred.

According to Shanghai Securities News, Shenzhen will hand out 30 million digital Chinese yuan (e-CNY) to local residents.

The digital yuan will be distributed through a lottery.
Shenzhen will cooperate with the Bank of China, Agricultural Bank and Industrial Commercial Bank of China for this purpose.