Significant developments last week around digital assets regulation and adoption in the United States, Europe, and the land down under were obviously welcome news despite the crypto markets bleeding by the week’s end.
Last week got island nations excited when John Rolle, the governor of the Central Bank of the Bahamas (CBOB), reportedly confirmed that the Bahamian digital dollar initiative will be introduced across all islands in the second half of 2020. In fact, the Bahamas already rolled out the pilot project on the island of Exuma in December. The governor emphasized that the upcoming Bahamian dollar will be nothing more than just a digital representation of the country’s fiat currency, the Bahamian dollar (BSD), and noted that the Sand Dollar is originally targeting domestic use only. However, it’s also possible that it could be linked with a foreign currency.
Last week also got the community highly charged up when Spanish soccer powerhouse, FC Barcelona, or Barca, the fourth most valuable sports team in the world, as rated by Forbes, announced it had teamed up with fintech platform, Chiliz, to create a blockchain-based token for the sports franchise. As part of the partnership with FC Barcelona, Chiliz created Barca Fan Tokens (BAR) for use on its social mobile app called Socios. This makes Barca the third soccer team, after Juventus and PSG, to have its own fan token.
Sign Up to Attend a Live Class this weekLast week talk on a government-backed digital currency was all the rage when Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, took the seat during a monetary policy hearing. Foster worried that if the Federal government doesn’t react and issue a plan for a digital currency quickly, potential competitors like China could roll out CBDCs and gain an upper hand. He specifically cited China’s plan to implement the digital Yuan among countries involved in its Belt and Road initiative, it could jeopardize the dollar’s world reserve currency status. The U.S government was asked to address the CBDC issue sooner rather than later as concerns over China’s ability to scale its digital Yuan by using their established cell phone payment system was raised.
Even more positive news, last week, Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) was dealing with a cascade of applications from 40 banks seeking to become regulated cryptocurrency custodians. This comes after new legislation in January 2020 has permitted banks to extend their offerings beyond traditional securities such as stocks and bonds to include cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and XRP. The new legislation covers the gamut of crypto assets — from cryptocurrencies to tokens — classifying them as digital representations of a value that do not have the status of legal tender.
Last week also saw tech giant Google, join Hedera Hashgraph’s governing council. Hedera is a enterprise-grade distributed ledger technology project that reportedly provides a performance of ten thousand transactions per second. The Hedera Governing Council is composed of many well-known companies such as Boeing, IBM, Deutsche Telekom and now Google and tasked with the network’s decision-making and ensure its continuous reliability. Google Cloud will now operate a Hedera network node. It will also provide access to its ledger data on its public cloud datasets, which include block information from blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
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