Cryptoassets, smart contracts, stablecoins, tokenisation and the two different types of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) – retail CBDCs and wholesale CBDCs. The world of finance and technology is quite confusing. Add onto this AI, APIs, BNPL, blockchain (Layer 1 and Layer 2), DLT [distributed-ledger technology], machine learning and more, and you get the idea….
Not sure if you noticed, but this week the U.S. Congress House Committee on Financial Services had a day investigating stablecoins, led by Chairman French Hill. The hearing was entitled ‘Navigating the Digital Payments Ecosystem: Examining a Federal Framework for Payment Stablecoins and Consequences of a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency’ , and invited various…
As many of you will have gathered, the next new book is all about Digital Trust in a Deep Fake World, coming out summer 2026 (I’m working on it now), so I was interested to see two fraud reports from by veriff, the AI-driven identity verification company, this morning. Released today, the reports show fraud…
As Donald Trump orders creation of a strategic cryptocurrency reserve for the USA, North Korea is working hard to hack it. This is demonstrated by the biggest theft of all time – $1.5 billion – by the North Korean Lazarus Group from Bybit. How could this happen? Well, Chainalysis breaks it down nicely into a step-by-step…
It is a wild ride with cryptocurrencies. Rising rapidly with Trump’s presidential campaign – after all, he is the crypto President! – things have gone south badly in the last week. It’s kind of that crescendo from zero to hero to zero again. The rises and falls in cryptocurrency values are a real rollercoaster. For…
After many years we have had many discussions of many countries and many banks talking about launching many central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Today, only three countries have a live CBDC: the Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria. Doesn’t that feel a bit strange? Well, most governments are experimenting with CBDCs and SWIFT, to retain their control…
A quantum financial system, or QFS for short Maybe it’s the way my feeds are set up, but every day seems like a headline about cryptocurrency and AI these days. Take my daily things worth reading, and here’s a few examples just from last Monday. On crypto: Trump orders crypto working group to draft new…
As a long-term and dedicated user of facebook and twitter since the 2000s, it is weird to find that, today, they are no longer useful tools. The feeds are now stacked with Mark Zuckerberg updates, Musk propaganda and worse. The only tool that’s still useful is LinkedIn, although there are issues there too. So it…
Marc Andreessen announced that their office in London, opened only two years ago, would shut down and its got everyone talking. Is London finished? Is the UK’s claim of being a great tech economy over? Will it bring down the government? Well, there are differing views. Many believe it is due to the new Trump…
