Crypto

Building on yesterday’s discussions of regulating, I got copied on a letter that’s doing the rounds from Sam Woods, Deputy Governor of the PRA (the Prudential Regulatory Authority). It lays out the official position and expectations of the regulator when financial insitutions are dealing with crypto-assets. It makes for interesting reading and you can read…

I find it quite surprising to see statistics around ICOs, such as the fact that $13.7 billion has been raised by ICOs so far this year alone. $13.7 billion! In what? Well, the 10 biggest ICOs this year are: Telegram: $1.7 billion Dragon: $320 million Huobi: $300 million Bankera: $150.9 million Orbs: $118 million Envion:…

I haven’t blogged about cryptocurrencies and blockchain for a while, as it’s been a bit too much for a while. There’s massive coverage everywhere, but what’s the reality? The reality is that a lot of this is nascent change. There are young tycoons making millions, whilst naïve bandwagoners are losing millions. From a $20,000 end…

Conservative MP Eddie Hughes has just written a 36-page white paper extolling the benefits of blockchain for Britain, which was published yesterday Unlocking Blockchain: Embracing new technologies to drive efficiency and empower the citizen, by FREER. FREER is a major new initiative from the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA, a UK think-tank dating back to…

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the guys who are responsible for Basel regulations and act as the global central bank to all the central banks, caught global headlines yesterday by saying that bitcoin will break the internet. Wowser. I couldn’t ignore this and neither should you so here’s a summary of what they said…

Every now and then, someone writes something better than me and, if they’re very nice, they let me republish their content on this blog. Ben Robinson of Temenos is one of those guys. Two years ago, he wrote a great insight into banking business models and, last week, he did it again in a superb write-up…

So, I’m presenting at a Corporate Treasury event, and we get into talking about distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain. Comments are made around so many tests and proofs of work and concept, but so little production. At this point, someone made the comment that it will happen from the ground up, as corporates start…

Building on Friday’s blog about small bank thinking, there’s another anomaly that occurs with big banks which is their usual response to technology is to test it. The problem with testing technology is that it is just a test. A false implementation. It is not designed for reality and can lead to false results. For…

I’ve been tempted for some time to write a book about how sex is at the heart of commerce, innovation and money. I’ve alluded to it a few times, and particularly noted that the right honourable Jeremy Clarkson sometimes says something intelligent. “Money and rumpy-pumpy (sex) are the twin engines powering everything we do”. He’s…

I’ve been watching the rollercoaster ride of cryptocurrencies very carefully for the last year, and it only struck me today that these are not currencies … yet. Apart from a few novelty vendors and merchants who put bitcoin on their websites, I don’t see many others accepting ether or XRP, and when I have tried…