Crypto

Some people talk about FinTech disruption and how payments and banking is being attacked and unbundled by start-ups, but we often look at banking too simplistically. Global banks and investment banks are far more complex creatures than their high street counterparts, which is why we’ve seen far less disruption in corporate, commercial and wholesale banking…

There are a few exchanges I use for trading cryptocurrencies such as Kraken and Coinbase, so I was interested to receive this email from Coinbase last Friday: Dear Coinbase Customer, We are contacting you to make you aware of recent developments in a number of proposals for technical changes to Bitcoin. All BTC stored on…

I was interviewed by UBS’s wealth management team a month ago, when the bitcoin bubble was in full bloom. The price had exploded, tripling in a month. Now that it has burst, the interview seems quite prescient so, here it is … UBS interview with Chris Skinner Cryptocurrencies – digital currencies based on encryption –…

I’m boarding a flight yesterday and murfing (mobile surfing).  Flicking between Facebook apps, twitter, bank account, BBC news and more.  Suddenly I spot a new ICO – Initial Coin Offering – for a new bank.  From Wikipedia: “An initial coin offering (ICO) is a means of crowdfunding the release of a new cryptocurrency. Generally, tokens for the new cryptocurrency are…

I’m being asked this a lot as the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have increased ten-fold in the past few weeks.  Good for those who have some.  Bemusing for those who don’t.  There are a range of factors driving the rise in cryptocurrency prices, particularly the craze for Initial Coin Offering (ICOs).  An ICO…

I’ve regularly got into confrontations with digital currency people, especially those who are believers in bitcoin, by saying things they don’t like to hear.  First it was my comment that you can’t have money without government.  They believe the currency is beyond control because it exists on a global network.  My contention is that money…

I try to generally avoid making political commentary on the blog as it’s not appropriate. This is a blog about technology and finance, not the economy and politics.  Every now and again the two come together such as with Brexit and Donald Trump.  Equally sometimes they cannot be avoided as the politics impacts the financial…

I tweeted this the other day, and it got a lot of likes, so I thought I’d make it today’s blog title.  We seem to have lost a lot of buzz on blockchain this year, even thought it’s still buzzing away as much as ever before.  I recently was talking about how blockchain is great…

I blogged a year ago about TechFin, the incumbents’ view of applying technology to existing banking services, versus FinTech which seeks to transform the financial system.  That has become one of the top search terms to find my blog, as it turns out, mainly because my blog entries are the first to be returned when searching…

I’ve just been alerted by friend Gijs Boudewijn to the release of a fascinating white paper by BIS, the Bank for International Settlements (the guys who do Basel stuff and are big cohonez in banking circles).  Their Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures released Distributed ledger technology in payment, clearing and settlement: an analytical framework…