Month: February 2023

IMF offers Jordan’s central bank recommendations for implementing retail CBDC

boss

The Central Bank of Jordan is closer to its next step toward a retail central bank digital currency (rCBDC) with the completion of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) technical report on the country’s markets. The IMF conducted a three-month mission last year to assist the bank with preparations for a CBDC feasibility report. The IMF released its report Feb. 23. Working between July and September 2022, the IMF gave the country’s existing retail payment market a largely positive review, calling it well-integrated. Two nonbank payment service providers (PSPs) have “generally…

Token Offering of Asset Management Platform Factor Raises Roughly $7.6M

First among these changes was increasing the liquidity owned by the protocol for the USDC/FCTR pair on Camelot. When participating in the token generation event, users would deposit stablecoin USDC into the protocol in exchange for FCTR. Half of the USDC funds raised from the public sale will now be deployed into a liquidity pool that is owned by the protocol. Initially, only 40% was to be used for protocol owned liquidity. Source

Change lies ahead for haphazard crypto regulation

boss

The World Wide Web, as its name implies, is borderless, and so is crypto. The internet and cryptocurrency’s common ethos is wide-open communication and exchange, unimpeded by national boundaries. On the ground, however, as crypto has become a more significant player in the financial system, nations have begun to consider issues of sovereignty and regulation. While many countries have so far remained open to crypto, others have restricted its use or outright banned it. The same reason that some have advocated for crypto and blockchain technology — as a means…

Yield platform Stablegains sued for promoting UST: Finance Redefined

boss

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. The backlash from the Terra implosion still haunts the crypto world, with the now-shuttered stablecoin yield platform Stablegains being sued for customer losses. The plaintiffs allege that the platform funnelled customer funds into Anchor Protocol without users’ knowledge or consent. Platypus, the DeFi protocol that was exploited for over $8 million, is working on a compensation plan to recover some of the funds. Florida’s…

For Solana Users, ‘Priority Fees’ Mean Paying Up to Skip the Line

Solana suffered multiple well-documented (and excoriated) network outages in 2022 and 2021, some of which were driven by bots pummeling one corner of the blockchain simultaneously. In one such outage, in September 2021, bots crowded a token sale on exchange Raydium with more transactions than Solana could handle. Solana basically broke, going offline for 17 hours – an eon in 24/7 cryptocurrency markets. Source

DeFi ‘fragility’ causes and cures explored in highly technical Bank of Canada study

boss

The Bank of Canada has released a working paper that examines lending protocols in decentralized finance (DeFi) with regard to sources of instability and their relation to crypto asset prices. Its findings point to potential ways to optimize DeFi lending platforms, or possibly the practical limits of decentralization. The authors of the paper, titled “On the Fragility of DeFi Lending” and released Feb. 22, acknowledged the inclusiveness DeFi offers and the advantages of smart contract protocols over the use of human discretion. They went on to identify the systemic weaknesses…