Digital Currency Financial News

Crypto futures exchange OPNX has launched a credit currency for margin trading, according to a July 5 statement made to Cointelegraph from the exchange’s co-founder, Mark Lamb. Called “oUSD,” the currency is available in its “phase 1” iteration, meaning that users cannot receive it without depositing crypto assets into the exchange. 

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) may not solve any problems faced today, but could be the answer to ones not even fathomed yet, says the executive spearheading Australia’s CBDC pilot.

On June 28th, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had issued a default judgment that granted a permanent injunction against Michael Ackerman, a resident of Alliance, Ohio. 

The European Commission announced on June 28 that it has proposed a legislative plan for a digital euro, aiming to make it a widely accepted and easily accessible form of payment.

The Bank of England (BoE) has made significant developments in its central bank digital currency (CBDC) program. Tom Mutton, director of fintech at the BoE, recently shared insights on the privacy aspect of the CBDC and why the central bank might look for other options beyond blockchain as the underpinning technology.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) released a proposal for a common protocol that would specify the conditions for the use of various types of digital currencies.

On June 19, European cryptocurrency investment firm CoinShares published its “Digital Asset Fund Flows Report,” revealing that cryptocurrency investment products experienced outflows totaling $5.1 million last week. The outflows contributed to the continuation of a nine-week streak of outflows, resulting in a cumulative total of $423 million.

Privacy and the ability to transact anonymously should be considerations in the design of a digital dollar, a United States Treasury official has said.

Texas lawmakers voted almost unanimously to change the state’s bill of rights to include the right of its residents to own, hold and use digital currency.

Zimbabwe’s central bank has set a price for its gold-backed digital tokens. The country is planning to sell its gold-backed digital currency to investors starting May 8. The tokens will be sold at a minimum price of $10 for individuals and $5,000 for corporations and other entities.

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe is set to introduce a gold-backed digital currency to serve as a legal tender in the country. The move is a government initiative to stabilize the local currency from its depreciation against the United States dollar. 

The post-COVID-19 era has brought the issue of inflation to the forefront, leading to increasing interest within the Web3 space for creating flatcoins, a close “cousin” of stablecoins designed to mitigate inflation risk.

Meanwhile, in the husk of a onetime aluminum smelting plant an hour outside of Austin, row upon row of computers were using enough electricity to power about 6,500 homes as they raced to earn bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency. The computers were performing trillions of calculations per second, hunting for an elusive combination of numbers that bitcoin’s algorithm would accept. About every 10 minutes, a computer somewhere guesses correctly and wins a small number of bitcoins worth, in recent weeks, about $170,000. Anyone can try, but to make a business of it can require as much electricity as a small city. In Texas, the computers kept running until just after midnight. Then the state’s power grid operator ordered them shut off, under an agreement that allowed it to do so if the system was about to fail. In return, it began paying the bitcoin company, Bitdeer, an average of $175,000 an hour to keep the computers offline. Over the next four days, Bitdeer would make more than $18 million for not operating, from fees ultimately paid by Texans who had endured the storm.

Decentralized multichain digital wallet solution BitKeep Wallet has announced that it has surpassed 10 million users as of April. The platform has seen tremendous growth in recent months, with over 560,000 new users onboarded in March alone. The surge in users can be attributed to several successful campaigns with popular blockchains like Arbitrum and Sui.

Japan's Finance Ministry is planning to establish an expert panel in April to explore the feasibility of introducing a digital yen, Japanese news outlet NHK reported. 

European Union lawmakers have adopted new draft legislation that would impose a 1000 euro ($1,083) cap on anonymous crypto asset transfers in a bid to combat money laundering and terrorist financing.

French lawmakers have proposed a ban on the promotion of certain financial products and services by electronic means, including crypto assets, in order to protect consumers from potential risks. 

The world of digital cash is divided into two camps. The traditionalists want a public authority to remain in charge of providing a safe medium of exchange for people to settle claims against one another. Or else, they say, private money could become as unreliable as in the pre-US-Civil-War era of wildcat banking, when notes issued by a lender in Tennessee would be discounted by 20% in Philadelphia.

Europe could lead the world in developing the Internet of Things (IoT) by harnessing the potential of stablecoins, the Digital Euro Association argues in a new report. Machine-to-machine (M2M) payment is a field poised for growth, and stablecoins, in particular, offer advantages for it, the report says.

Australia's central bank is set to launch a "live pilot" of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) "in the coming months," according to a joint statement from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and Digital Finance CRC (DFCRC), an Australian financial research institute.

Crypto exchange Coinbase has been named as a defendant in a legal complaint brought by NanoLabs — the company behind the digital currency Nano (NANO) — over alleged trademark infringement.