Cryptocurrency brought us peer-to-peer payments that continue to elevate participation in the global economy for millions of people without access to traditional banking services. The rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) promises to further expand access to financial services, including savings, lending, derivatives, asset management and insurance products. This innovation, which empowers financial inclusion, should be allowed to flourish in a regulated environment where individuals and institutions are protected and suspicious activity is identified and reported. But how do you regulate these decentralized products without completely removing the core attributes of financial inclusion and decentralization? Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures are …
The team behind a private digital currency for secure payments says its goal is to make every consumer their own bank — enabling them to send and receive crypto with the gadget of their choice. Xeonbit says its peer-to-peer technology ensures that every user’s accounts and transactions are “out of reach to any prying eyes.” A feature known as “ring signatures” means public keys are shuffled in order to ensure that particular users cannot be identified once a transaction has taken place. The startup says this is not at the expense of speed, scalability or security. In a blog post …
The United States Deputy Treasury Secretary argued that decentralized privately-issued digital currencies can shift some functions from the state to the private sector. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Justin Muzinich presented his view on the emerging ecosystem of financial intermediation and digital currencies at an annual banking and payments conference in New York on Nov. 21. The keynote by Muzinich was published on the official website of the United States Department of the Treasury. The recent conference was co-hosted by the U.S. Clearing House and Bank Policy Institute. Illicit uses of crypto are “one of the issues at the top …
The crypto community and Wall Street converged last week in Nassau, Bahamas, to discuss the future of digital assets during SALT’s Crypto Bahamas conference. The SkyBridge Alternatives Conference (SALT) was also co-hosted this year by FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange. Anthony Scaramucci, founder of the hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, kicked off Crypto Bahamas with a press conference explaining that the goal behind the event was to merge the traditional financial world with the crypto community: “Crypto Bahamas combines the crypto native FTX audience with the SkyBridge asset management firm audience. We are bringing these two worlds together to create a …
At a time when technology can be used as both a mechanism for privacy intrusions and a tool for protecting privacy, the prescient sentiment of cypherpunks in the 1990s of cryptography as the last defense against a digital surveillance dystopia rings truer than ever. And one of the most potent instruments for defending digital privacy has recently gained significant momentum thanks to the advent of cryptocurrencies. An iteration of zero-knowledge proofs, trustless zero-knowledge proof systems that are also referred to as zk-SNARKs are a powerful cryptographic primitive that can sever any tractable piece of data between two parties over a …