In cryptoland, the fall tends to be regulators’ open season. As unprecedented as it’s been, 2020 is no exception to this trend. Tensions are high on both sides of the Atlantic: As markets were still processing the news of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission cracking down on derivatives exchange platform BitMEX, the Financial Conduct Authority, the British financial watchdog, moved to ban retail investors from using cryptocurrency derivatives altogether. The densely packed news cycle has somewhat muffled the impact of another regulatory bomb that dropped a week earlier and is bound to have major lasting effects on the …

Editor’s note Blockchain technology has attracted regulatory attention since its inception. The security of the Bitcoin network despite the value of BTC in play has consistently proved the resilience of blockchain technology in maintaining records across a vast range of parties. However, many countries have determined that Bitcoin doesn’t behave as a currency at all, or at least not a replacement for their own. The nations behind the world’s most-used fiat currencies have in many cases pointed to Bitcoin’s volatility as a critical flaw. They have decided that the rise of stablecoins, especially over the past two years, poses a …

The G20’s financial watchdog, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), has published regulatory recommendations opposing the trans-national ambitions of “global stablecoins,” such as Facebook’s Libra project. The FSB’s report offers regulatory recommendations to G20 member states and the broader international community intended to prevent stablecoin projects from using opportunities for "regulatory arbitrage" and becoming embedded within the financial structures of national economies. The report warns that so-called global stablecoins (GSC) could become “systemically important” across jurisdictions, undermining the capacity for governments to dictate monetary and investment policy within their borders. “The decentralized nature of GSC arrangements could pose governance challenges; stabilization …

Countries representing the world’s largest economies said in a draft of a statement that they would initially oppose the launch of Facebook’s Libra project. According to an Oct. 12 report from Reuters, central bankers and finance ministers from the United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and the U.K (also known as the Group of Seven, or G7), said it would halt global stablecoin projects pending appropriate regulatory oversight. The draft stated: “The G7 continues to maintain that no global stablecoin project should begin operation until it adequately addresses relevant legal, regulatory, and oversight requirements through appropriate design and by …

Aragon co-founder Luis Cuende told Cointelegraph that the decentralized technology his company has been developing could find its perfect use case on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In recent months, content moderation practices employed by global social media platforms have been criticized by people across the political spectrum. Libertarian-leaning constituencies tend to criticize them for essentially instituting politically correct censorship while the liberals contend that they are not doing enough to filter offensive content. To this point, yesterday, the FBI charged six individuals with a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. It has since been …

On Tuesday, a House subcommittee put out a massive report that places Big Tech in the crosshairs of major antitrust reforms. The four firms at the center of the report — Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon — have been in hot water with Congress for some time. But while the tone of the recent conversation is punitive towards those firms, it also seems to envision a broader shift to new rules that would stop tech from this level of centralization again. Obviously, that’s a lofty ambition, and sweeping political ideals don’t make it into market practice without extensive compromise. Nonetheless, …

Mask Network has launched a trading widget allowing Twitter users to access market data and trade Ethereum-based crypto assets without leaving the platform. Powered by Uniswap and CoinMarketCap, the new Mask widget brings up a window featuring market data and an interface for trading on Uniswap when users hover the mouse pointer over crypto asset tickers in posts. In a Tweet thread announcing the new widget on September 24, Mask Network (formerly known as Maskbook) said it hopes to expand the service to other popular social media sites such as Facebook as well as other protocols in the decentralized finance …

Smart speakers have become part of our daily lives. With a single word, we are able to command a device to answer our inquiries and shopping desires. The simple act of ordering diapers or asking for a weather report is now banished to the corner of the brain that houses what you had for breakfast that morning; you can recall it, sure, but not without considerable effort. Our devices, though, don’t forget. And neither do the companies that make them and own all the data collected through our interactions. Data — as the analogy goes — is the new oil. …

Unstoppable Domains co-founder Bradley Kam believes that neither the anti-encryption bills nor the technology giants present a real threat to the future of the Internet. In his opinion, both, the governments and the giant platforms are helping to usher the era of the decentralized web, he told Cointelegraph: “There was a narrative in a popular narrative that the Internet was working pretty well, I think even a few years ago, and I thought that narrative is almost completely gone now. And there's a lot of things there's the anti-encryption laws you mentioned or Barack Obama getting hacked on Twitter. So …

The Facebook-initiated Libra blockchain project continues to grow as its governing body adds a new major industry partner. Blockchain Capital, one of the largest venture capital firms in the blockchain industry, has joined the Libra Association, according to an official announcement Friday. Alongside the other 26 association participants, Blockchain Capital will now be working to create a “more equitable payment system” with Libra. Bart Stephens, co-founder and managing partner at Blockchain Capital, said, “Leveraging blockchain technology to improve financial access and promote innovation has been at the core of Blockchain Capital’s portfolio strategy.” The Libra Association was formed in June …

The Libra Association has appointed HSBC veteran James Emmett as managing director of its subsidiary firm, Libra Networks LLC. James Emmet spent 25 years at HSBC and is a former colleague of the Libra Association’s new CEO, former HSBC chief legal officer Stuart Levey. Levey is also the former Under Secretary for Terrorism under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama Emmett has held multiple roles in his long career at HSBC, most recently working as group general manager. In an official statement, Levey underscored Emmett’s extensive experience as a financial services executive “with deep substantive expertise and …

The governor of the Bank of France has warned that Europe cannot afford to lose momentum in tackling the challenges posed by private sector global digital assets. His warning came as five EU governments — Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands — all backed the European Commission’s intent to draft regulation for asset-backed crypto assets, notably stablecoins. In their draft joint statement, the five governments reportedly pledged to prevent global stablecoins from operating in the EU before all legal, regulatory and oversight matters have been addressed. The Commission is expected to put forth its proposals for regulating crypto assets …