Auto Added by WPeMatico
Is it Libra or is it Diem, is it Facebook or is it Meta? Hard to keep up with all the name and brand changes, but whatever way you look at it, the news just in about the sale to a US based VC called Silvergate for $200m represents a significant fail. To try and […]
The post Facebook Fail! appeared first on Daily Fintech.
It is easy to place your bets as all three companies are publicly traded. Square is part of the Fintech 50 Index. Facebook and Twitter are big media businesses. Bias disclosure. While I have no commercial stake at time of writing I do have two biases. 1. Daily Fintech is a media business writing about […]
The post Part 4 Place your bets on this behemoth battle appeared first on Daily Fintech.
Square (SQ) is ranked 7 in the Fintech 50 Index of publicly traded Fintech stocks and describes itself as “tools to empower businesses and individuals to participate in the economy. Sellers use Square to reach buyers online and in-person, manage their business, and access financing. And individuals use Cash App to spend, send, store, and […]
The post Part 3 Square’s moves in Crypto appeared first on Daily Fintech.
Move fast and break Facebook. It will soon be conventional wisdom that Facebook Libra will fail and you only make money before the herd catches on. In this article, Daily Fintech Subscribers learn why Facebook Libra will likely fail and who/what will win if Facebook Libra fails and how to profit from that. Bernard Lunn […]
The post How to profit from the now likely failure of Facebook Libra. appeared first on Daily Fintech.
The 2019 Cryptovalley Conference remains true to its nature. Three days, three stages, and overweight technical and economics content. I attended for two days and became A cool kid on the Blockchain.
The narrative has clearly changed. Lots of evidence around us. Yesterday the BIS, the umbrella organization, announced the launch of a global innovation hub in Basel,Hong Kong, and Singapore to help Central Banks to “identify relevant trends in technology, supporting these developments where this is consistent with their mandate, and keeping abreast of regulatory requirements with the objective of safeguarding financial stability”.
The EU is very serious about supporting Blockchain technology. Tom Lyons announced the Convergence conference this coming November sponsored by the European Commission, the EU blockchain observatory & Forum, Consensys, Alastria, and INATBA[1].
Several speakers and panelists participated at the Cryptovalley Conference from Central banks around the world. Of course, they repeatedly stated that they share personal opinions and not the CBs official position. Between the BOE, the Fed, the SNB, and the Bank of Italy, the conversations went deeper.
We were reminded that unconsciously we are going back to the 19th century when multiple entities issued money. I like to add to that observation that we are also going back to bearer instruments. Tomaso Atse, director of the UCL Center for Blockchain Technologies, pointed out that what is new in our era is programmable money and the creation of hybrid types of value (like combining digital identity with money or some other value) and the ability to exchange it).
Alexander Lipton, the EPFL visiting professor and founder of SILAmoney, poked and provoked and defended his point of view. In a nutshell, he is the godfather of the DLT version of Narrow Banking concept. This is a way for Central banks to deploy DLT technology by issuing a fiat-backed digital coin (FBDC). The idea is that the central bank will allow and work (indirectly) with a consortium of validators that manage the issuance of the FBDC. It is worthwhile reading about this concept `Narrow Banks and Fiat-backed digital coins` by Alexander Lipton, Alex Pentland, Thomas Hardjono (MIT). What jumps out of it is that right now, we are faced with Facebook intending to implement this kind of concept through the LIBRA association. While each Central bank is doing its in-house due diligence, concerned only with its local country monetary policy and reserves; there is a clear need for Central banks to get together. They should be designing a Central bank coordinated narrow bank consortium.
This is a wakeup call to nightmares of whether Central banks will be able to control reserves and rates on reserves if LIBRA scales. LIBRA`s adoption in countries with currency instability, is troublesome if it really scales. Can LIBRA create hyperinflation in Venezuela? Alexander Lipton, says yes.
The narrative has clearly changed, and we are shifting in a phase where understanding monetary economics is becoming important.
When I raised the question last week about the governance of the LIBRA association (see here) and whether there could be collusion; I didn’t mean in the DAO technical sense (i.e. more 50% of validators collude and validate an invalid transaction). I meant collusion in terms of decisions about, for example, the management of the LIBRA reserve fund. Which currencies will be included, will the fund become a significant holder of US debt, how much government debt versus currencies, why share the interest of this cash cow by accepting new members, how to deploy the profits of the reserve?
Once the LIBRA reserve scales to $100billion (Ant Financial`s money market fund is currently $168billion down from a high of $250billion), the interest will be in the order of $1.5billion (assuming an average 1.5% interest rate). That is huge for an association with no reporting requirements.
We live in very interesting times.
Monetary policy issues need to be understood better.
Moral hazards are lurking everywhere.
Those that have been working on financial inclusion, self-sovereign identity, P2P protocols are feeling looted.
Back to the native people, Lisa Nestor from the Stellar foundation, shared a great overview of the global P2P network that can be used by banks to work directly with each other, without the need for correspondent banks. Stellar is decentralized and open with 28 nodes currently. Their aim is to optimize cross-border payments and work with all currencies. They launched in 2014. In 2016 they had 9,000 accounts and today they have 3.2million. Their daily volume has reached $350k with a total cost of processing of $1.50! During the conference, they reported that the first Swiss node was launched.
Bitcoin Suisse announced that they are seeking a banking license and they will be expanding in Europe. Ficas, a Swiss crypto asset management group for HNW, was a platinum sponsor. They are based in Zug with presence in Turkey, Greece, Spain, and Australia. Flovtec and Ovrium shared the award of the best Swiss Blockchain company at the SICTIC investor event during the conference. Orvium is a decentralized scientific collaboration platform for deploying blockchain and artificial intelligence technology. Flovtec is a liquidity provider for tokenized assets.
My opinion is that we will be seeing an explosion of stable coin issuance. CNNmoney Switzerland was at the Cryptovalley conference taking a pulse on LIBRA (watch here).
The GOSCI – Global Open Source Currency Index- is a novel independent volatility benchmark for Stablecoins. Launched by Bernard Lunn the same day the LIBRA white paper hit the market. Become part of it.
The Stablecoin.foundation was launched in October 2018 with 25 Stablecoin issuers from 16 countries. Its mission is to represent the collective interests of Stablecoin issuers to unify the industry.
Closing remarks
The narrative is now, about financial stability with privately issued coins. Several factors are forcing everyone to the table. These conversations are hard and consensus is not given.
Stable coins are creating a very collateral hungry market situation.
[1] INATBA is the new International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications, offers developers and users of DLT a global forum to interact with regulators and policy makers and bring blockchain technology to the next stage.
[2] “That’s very world domination-ish of them,” said Kaliya Young, a co-author of “A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity” and co-founder of the Internet Identity Workshop. “Some of us have been working on that problem for a really long time. You already have a set of open standards for verifiable credentials that are basically done and working.” From the article `Buried in Facebook`s LIBRA paper, a Digital Identity Bombshell`
Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer.
I have a commercial relationship with Flovtec. I have no positions or commercial relationships with any other company or the people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.
Subscribe by email to join Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).
Governance, Financial Inclusion, India, Tier 3 economies, remittances, payments, currencies, tokens, coins,…
These and more terms have been tossed around over the past few days, as we consumed facts and interpretations, triggered from the Libra white paper and all the related communications around it. As the dust settles down from the initial reactions, there are several overlooked aspects of the LIBRA plan that merit looking into.
Confession No. 1
There has been an explosion of cynical, partisan, and hyped threads of discussion. I include myself in the humans that reacted rather emotionally to the communication of the LIBRA plan. My `button` was pushed when the `financial inclusion` intention seemed to be the branding and PR storyline.
Dr. Cathy Mulligan and her collaborators called for caution in their Digital Cooperation report for the UN High-level panel (UNHLP) about using vulnerable communities to experiment on with #digitaltechnologies. Of course, `experimenting` is subject to interpretation and in the case of Facebook, maybe they can argue that this will be their second attempt in financial inclusion – as they did attempt to launch in the booming Indian market to offer seamless, cheaper payments like in any messaging app. Admittedly, payments are the very heart of any economy and we do live in a world that customers expect payments to be like WhatsApp messages[1].
Confession No. 2
We are not ready yet for DAOs. Thomas Power, rightly says that we need a Face to each and every scalable unicorn (every system needs a Face, at 8:30 BloxLiveTV). And the truth is that there is a problem with the Face behind Facebook, even though #DeleteFacebook led nowhere.
However, sentiment is not on our side, on this one. We, the ones that don’t forget Cambridge Analytica, fake News, propaganda, and what Chris Hughes or Sean Parker or Chamath Palihapitiya said; we are outnumbered. Let’s admit it.
The masses that send and receive remittances, and the masses that spend online to buy inexpensive items – micropayments – value access and convenience. While we, the ones that have a problem with the Face, are in another phase altogether, with more choices and the luxury of discussing governance, social responsibility, public scrutiny etc.
We have to acknowledge that foundations and associations (two different legal entities) setup in Switzerland have credibility and thus, the registration choice for LIBRA association. However, we need to also admit that this Swiss branding that has been deployed in another `alternative` use case – to accommodate legally the needs of blockchain startups to launch ICOs – still has to prove itself in the governance field and in the ways it links to the for-profit businesses that are their raison d` ȇtre.
As Kathryn Haun, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (one of the 28 founding members) pointed out[2], the Libra Association, will focus on governance issues debating decisions around how the new digital currency will be overseen etc. Swiss associations and foundations are not legal structures that were meant to spearhead such large business initiatives and that is the reason that Kathryn Hauna says “I think of it as a constitutional convention; you have all these different states coming in trying to form this union.” Dianne Schepers, a legal executive, explained to me that foundations are supervised by the Swiss Federal Supervisory Board for Foundations (ESA) and are required to be registered in the commercial registry and provide an annual report. Associations are not subject to any of these requirements.
As the 28 founding members will be discussing governance and much more about LIBRA, I feel that the composition of this association was overlooked (as other more basic items needed tending). It was actually – and rightly so – welcomed and the sentiment was positive because it has a decentralization flavor to it.
Confession No. 3
One of my first emotional reactions while reading the facts reported from Verum Capital – Your guide to Libra – on the day it hit the market, was to ask three questions:
Q1: For how many of the 28 founding members has financial inclusion been their business?
Q2: How many of the founding members have unsuccessfully experimented at scale in financial inclusion?
Q3: Which organizations were invited to consider being a founding member? And who decided this?
I share with you today my initial findings (more research and patience is needed to address them all) from looking closer to the founding members that each `coughed up` $10million
There are 7 members from the financial sector and most of them need no introduction.
Discussing the composition of the founding members with Verum Capital, it became clear that none of the top 5 remittance players were invited. Xoom ranks 6th and was bought out by Paypal in 2015. LIBRA has included the 6th global remittance player as a founding member.
Source: SaveOnSend.com
There are 4 members from the Blockchain space. Coinbase and Xapo, need no introduction. I do confess that I had to check out the others. BisonTails was only setup in Oct 2018 in the US to focus in blockchain interoperability and has only $5.3mil in seed funding[4]. Anchorage is a US start-up launched in 2017 focused on digital asset custody for institutional investors with a Series A funding completed (total funding $17mil).
Where did Bison Trails find the $10million membership fee to participate in the LIBRA association? Why did Anchorage decide to spend 60% of its total funding up to date, on its LIBRA membership?
There are 4 members from the VC world, which a priori seems a sector weight that I cannot rationalize (help is welcome; please comment).
Source: Ribbit, A16Z Lead Fintech Unicorn Hunters, CB insights
Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in Bison Trails (one out of seven) and a lead investor in Anchorage. Thrive is family to the Facebook family. USV is family to Coinbase, and on and on.
Three out of the five top VC are founding members of the LIBRA association. Top VCs can be measured in several ways. What is more relevant here is their Fintech footprint.
There are 3 members from the e-commerce space. Ranging from travel, to luxury fashion.
Two online hailing businesses and one music unicorn
Two telecoms with Iliad being a founding member that is losing clients and revenues but has a founder and still majority shareholder (billionaire Xavier Niel) who loves challenging the corporate establishment and is the founder of the StationF, one of the biggest startup campus.
There are 5 members that are non-profit organizations:
Wrap up
Confession No. 4
I continue to look into the issues raised by the boldness and the potential of the Libra coin (which has huge regulatory risk). LIBRA has actually a huge PR and branding problem, as even the MIT Tech Review article and many more, refer to the LIBRA Stable coin as the `Facebook coin` Facebook’s Libra: Three things we don’t know about the digital currency.
David Marcus, spearheading the Libra project for Facebook, had to denounce rumors that the $10 million buy-in got the validating firms access to transaction data (Decrypt).
There are 28 seats around the LIBRA table for now (similar to the way Stellar started off with 30 nodes). The LIBRA coin is not a Facebook coin. However, governance in an association is legally non-existent. So, for now we need to be clear that it is in good faith and only by giving the benefit of the doubt, that the LIBRA association has a dream and we should be watching their execution closely.
David Siegel through his new endeavor Cutting through the noise shared several facts and insights on LIBRA, as he is excited about the potential of a Stable coin that can scale fast as it will be launched in established markets. LIBRA will be offered to all users on Facebook, Booking, Lyft, Paypal, Farfecth, …..
During his webinar on Saturday (recording on youtube) I learnt that 60% of votes are needed in order to make a change in LIBRA. I like to think of this as the 60% attack nightmare.
Can Facebook pull off a 60% attack?
As Bernand Lunn said to Swissinfo.ch the day after, in What does Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency aim to achieve?: “Facebook has been hugely successful making money from accumulating people’s data and then selling it. It’s hard to see them completely changing their stripes.”
How will the LIBRA association untaint the LIBRA coin so that it is not thought of as a Facebook coin?
[1] Excerpt from `Money is a claim on an Institution and the reason for change`, Efi Pylarinou
[2] Andreessen Horowitz: How Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Will Be Governed
[4] Source from Crunchbase
Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer.
I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.
Subscribe by email to join Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).
TLDR. Will the Blockchain Economy be acquired by the Facebook Economy? Tuesday’s announcement by Facebook ranks as the 3rd big event in the 10 year history of the Blockchain Economy (the first two being the Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers in 2009 and 2014).
This update to The Blockchain Economy digital book covers:
1. The biggest losers will be global banks
Facebook Libra will obliterate the bank’s advantages in three ways
David Marcus, the very smart leader of this part of Facebook, has been super articulate and on message in interviews. The only point where he looked a bit uncomfortable was when asked why no banks participated. Grab your popcorn folks, this one will be epic.
2. Move will get a lot of traction with developers (despite many negative technical reviews).
Move is the programming language on the Libra blockchain. There is much commentary that it is not as flexible and open as programming on Ethereum or other similar open consensus networks. Despite these negative technical reviews, I predict that Move will get a lot of traction with developers for two reasons:
3. We have all contributed a lot of free brainstorming and market testing for their future product.
Myself included – no, Facebook did not pay me for this analysis.
Tuesday was the start of Step 3 in a 5 Step dance
Step 1. Recruit David Marcus. This happened in 2014. I wrote about Facebook Ambitions in Fintech at that time and correctly identified the direction of travel ie where the puck was headed. How long they spent in planning took me by surprise but now, seeing how well they have planned it and the scale of the ambition, it makes sense.
Step 2. Create a plan. Facebook has spent 5 years on this plan. It is a) very well thought through b) existentially critical to a $500 billion market cap company.
Step 3 Run it up the flagpole. This what they did on Tuesday. All of us have given Facebook a ton of well considered feedback aka free market testing and brainstorming and we will continue to do so in the weeks and months ahead.
Step 4. Adapt based on this feedback. The feedback already includes howls of protest from privacy advocates. Crypto folk are certainly privacy advocates; so we can expect this phase to be very, very noisy. Facebook will have planned for this. Based on past Facebook launches, we can expect them to:
Step 5. Launch & execute in 2020
4. Libra is a Stablecoin with unknown constituent parts.
Critical to their very well thought-through plan is the use of a stable cryptocurrency in the Stablecoin switchboard that I described in Takeaway 1. Interestingly enough, considering how critical this is to their plans and how much detail there is in other parts of the white paper, critical details, such as what Fiat currencies are in the Libra currency basket, are missing from the white paper.
That is why Daily Fintech created the GOSCI – Global Open Source Currency Index as an independent volatility benchmark for Stablecoins. If a Stablecoin claims low volatility, one should be able to measure that volatility against other Stablecoins.
5. Facebook’s delicate dance with regulator
Facebook’s delicate dance with regulators has three clever pieces:
Facebook’s delicate dance with regulators over Libra needs to be seen within the wider context of Facebook being regulated as a dominant social media platform. They can now say “see, we are not dominant within the wider market of financial services, so a break up should not be on the cards”.
6. Facebook will ignore all the early adopter howls of protest because they are going direct to the mainstream.
Like most crypto early adopters I am a bit of a “privacy nut” but I am under no illusions that my opinion will matter to Facebook. They know they cannot meet the 5 five pillars of open blockchains as defined by Andreas Antonopoulos:
Without those 5 pillars you will never win over the crypto early adopters. With most launches that would be game over, as the only route to market is via the early adopters. Facebook is taking Libra direct to the mainstream users who don’t give hoot about those 5 pillars.
The irony today is seeing crypto early adopter cypherpunk libertarian types happily saying that Libra will be stopped by regulators.
7. The Calibra wallet will probably drive mainstream adoption of Bitcoin
I say “probably” because this is dependent on Calibra wallet allowing coins other than Libra. I think this will happen because a single coin wallet will not be popular unless Libra is the only currency/coin we ever use. If Calibra wallet allows coins other than Libra, it will introduce millions of new users to Bitcoin.
8. They have brilliantly coopted the regulated Legacy Finance world as Nodes.
The list of partners leads people to a conclusion that Facebook can only win, that it is game over. Yet many of the partners have more to lose than to gain. For example credit card networks will lose if payments moves to crypto and VCs will lose if Facebook has too big a hold on crypto innovation and value creation. It remains to be seen if these are PR partners or real partners. In a PR partnership, both parties get something but don’t have much skin in the game.
9. There are lots of opportunities for agile entrepreneurs but never forget who owns the playground.
Libra is like Apple creating the Apple Store, a defining moment full of opportunities for agile entrepreneurs. As long as you never forget who owns the playground, your business won’t be obliterated when/if Facebook changes the rules.
10. XRP just became a lot more risky and be careful investing in ETH
Ripple wants to enable cross border payments via banks. Some banks will run into the arms of Ripple because they are scared of Facebook, but what was a risky speculation pre Libra (can Ripple persuade banks to use XRP) just had another layer of risk added (if banks can be persuaded, can they beat Facebook?).
The ETH Ethereum story is more nuanced. The total openness of Ethereum means that there maybe use cases nobody ever dreamed of (ICOS and CryptoKitties was not part of Ethereum plan in 2014). Yet a platform like Libra can attract lots of less experienced developers who want to win over Facebook’s 2.4 billion users.
Context & References
Investing in Payment Tokens and Stablecoins (aka new currencies).
Why StableCoins are so important (but also so hard to get right)
Facebook Ambitions in Fintech (note, from October 2014)
The Facebook GlobalCoin stablecoin won’t kill Bitcoin but many companies should be worried.
———————————————
Bernard Lunn is a Fintech deal-maker, investor, entrepreneur and advisor. He is CEO of Daily Fintech and author of The Blockchain Economy.
I have no positions or commercial relationships with the companies or people mentioned. I am not receiving compensation for this post.
Subscribe by email to join other Fintech leaders who read our research daily to stay ahead of the curve. Check out our advisory services (how we pay for this free original research).