What is Ampleforth?

30 July 2020 in blog, podcast

Introduction In this article [1] I want to discuss the dynamics of Ampleforth [2,3], which is a crypto currency with its twist. Instead of issuing a fixed number of units, Ampleforth monetary supply expands and contracts dynamically to keep one Ampleforth valued at around 1 USD. The expansion and contraction is executed in a pro-rata manner, meaning that they do not impact the percentage of overall supply an investor holds. On first sight this looks like a stable coin, but on second sight it is clear that this is not quite the case – it is a regular crypto coin whose price dynamics has been moved to play out in the volume space.

Banque de France selected companies for CBDC trial, and related news

21 July 2020 in podcast

Banque de France selected the firms for its announced CBDC trial [1]. Four out of the eight companies chosen are old economy giants who are venturing into the brave new world, but the remaining four are more recent upstarts: Iznes, LiquidShare, ProsperUS, and SEBA Bank.

Cloudcoin and the old school way of transferring value

18 July 2020 in podcast

It is interesting how technology gives a new lease to old principles. The medieval banking systems relied heavily on bearer instruments to assert ownership of financial assets, and this has over time be replaced with centralised registers. Now we see the rise of a new class of bearer instruments, eg via Corda, or now via CloudCoin which uses a very different – and in many respects much more pedestrian – way of avoiding the double spend problem.

The Green Ship Security Token Offering

17 July 2020 in podcast

Before we start: this is not a financial promotion, I am in no way related to this token offering, and I have no views whatsoever of whether or not this token is a good investment. With this out of the way, I am excited that there is another major security token offering coming out of Germany, a $50m subordinated debt token for investing into green shipping assets.

The article announcing this is so far only available in German [1], but there is a lot of information on the sponsor’s page [2] and the subscription page [3]. The prospectus has been approved by the FMA Liechtenstein [4].

Binance issues Swipe-powered debit card against crypto balances

14 July 2020 in podcast

After its acquisition of Swipe [5], Binance now announced details of the debit card it will be offering first in the EEA and later in the UK [1,2]. And Binance’s CEO is amongst the beta testers [3,4].

Did someone really just pay a few million dollars in fees? Twice? Or was this money laundering?

11 June 2020 in podcast

In the last days there were two Ethereum transactions [3] that paid about $2.6m in transaction fees each, which even for Ethereum is a bit on the high side [1]. After the first transaction there were two major theories: fat fingers, and money laundering [2]. Now a third one has been added [4]. So what was it?

Securitize pays out dividend-like payment on-chain

9 June 2020 in podcast

Securitize – the tokenisation platform – has announced that they effectuated the first dividend-like payment on-chain, as Cointelegraph reports [1]. The payment was for the Lottery.com security token about which unfortunately apparently not much is in the public domain [2]. So whilst the details are a bit scarce this is definitely an important step forward in the tokenisation world [3].