The central banks of Canada and Singapore announce this week an unprecedented milestone. As the world’s first state-owned financial institutions, they are celebrating the joint premiere of their blockchain-based payment system for cross-border transactions. They also publish the joint cooperation of their respective blockchain systems Jasper and Ubin in a joint report. This should promote the further development of the technologies, especially by central banks and monetary authorities.

Constantly fluctuating exchange rates, different administrative systems worldwide, a flood of regulations and regulations – there are many hurdles to settling payments across national borders. The result: Often such transactions not only require extremely long processing times. In addition, payments from one country to another are often extremely expensive.

The central banks of Canada and Singapore, the Bank of Canada (BoC) and the Monetary Authority Singapore (MAS), have jointly declared the problem of this problem. Since 2016, they have been developing Blockchain solutions to make cross-border payments cheaper, faster and more secure.

Asset Backed Securities, ABS for short, were responsible for the financial crisis. As early as the beginning of 2000, American banks began bundling real estate-backed bonds with high probability of default with other bonds and bundling them into intransparent packages. The result is well known. Well, in 2019, the first ABS will start on a token basis. Will there be a bursting of a mortgage bubble this time as well?

Just like the few of us today still buy a CD, but download the music in a purely digital form as an MP3 file or listen directly to Spotify, also changes the medium of securities. Physical documents become digital tokens, ergo security tokens. Accordingly, each security that is currently held in the form of a deed at central securities depositories will in future be kept in custody via a blockchain. The more efficient medium to securitise and exchange property replaces a less efficient medium.

The London-based fintech company Zeux wants to make future payments with the cryptocurrency NEO. The goal is to give customers the opportunity to pay with cryptocurrencies in the business.

As the start-up Zeux recently announced on Medium, users of the Zeux App will in future have the opportunity to pay for goods via Apple or Samsung Pay. The company integrates all services on one platform. The Zeux app provides each user with a digital bank account and digital wallet addresses. This is to enable customers to make payments in all transactions and to purchase a range of investment products from various financial institutions. It also claims that the Company does not charge any fees for opening an account, transferring funds, charges, withdrawals or payment fees. The London FinTech is authorized by the British Financial Market Authority.

Send me Bitcoin and I’ll tell you who you are? If you make a transaction in Bitcoin, the recipient will be informed of the address from which the Bitcoin came. The payment and the recipient’s address are stored together with the amount on the blockchain. With simple means can then determine how many Bitcoin are on the payment address. One of many solutions in this very heated debate is bestmixer.io.

About anonymity, paranoia and the desire for more serenity.

Information is the gold of the third millennium. In our small country you get the impression that the account balance and the income are among the most sensitive data of a person. But this information is anything but in our hands, whether we like it or not. For investigative agencies, for savvy hackers and for intelligence agencies, finding out about a person at the local savings bank is not a big challenge. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, there is some hysteria about the glassiness of the blockchain. Apart from the fact that one operates in the Bitcoin network under one or more pseudonyms, there are many solutions for improved privacy and anonymity. The most promising one is probably the Lightning Network, which until now has only limited practicality. An already working solution represents the platform bestmixer.io.

Bitcoin can now also be purchased at the vending machine in selected locations within Germany. After some legal difficulties, the operators decided to set up the machines after all.

One or the other may still remember: Bitcoin machines have not had it easy in Germany so far. Some brave pioneers have already tried to exhibit; However, they had to switch them off again at the direction of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin). In October last year, however, the Berlin Court of Appeal ruled that BaFin had exceeded its powers. In other words: Bitcoin trading is not punishable.

A new indictment leads to findings in the case of the Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex. So this depends on a service provider with the Canadian stock exchange QuadrigaCX: Crypto Capital. The US judiciary is now taking its operators to court for illicit banking

The Bitcoin ecosystem struggles again and again with trust reversals. Recent entanglements between the Bitfinex Stock Exchange and the Stable Coin provider Tether Limited have cast serious doubt on their credibility. Now there are new insights: One of its service providers, Crypto Capital, connects them to the Canadian stock exchange QuadrigaCX.

The auditing firm KPMG joins the Trusted IoT Alliance. Verbund is working to link Blockchain and IoT to pave the way for Industry 4.0.

With the auditing firm KPMG, the Trusted IoT Alliance receives prominent reinforcement from a “Big Four” company. As KPMPG LLP announces in a press release, it hopes to leverage the synergy effects of the two technologies by working with blockchain industry and Fortune 500 companies.

The FinTech Council of the German Federal Ministry of Finance considers a referral of the Federal Government with the Blockchain regulation overdue. In an opinion on the blockchain strategy of the Federal Government is present, the experts demand a regulation by eye. It is important to understand the enormous potential of the technology without neglecting the very real risks. And that’s better yesterday than tomorrow.

It is provoking something in the German blockchain regulatory landscape. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) has concluded a public consultation with the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) on the development of a blockchain strategy. Between February 20 and March 29, associations, companies and organizations had time to share their positions and recommendations with ministries.

Among other things, the FinTechRat of the German Federal Ministry of Finance participated in the survey, for which www.blockchain-strategie.de has its own homepage. On 19 pages, the panel of experts made it clear why the development of a coherent blockchain strategy was long overdue. In addition to representatives of the classic financial world and the fintech industry, FinTechRat also includes well-known blockchain experts such as Prof. Dr. med. Philipp Sandner, head of the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center.