Congress unveiled a new legislation focused on the regulation of stablecoin issuers and service providers

Three House Democrats have unveiled a new piece of legislation focused on the regulation of stablecoins issuers and companies that provide stablecoin-related services. The new Congressional bill says it would be 'unlawful' to issue stablecoins, 'provide any stablecoin-related service' without federal approval.

According to the text of the bill, the draftees appear to be casting a wide regulatory net to cover those that issue stablecoins or provide business services related to them.

As the text states:

"It shall be unlawful for any person to issue a stablecoin or stablecoin-related product, to provide any stablecoin-related service, or otherwise engage in any stablecoin-related commercial activity, including activity involving stablecoins issued by other persons, without obtaining written approval in advance, and on an ongoing basis, from the appropriate Federal banking agency, the Corporation, and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System."

The draft bill, if approved, "would protect consumers from the risks posed by emerging digital payment instruments, such as Facebook’s Libra and other Stablecoins currently offered in the market, by regulating their issuance and related commercial activities," according to a statement published by the office of Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

The bill would notably mandate that "any prospective issuer of a stablecoin to obtain a banking charter" and "that any company offering stablecoin services must follow the appropriate banking regulations under the existing regulatory jurisdictions." The legislation was put forward by Tlaib along with Reps. Stephen Lynch and Jesús García — all of whom signed a letter that took aim at U.S. Comptroller Brian Brooks for his focus on cryptocurrency-related issues earlier this month.

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to minimize the volatility of the price of the stablecoin, relative to some "stable" asset or basket of assets. A stablecoin can be pegged to a cryptocurrency, fiat money, or to exchange-traded commodities (such as precious metals or industrial metals).


JPMorgan to Launch JPM Coin Digital Currency

JP Morgan is rolling out the first US bank-backed cryptocurrency to speed up payments.

In a move commentators may see as unlikely, the multinational lender will use its newly developed asset, dubbed “JPM Coin,” to increase settlement efficiency, initially within three of its operations.

Speaking to CNBC, Umar Farooq, who leads JPM’s blockchain focus, appeared buoyant on blockchain technology’s perspectives at the bank.

“So anything that currently exists in the world, as that moves onto the blockchain, this would be the payment leg for that transaction,” he told the network:

“The applications are frankly quite endless; anything where you have a distributed ledger which involves corporations or institutions can use this.”

JPM Coin will initially focus on international settlements by major corporations, helping speed up transactions that currently take a day or longer using extant options such as SWIFT.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has officially become the first U.S. bank to launch its own digital token representing a fiat currency. Per a press release and interview issued on Valentine's Day, the bank has announced the creation of JPM Coin, a blockchain-based technology which will facilitate the transfer of payments between institutional clients. The coin has important differences from preexisting cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, primarily because it is redeemable at a 1:1 ratio for fiat currency held by JPMorgan.

JPM Coin is essentially a tool to help with the instantaneous transferring of payments between some of JPMorgan's clients. In order for an exchange of money between client parties to take place over a blockchain ledger, a digital currency must be used to facilitate the transaction. JPM Coin is the tool which helps to complete that process in a more efficient manner than traditional settlements.

JPM Coin itself is not money in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a digital token which represents U.S. dollars which are held by JPMorgan Chase. It maintains a value equal to one USD. Assuming that JPMorgan Chase deems the initial launch of JPM Coin to be successful, the bank has indicated its plans to use JPM Coin for additional currencies as well in the future.

The process by which clients will utilize JPM Coin is relatively straightforward. First, a client deposits a sum in a particular account and receives corresponding JPM Coins. Next, these coins can be used to facilitate transactions across a blockchain network and...


Facebook is planning to launch its own stablecoin digital currency

The United States-based global social tech giant would be the largest entrant to the consumer blockchain, and cryptocurrency space.

Facebook's blockchain boss, David Marcus. WSJD

Facebook could become the most important company in Crypto.

News broke yesterday that Facebook is building a stablecoin (crypto coin) that will be launched to allow WhatsApp users in India to transfer money. Of course, the immediate reaction of those in the space was to start yelling. Many people were excited, others were upset about the company’s recent privacy issues, and some felt that a Facebook stablecoin didn’t fit the authentic ethos of the crypto industry.

All of these reactions missed the mark though.

Zuckerberg and the Facebook team have never been interested in playing it safe. The highly talented team consistently looks to invent and/or grow products that change the world. If Facebook is building a stablecoin for WhatsApp, this is less about crypto and more about building a globally dominant product that changes the way billions of people live their lives.

David Marcus who leads the blockchain team is the former President of PayPal. Kevin Weil is the VP of Blockchain Product, previously served as the VP of Product at Instagram, and was once the SVP of Product at Twitter. Evan Cheng is the Director of Blockchain Engineering and was a former senior manager at Apple. And finally, Morgan Beller is the unsung hero of the group — the woman who leads blockchain strategy, but worked solo on the project for a period of time before she was able to build internal support and recruit some of the company’s best talent.

Couple these individuals with Facebook’s notorious "Growth Team" and you have a recipe for success. The Growth team is the company’s secret weapon. They are brought in like a SWAT team to solve the hardest problems by leveraging immense amounts of data and the proprietary analytical tools that have been built over the years. This team has helped four separate Facebook product teams scale their offerings to over a billion users each (Facebook main app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp).

So what exactly is the potential for this team?

The holy grail would be to build the world’s dominant payment system. This would be a direct competitor to Visa and Mastercard, but it is more likely to happen than you may think. Facebook has billions of users and tens of millions of merchants. This gives the company a leg up on competitors as they bootstrap the network effects needed to lock in both sides of a marketplace.

If Facebook could successfully build the product and drive adoption, they will have a chance to transition from a social network to one of the largest financial services companies in the world. This move would allow them to take a small percentage on each transaction and reduce the dependency on their advertising-based model.

This won’t happen overnight though. Facebook needs to

(1) create a viable stablecoin (not that easy)

(2) launch the product in India’s large market (significant opposition from government and financial institutions)

(3) drive sustainable adoption,

(4) expand to other jurisdictions and other digital currencies, and then

(5) build out additional financial services to serve their customers.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see Facebook back their way into becoming a new-age bank for digital natives outside the United States.

Facebook could be the most important company in crypto. They have 2+ billion people who use their services daily. Anything they launch will quickly become the most popular product in the industry….maybe even one of the most popular products in the world.

Mark Zuckerberg has dedicated his life to changing the world. Most people in tech don't trust him and would love to see him fall. Many people no longer trust him ... and still, get your popcorn ready — I wouldn’t bet against this team (and in most cases, it boils down to the team)

TechCrunch Covered The Breaking News

Jon Russell For TechCrunch

Facebook looks to be jumping on the blockchain wagon with plans to introduce its own stablecoin, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The social network company — under fire for a seemingly constant stream of privacy snafus of late — created an internal blockchain divisionin May and, while there has been plenty of speculation, the exact nature of its work is unclear.

The Bloomberg report is a first solid suggestion at what will come from the new division and, according to the publication, it’ll be a stablecoin that “let[s] users transfer money on its WhatsApp messaging app, focusing first on the remittances market in India.”

Facebook  offered a non-committal response.

“Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of blockchain technology. This new small team is exploring many different applications. We don’t have anything further to share,” it told Bloomberg in a statement.

If the U.S. giant does carry out the plan that Bloomberg is reporting it would (easily) be the largest company to embrace consumer blockchain service. That’s both in terms of the size of the business — a $376 billion market cap and annual revenue of more than $40 billion — and the user base it touches. Facebook reaches more than 2.2 billion people for its core social network, 1.5 billion for WhatsApp, 1.3 billion for Messenger and a further one billion via Instagram.

That makes this a thread worth pulling, so let us get into it.

Former PayPal CEO David Marcus heads up Facebook’s blockchain division — Marcus is also a former board member at crypto exchange Coinbase

Yet another stablecoin

Stablecoins have become all the rage in the blockchain space during the second half of this year, with scores of projects popping up to provide solutions — but let’s start with why.

The concept is simple: a cryptocurrency that is pegged to a fiat currency and therefore immune to the often wild valuation swings.

Blockchain as programmable and border-less money has potential, but stability is a huge concern. Bitcoin, for example, hit a record high of nearly $20,000 one year ago; today its price is just over $4,000 but, symbolically, it fell below that figure in recent months. The ride for “altcoins” has been even bumpier.

Stablecoins offer a way to deposit money ahead of buying into Bitcoin, Ethereum or other tokens more quickly than a bank account. They also allow profits to be moved from volatile tokens and, among other things, are a more stable way of sending crypto to another person (or business) without being subject to moving prices.

Yet, despite a simple premise, there are no current examples of a proven and successful stablecoin, despite the many who have thrown their hats into the ring.

Tether, the highest-profile project, is dogged by concerns around its financial backing. The organization behind it has never shown that it has the required fiat currency to back the tokens in the market, while its value has previously slipped below $1.....

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Cryptocurrency Exchange OKEx Simultaneously Lists 4 Stablecoins

Third Top Cryptocurrency Exchange OKEx Lists Four Stablecoins at Once

The third top crypto exchange by market cap, OKEx, has recently announced the listings of four stablecoins at once, according to an official blog post published on Monday, Oct. 15.

OKEx has added support for four stablecoins, including TrueUSD (TUSD), USD Coin (USDC), Gemini Dollar (GUSD), and Paxos Standard Token (PAX). According to the schedule mentioned in the statement, the stablecoins have become available for deposits today, at 05:00 PM on Hong Kong Time (HKG), with a number of crypto trading pairs. Withdrawal will be available starting tomorrow, Oct.16.

TrueUSD is the second stablecoin that has been introduced following the launch of controversial stablecoin Tether (USDT), which is backed by the U.S. dollar on a 1:1 proportion. Both listed on major cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Bitfinex, OKEx, Huobi and HitBTC, the stablecoins are deployed on the Omni and Ethereum blockchain networks.

Based on tokenization platform TrustToken, TrueUSD has been touted as “world’s first legally backed stablecoin,” and went...


Binance Backs TMON Unicorn Founder's $32 Million Crypto Stablecoin Financing

Yet another stablecoin is attracting big investors.

Announced Tuesday, the founder behind a $1.4 billion startup unicorn called TMON is revealing he has raised a $32 million seed round to build a stablecoin called Terra. But while a number of startups have deployed stablecoins – cryptocurrencies engineered to track the price of another asset, usually fiat currency – Terra comes with a notable addition: an existing user base.

Created by Korean entrepreneurs Danial Shin, who founded and chairs TMON, one of the top e-commerce websites in South Korea, the Terra project is launching with a significant number of partners that already reach 40 million customers. Those partners, who will together form the Terra Alliance, a group of e-commerce sites that are interested in incorporating the stablecoin into their business, include Woowa Brothers, Qoo10, Carousell, Pomelo and TIKI.

According to a spokesperson for the project, those companies, combined, take in $25 billion in sales.

"We've banded together all the e-commerce platforms in Asia that are not called Alibaba or Amazon to push Terra into the hands of many many people," Shin told CoinDesk.

It's no wonder that the round includes quite a few notable crypto investors, including Polychain Capital, FBG Capital, Hashed, 1kx, Kenetic Capital, Arrington XRP, Binance and others who were not disclosed.

"We are pleased to support Terra, which sets itself apart from most other blockchain projects with its established and immediate go-to-market strategy," said Polychain's Karthik Raju in a statement.

Echoing that, Ella Zhang, head of Binance Labs, said in a statement:

"While we see many stablecoins coming out, Terra's journey is especially meaningful as they are designing one of the few price-stable protocols with existing, working and strong go-to-market strategy and usage."

That use, according to Shin, is in acting as an economical digital payment system, compared to credit cards.

He told CoinDesk, that a significant portion of TMON's annual losses take the form of credit card fees. And he's sure other retailers experience the same.

That...