Bitfinex announced they have added XRP, litecoin (LTC), EOS, and Polkadot (DOT) as collateral on Bitfinex Borrow, a peer-to-peer digital token loan portal. Clients will be able to obtain loans of up to 80% of the value of their XRP, LTC, or EOS holdings or up to 70% of the value of their DOT holdings in either tether (USDT) tokens or US dollars, they continued in an emailed press release.
Blockchain News
Sequoia-backed cross-chain data oracle Band Protocol (BAND) said it has entered the OpenAPI Initiative to join blockchain applications to common Application Programming Interfaces (API) and streamline the exchange of data within smart contracts and off-chain data sources. By forming a common API standard, Band Protocol intends to support blockchain applications to leverage off-chain APIs and data to better engage with centralized data references and the wider technology community, empowering extensive use cases of smart contracts, they stated in an emailed press release.
Lecturers at a fintech summit in China have revealed that next year, blockchain efforts in the country will center on government services, finance, medical care, and smart manufacturing. As claimed by SouthCn, attendees at the Future Business EcoLink Conference, held in Shenzhen were told that Huaweiand other tech titans in China will also look to develop and deploy blockchain-powered certificate services, supply chain finance solutions, telemedicine, and complete traceability platforms in 2021.
Derivatives News
Swiss fintech firm Amun AGsaid they’re closing down the operations of their leveraged tokens — BTC3L, BTC3S, ETH3L, and ETH3S — as the company is now centering on “other projects.”
November has been the best month of trading for bitcoin (BTC) futures in 2020, in terms of average daily volume (ADV), and it has been the second-best month since launch, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange said today. Volume struck 19,700 contracts (98,400 equivalent bitcoin) throughout the final week of November, supporting to lift ADV to 11,400 for the month, a 55% gain over October. Nearly 6,300 individual, active accounts have traded since launch, and 2,600+ were added in 2020, 64% more than in 2019, they said. The number of big open interest holders (they hold 25+ contracts, 125 equivalent bitcoin) grew to a record of 108 in the last week of November.
Source: CME
CBDCs News
The former head of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), China’s central bank, has declared that Beijing has no plans to eclipse traditional currencies with its forthcoming digital yuan. The ex-PBoC governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, told attendees at the Shanghai Financial Forum that the bank, which he headed until 2018, would look to use the digital yuan to process payments in real-time and execute foreign exchange transactions simultaneously in a bid to “transform” cross-border trade, per a report from the South China Morning Post. In a swipe at Facebook, Zhou added, “We are not like Libra [now – Diem] and we don’t have the ambition to replace existing currencies.” (Learn more: It’s Official: China’s Digital Yuan To Target US Dollar Dominance)
In Suzhou, China, the receivers of 100,000 digital “red envelopes” containing a total of USD 3m worth of digital yuan tokens have been putting their tokens to work within hours of receiving them, making 20,000 digital yuan transactions on the e-commerce site JD.com – which opened parts of its platform up to digital yuan-owning Suzhou residents ahead of the handout. Per the Global Times, the first digital yuan transaction on the platform took a customer “only about 0.5 seconds to complete,” with JD.com claiming that some 80% of the digital currency transactions on its platform were made by younger users, with the largest online payment exceeding USD 1,528.
Tokenization News
Switzerland-based digital asset bank Sygnumsaid it tokenized its shares, indicating that that digital representations of the shares, together with associated legal rights and obligations, have been created and are immutably accounted for on a distributed ledger. Tokenization of its shares lays the foundation for Sygnum’s future public offering, which includes a potential dual listing across Switzerland and Singapore in partnership with SIX Digital Exchange, they continued.
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