Eastern Caribbean Central Bank's DCash digital currency goes live

The ECCB has launched a regional central bank digital currency in partnership with Caribbean fintech outfit Bitt.

The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, the main financial institution of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union, has launched DCash.

The ECCB announced the launch of its CBDC for the region via a media event held on Wednesday.

DCash is the digital version of the Eastern Caribbean dollar — the official currency of the eight countries in the union.

However, as announced during the launch, DCash is only available in four of the currency union’s member states: Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Lucia.

Wednesday’s launch marked a culmination of the project over two years in development with the ECCB first announcing its plans for a CBDC back in March 2019.

As part of the launch, ECCB governor Timothy Antoine performed the first-ever live DCash cross-border transaction. Governor Antoine reportedly sent 100 DCash dollars from the ECCB headquarters in St. Kitts to DCash wallet holders in the three other countries involved in the launch.

Using Bitt’s CBDC management protocols, the ECCB will reportedly be able to mint and issue DCash. The ECCB will also be able to redeem and burn the DCash CBDC.

As part of the rollout, the ECCB state that DCash will support both business and private transactions with vendors and merchants signing up for the DCash Merchant App. Users will also be able to transfer DCash to residents within the currency union.

Speaking during the launch on Wednesday, the ECCB governor commented on the central bank’s decision to partner with Bitt for the CBDC project, adding:

“The ECCB chose to partner with Bitt because of the company’s shared values of citizen empowerment through financial inclusion and its respect and understanding of the unique needs of emerging economies. These past two years have been an intensely collaborative journey, and both Bitt and the ECCB have learnt many transferable lessons along the way.”

For Bitt CEO Brian Popelka, DCash is a “game-changer” for the currency union adding that the CBDC was designed to be interoperable with digital currencies around the world.

Following the public rollout, both the ECCB and Bitt say the next step is to work towards full incorporation of DCash into the financial infrastructure of the four nations participating in the initial launch over the next year.

Beyond this point, both partners are also looking to extend DCash to the remaining four countries in the currency union: Montserrat, Commonwealth of Dominica, Anguilla, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

In other Caribbean-related CBDC news, Jamaica’s central bank recently partnered with Ireland-based tech firm eCurrency Mint to develop its own sovereign digital currency.

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To the 'literal moon'? Elon Musk SpaceX tweet gives Dogecoin a 35% lift-off

RIght on cue for April Fool's Day, Musk promises to "put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon," but for hodlers, the resulting gains were anything but a joke.

It may be an April Fool's prank, but when it comes to meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin (DOGE), it hardly matters.

DOGE/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bittrex). Source: Tradingview

Musk: SpaceX taking Dogecoin to "literal moon"

After a fresh tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, DOGE/USD shot up 35% in minutes on April 1, hitting six-week highs.

Musk, newly dubbed the "Technoking" of Tesla, is known for his tongue-in-cheek Dogecoin publicity, and his antics on Twitter and in interviews have already succeeded in boosting the altcoin's price.

This time was arguably the most overt example of "memeing" a cryptocurrency to the moon, however, as Musk promised that his other company, SpaceX, would "put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon."

SpaceX is going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2021

Immediately, Dogecoin began rising, reaching a peak of $0.07 before cooling off but still retaining the gains.

Having began 2021 at just $0.004, DOGE's year-to-date gains as of Thursday stood at over 1,500%.

In a perhaps equally unlikely but genuine move, Latvian national carrier AirBaltic announced this week that passengers can now book flights using DOGE, along with several other altcoins. Bitcoin (BTC) has been accepted since 2014.

More than empty promises?

Musk, meanwhile, has found himself in hot water over his Twitter plugs, with reports emerging in February that the mogul was under investigation by U.S. authorities.

He is not the only one to fall foul of the establishment for doing so. As Cointelegraph reported, entrepreneur John McAfee was charged with a raft of offences last month, among which were his daily showcases of various cryptocurrencies on Twitter.

However, it was advertising Dogecoin in particular that got him into trouble, he claimed.

The concept of clamping down on alleged market manipulation remains a sore point among many lay investors in light of the Reddit GameStop debacle, which saw trading platforms prevent investors from transacting in a seemingly ad hoc fashion when their trading provoked heavy volatility.

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Hong Kong and China test cross-border digital yuan, says PBoC official

The digital yuan continues to develop apace.

China has completed its first cross-border pilots of the digital yuan with Hong Kong.

Wang Xin, director of the People’s Bank of China research bureau, said that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the PBoC have conducted technical tests on the cross-border use of China’s central bank digital currency.

 The official announced the news at a Thursday press conference hosted by the State Council Information Office of China, local news agency Sina Finance reports.

The news comes shortly after Mu Changchun, head of the PBoC's digital currency research institute, proposed a set of global CBDC rules last week. Speaking at a Bank for International Settlements seminar, Mu called on global financial institutions to ensure the global interoperability of national digital currencies.

“Interoperability should be enabled between CBDC systems of different jurisdictions and exchange. The PBoC had shared the proposals with other central banks and monetary authorities,” the official said.

The latest news brings a significant update to China’s aggressive CBDC development. After debuting internal digital yuan pilots in April 2020, the Chinese central bank has been actively pursuing to move its CBDC expertise beyond its own jurisdiction.

As such, the PBoC joined central bank authorities in Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates to explore a cross-border CBDC in February 2021. In late 2020, an official at the HKMA claimed that the regulator and the PBoC were at the preliminary stages of piloting the digital yuan for cross-border payments.

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Finance Redefined: The slow march forward, March 24–31

DeFi keeps chugging along while everyone is focused on NFTs

Finance Redefined is Cointelegraph's DeFi-centric newsletter contextualizing major events in the previous week. Subscribers receive a copy every Wednesday.

Editor's Note

This is one of those weeks where it’s hard to find a central topic for this newsletter. There weren’t any big scandals or releases, more like a slow grind with a few projects launching new features, others announcing their fancy investment round, while every celebrity and their mother keeps dropping NFTs. Snoop Dogg is the latest, I believe?

I suppose a fair question to ask is, “why NFTs and not DeFi?” The answer is money. NFTs are currently making stupendous amounts of money to their sellers, not unlike the DeFi yield farming mania of the summer of 2020. In crypto, money is always the answer.

NFTs too shall pass, but like other past trends in crypto, this current rise may leave behind a residue that’s much larger than what we started with.

I would say DeFi is in its “accumulation” stage right now, and that’s why we’re seeing a steady stream of releases and investments, without any of them really rocking the ecosystem. Market conditions are not helping either, as we’re still in a wavering stage that needs to ultimately resolve itself. Maybe we’ll resume the bull run shortly, maybe we won’t. I’ve come to understand that timing the market’s top is fairly easy, the problem is that there are so many “tops” in a crypto year that it becomes difficult to tell a local correction from a global peak.

Sushi releases Kashi

One of the bigger developments this week was SushiSwap finally deploying BentoBox and Kashi, a margin lending platform. What distinguishes it from platforms like Compound or Aave is its segregated approach to risk. Kashi uses separate vaults for each pair of lendable assets, meaning, for example, that putting Ether into an ETH-SUSHI vault does not let you draw UNI from the ETH-UNI vault.

The segregated approach allows higher risk tolerance. A spectacular collapse in value of some small and illiquid coin does not affect anything but its own vault. This means that SushiSwap can create margin trading pairs for even the smallest of projects without suffering structural risk. With the upcoming Kashi V2, the act of creating lending vaults will even become permissionless, similar to creating AMM pools.

Margin trading is the lifeblood of DeFi. Margin traders paying for the privilege of shorting your coins (or dollars) in Compound or Aave are the source of your “risk-free” yield when supplying capital. Expanding margin trading to more coins adds capacity for more capital chasing those sweet DeFi APYs across the entire market.

Aave, Polygon, and the importance of narratives

Aave and Zapper have just announced an integration into Polygon, the sidechain and layer-two ecosystem formerly known as Matic Network.

The choice comes as an obvious consequence of the high gas fees on Ethereum, which have been pricing out a lot of smaller users for quite some time now. However, Aave’s destination is quite curious. Up until the rebranding, Matic was a weird mix of a competitor and addition to the Ethereum ecosystem. It ran a Plasma network, but most projects preferred to build on its smart contract-enabled “sidechain.”

The Matic sidechain is, in reality, an independent blockchain that simply lets you bridge assets back and forth from Ethereum. In order to qualify as a proper sidechain, it should have used ETH or at least something like DAI to pay for transaction fees — instead it uses MATIC tokens. Under Matic’s very loose definition, Polkadot, Near, Avalanche and Binance Smart Chain would all be sidechains of Ethereum.

But imagine the backlash if Aave announced it would move to Near or BSC — it would be seen as nothing less than betraying Ethereum. I’ve witnessed how projects like Balancer or Curve downplayed their involvement with “the enemy” after agreeing to release news of an integration with an external platform. Though, to be fair, these other platforms were also probably jumping the gun on the announcement.

Either way, Polygon’s rebranding and shift into a “Polkadot on Ethereum” strategy is paying dividends for public perception. Even if, in practice, moving to Matic is for now equivalent to moving to BSC. That may change with future releases of the Polygon SDK and other tech solutions, but narratives seem to be the main drivers of the scalability platform choice right now.

I’d argue that being “Ethereum-native” is the only reason people are even considering using Optimistic Rollups, the “darling” of the Ethereum layer-two solutions that carries impressive usability flaws.

In other news

• Liquity Protocol raises $6M from Pantera and other big players.
• Aave Ventures (and others) invest into derivatives CEX Delta Exchange.
• Kava got ready to release major V5 upgrade, but failed to reach quorum on governance.
• Moonbeam raises $6 million to develop its Ethereum “sidechain” on Polkadot.

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South Korean gov't makes $10.5M profit from 4-year-old Bitcoin crime haul

The coins languished in cold storage for four years after being confiscated by authorities during an arrest.

South Korean prosecutors have finally sold a Bitcoin (BTC) haul they confiscated from a criminal in 2017 and it’s worth $10.5 million more than it was at the time of the arrest. The cash has reportedly been deposited in the coffers of the country’s national treasury.

According to reports coming out of the Suwon District Prosecutors Office, this is the first time confiscated Bitcoin has been sold by authorities, and the first time the coins in question have moved since being put into cold storage in 2017.

Originally worth $238,000 at the time of the confiscation, the coins were recently sold for a sum of $10.8 million, marking a 4,400% increase in value in four years. Based on that percentage growth, we can assume that Bitcoin was priced at around $1,300 when the arrest was made, close to April 2017.

With no specific cryptocurrency laws or regulations in place at the time, authorities left the coins in cold storage. In late March, the South Korean government enacted widespread crypto-specific laws for the first time, putting more pressure on exchanges and virtual asset service providers to use real-name trading accounts and to report their activities to Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit. Prosecutors reportedly sold the coins as soon as the laws were put into place on March 25.

South Korea’s determination to regulate the cryptocurrency space stems from revelations regarding crypto’s use by tax evaders, and the evergreen concerns surrounding money-laundering. In January 2022, new laws will come into force that levy a 20% capital gains tax on profits made from cryptocurrency trading.

The National Tax Service of South Korea claimed the number of cryptocurrency investors rose 25% in the past year, resulting in an 800% increase to overall trade volume.

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Total crypto market capitalization posts new all-time high above $1.9T

Total crypto market cap briefly surpassed that of Saudi Aramco.

Amid another bullish trend on cryptocurrency markets, total crypto market capitalization has broken a new historical record just unde $2 trillion.

The market cap of all cryptocurrencies surpassed $1.9 trillion on March 31, according to data from major crypto monitoring resources like CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. The total market cap reached as high as $1.99 trillion earlier on the day, hitting a new all-time record.

Total market capitalization since July 2017. Source: CoinMarketCap

Following a subsequent correction, the total crypto market cap has slipped slightly, dropping to $1.89 trillion at the time of writing. 

In hitting its new historical high, the total crypto market capitalization has overtaken the market cap of oil and gas giant Saudi Aramco, the world’s second most valuable company by market cap after Apple. According to data from TradingView, Saudi Aramco’s market cap amounts to about 7 trillion Saudi riyals, or $1.86 trillion at the time of writing.

After surpassing the market cap of Google stock at above $1.4 trillion in February, the total crypto market cap has continued flipping the world’s largest companies including Amazon and Microsoft. At publishing time, Amazon and Microsoft’s respective market capitalizations are $1.5 trillion and $1.7 trillion.

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South Korea will use blockchain to prevent counterfeit vaccine passports

Blockchain technology is being used to cement confidence in the integrity of new health surveillance measures such as COVID-19 vaccine passports.

South Korea, which has begun its COVID-19 vaccine rollout for residents over 75 years of age, has revealed plans to use blockchain technology to certify forthcoming vaccine passports for immunized citizens. 

According to Reuters, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun told a government meeting that a new mobile app will be used to manage digital proofs of vaccination, and is expected to launch later in April. Blockchain technology will be used to ensure that citizens are not able to forge evidence of having ostensibly received a jab. 

“The introduction of a vaccine passport or ‘Green Pass’ will only allow those who have been vaccinated to experience the recovery to their daily lives,” Chung said.

The vaccine passports are also targeted at travelers from overseas, who will be supported by the app and be permitted to enter the country subject to having certifiable proof of having been vaccinated. 

Many countries and international blocs, among them China, Israel and the European Union have either already embraced or indicated their readiness to implement vaccine passports domestically and/or to facilitate cross-border travel amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, are still internally politically divided as to the potential benefits and drawbacks of such a certificatory regime.

Whatever its eventual approach toward vaccine passports will be, the U.K. has, like South Korea, recognized the usefulness of blockchain technology for managing the complex logistical challenges of the vaccination procedure itself. In addition, the Brazilian government has indicated its intent to use the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework for keeping tabs on its own vaccinated citizens.

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