A digital euro within 4 years?

Christine Lagarde believes that the European Central Bank will take the decision to continue its digital currency project.
The project could last up to 4 years.
The President of the ECB indicates nevertheless that there will be no race to deliver first. A decision will be taken in January 2021.

On the same subject, Deutsche Bank’s research team believes that CBDCs will replace cash in the future.
They explain that the Covid-19-related pandemic has accelerated the use of digital payment methods, which could lead to a faster adoption of CBDCs.

Binance begins to comply with regulation.
The exchange is now blocking U.S. users and has asked them to withdraw their funds from the platform within 90 days.
Binance had been taking steps since September 2019 by simply asking its customers if they were American when they opened an account.
Now the tracking is done through the IP address.

Infura, a service that provides access to information from the Ethereum blockchain without having to maintain a full node, went down for six long hours on November 11.
Many applications were using this service to function properly.
This led to and malfunction on some dApps, including price feeds on Ether and ERC20s that were out of date.
This incident brought back to the table a long-standing debate about Infura and centralization issues related to its massive usage.

Pantera Capital and Alemeda Research have taken positions on the Balancer protocol via a direct purchase of tokens from the treasury.
These funds are intended to accelerate the development of v2 of the protocol.
Balancer currently has $343 million in assets under management.
It is positioned as an innovative leader among decentralized marketplaces.

sOIL and iOIL are now available on Synthetix Network.
sOIL is a synthetic asset that mimics the price of oil. iOIL represents a short position on the same product.
This allows to trade synthetic assets on a decentralized protocol.

The Ethereum 2.0 staging has a great chance to start on December 1st.
In this context, the Ethereum Foundation is setting up a funding program for all projects wishing to develop services around staking.
99 400 ETH are already staked on the deposit contract, that is 19% of the 524 288 ETH needed on November 24th to have a Genesis on December 1st.

JP Morgan’s communication about Bitcoin has changed a lot since 2017.
Jamie Dimon, its CEO, still said in 2017 that Bitcoin was a fraud that would explode in mid-air, and that he would fire any bank employee who bought cryptocurrencies.
Today, JP Morgan reports that institutional investors, such as Family Offices, seem to prefer Bitcoin to Gold and see it as a real alternative.
These investors position themselves mainly through derivatives such as ETFs.

Ripple wants to add color to his token.
So, for the first time, the firm has made a $46 million buyout of XRP in Q3 2020.
Ripple still owns more than 50% of the existing XRP, which is sold on a quarterly basis in OTC to institutional investors, or on the market.

The KuCoin marketplace managed to recover 84% of the funds hacked in September.
The exchange suffered a loss of $280 million, mostly in ERC20 tokens.
Johnny Lyu, the PDF, explains that this was possible through the tracking of funds on the blockchain, smart-contract upgrades in collaboration with the projects involved, as well as legal actions.

The second largest bank in the world issues $3 billion worth of government bonds on a blockchain.
China Costruction Bank has partnered with the Fusang foreign exchange site to develop this product.
The bonds will be available from $100, with a yield of 0.75%, and will be exchangeable for dollars or bitcoins.

The Enjin platform, which allows the creation of non-fungible tokens (known as NFT, aka Non-Fungible Tokens) and assets to integrate them into its applications or video games, announced that it will no longer charge users for their creations.
The platform thus becomes totally free for all users.

Recently announced, the v2 of the Aave protocol is available on the Kovan testnet.
This new version of the protocol aims at improving its efficiency, reducing transaction costs and increasing the security of the protocol.
In addition, it will now be possible to repay debt with collateral, even if it is not the same asset.
Many other improvements and functionalities are added in this v2, such as debt and collateral trading, or debt tokenization.
The protocol is still in test phase, and is currently undergoing several security audits.

Exploits (exploiting a flaw in a protocol) of DeFi protocols using flash loans are gaining in popularity.
This week, it is 3 protocols that have suffered such attacks. The Akropolis, Value and Origin dollar protocols have lost respectively 2 million, 6 million and 7 million dollars following these exploits.
These three attacks are based on flash loans, but also on a misuse of oracles by the protocols.

An application offered on the PlayStore as the mobile version of the Uniswap site is actually a scam. This application, although similar to the Uniswap site, aims to steal the users’ seed sentences.
This type of Uniswap mobile application is not considered, and the only way to access Uniswap on mobile is via wallet applications such as Metamask.

Figures of the week

New record for DeFi

The total value of assets locked within DeFi’s protocols breaks new records, exceeding $13.5 billion.

A stat on Bitcoin

In 2010, 10,000 bitcoins sold for $50.

Symbolic threshold crossed for DAI

The number of ICDs in circulation has reached one billion.

Grayscale, all about Bitcoin

The Grayscale investment fund now holds 500,000 bitcoins.