CBDC Digital Yuan Deployment To Massively Impact Cross-Border Policy Regulators' Decisions

The People's Bank of China (PBOC) has been a global front-runner in its creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) through the digital yuan's inception.

Also known as the e-CNY, the PBOC recently released the pilot version of its e-CNY app in China's Apple and Android app stores. The release of this app to selected users is particularly interesting given the app's current "research and development pilot phase", as indicated in a notice displayed when the app is downloaded. 

Nevertheless, the timing of this app release gives the world excellent insight into China's e-CNY ambitions, particularly with the 2022 Winter Olympics and the Chinese New Year holiday around the corner. 

Want to find out more? Click HERE. 

How to Build Blockchain Financial Services Applications

Are you a start-up founder or an enterprise leader with plans to launch a financial services application? You might be wondering whether, and indeed, how to use blockchain for this.

Industry observers highlight the steady growth of blockchain in the financial services market.

A Markets and Markets report states that the FinTech blockchain market will grow from $0.23 billion in 2017 to $6.2882 billion by 2023. The report projects a CAGR of 75.9% during the 2018-2023 period.

You are no doubt wondering how to build blockchain financial services applications?  Find out how, HERE.

 

Investors Buy Up Metaverse Real Estate in Virtual Land Boom - WSJ

Real-estate transactions in the metaverse are reaching record highs. The WSJ spoke with companies investing in digital real estate to understand the economic model, and why investors are spending millions on virtual property. 

So, is the metaverse real or just some great big scam? 

Below are just a few comments on the WSJ piece.

• People are out their minds, the reason actually land in the real world has had an increase of price over time is due to it being finite and on the other hand you’ve got a digital online space where you can create as much virtual space as imaginable.
• This is just a hype. Similar concepts had happened on virtual world of various games in gaming industry since 90s and is still on going. Sure, some addicts with the money would spend to acquire virtual land, goods, items, services, and etc. However, once the honeymoon period is passed, either the developer or users leave.
• This is basically a new iteration of the Pyramid Scheme...none of these videogame real estate assets would have any value if the scheme doesnt put on a show to recruit new investors to prop up and legitimize the values...
• What stops other “Metaverse” being made. Crypto Marvel Multiverses. Why would people be stuck in the one place if it can be replicated and people move to another. Like how people jumped in early social media. People moved from Friendster to MySpace then to Facebook and so on. The same happened with online gaming. Ultimate online, RuneScape, World of War Craft. People will get bored. It will stop being the cool place to be over time. What is the draw card to lock people in?
• I love how this screams the Investor class has absolutely zero perception of quality, as long as they can sell a tall tale that makes them a new type of money they'll lie in order to sell it.
• This is never going to work. Only for rich people with nothing else to spend their money on. No one is going to go to a plot of land to see an NFT. Concerts will always be better live. And shopping at Rodeo Drive is better than shopping in a virtual Rodeo Drive, lol I still prefer amazon for my online shopping experience. Don't need headset and an avatar to go buy my wife a louis vuitton. Playstation had this yearsssss ago and it sucked. Poeple will get bored of this. This is only temporary. Want to invest in a better risk, buy BTC or ETH.

 YOU be the judge...

Is ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ the Future of Consumer Lending?

Major specialists like Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm, as well as payments giant PayPal, are raking in big bucks financing consumer purchases. They are playing a different game than many banks and credit unions. But amid this tectonic shift there may be opportunity for traditional institutions — in part by picking up the pieces.

That buy now, pay later purchasing is booming is indisputable. It’s a story that’s been building up over the course of the last several years. Predictions that it would surge to new heights during the 2021 holiday shopping season were supported when PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, appearing on CNBC, crowed that on Black Friday, “our volume on buy now, pay later was up almost 400% year over year.”

Schulman added that his company’s “Pay in Four” installment plans proved to be “one of the stars, actually, of the holiday season for us.”

Want to find out more? Click HERE.

 

Who will secure the Metaverse - and how will they do it?

With the metaverse being talked up everywhere — even though the concept still seems to be a bit vague — concerns about safety have bubbled up, and you wouldn’t be along in wondering what cybersecurity challenges may come with it.

The metaverse, a concept of the next incarnation of the Internet, an immersive virtual 3D world connecting all sorts of digital environments, has been gaining a strong foothold in the media and has quickly become one of the hot topics in the digital landscape. You can even consider it as a new decentralized marketing ecosystem, characterized as social, live, and persistent, as it will contain a lot of user-generated content. It will also be easy to join and contribute to for hardware-agnostic users.

Just like in any other digital landscape where authentication plays a key role, cybersecurity will play a significant role in keeping the parties safe. No matter how sophisticated the technology and techniques of circumventing security measures will be, businesses will need to stay one step ahead of cyber criminals. So, the armaments race in cybersecurity that we’ve known for years will get even more intense.

And what will actually happen to the cheaters? Will they be sent to a sub-universe where they’re free to cheat where cheating is accepted as part of the rules? How will users in the metaverse be monitored to ensure any removal of possible illegal operations, morally corrupt conduct, and hate speech? By private companies themselves or by some governmental cyber-police?

There are a lot of open questions to be answered and certainly an interesting challenge for the metaverse community as well as the cybersecurity providers.

Find out more HERE. 

 

Triple Extortion Ransomware - What it is and how to prevent It

The global surge in ransomware attacks increased by 102% in 2021 compared to the beginning of 2020, and shows no sign of slowing down

The number of organizations impacted by ransomware globally has more than doubled in the first half of 2021 compared with 2020.

The healthcare and utilities sectors are the most targeted sectors while organizations in Asia Pacific are targeted more than any other region.

Since April, researchers at Check Point Research (CPR) have seen an average of over 1,000 organizations being impacted by ransomware every week.

Prominent attacks that have taken place at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 point at a new attack chain – essentially an expansion to the double extortion ransomware technique, integrating an additional, unique threat to the process – that CPR calls the Triple Extortion. 

What is Triple Extortion? You can find out HERE.

Santander finds itself in a Citi moment with $175 million error

As Santander looks to claw back roughly $175 million it mistakenly paid to British customers on Christmas Day, it can look to Citi, on a basic level, for what to expect, what to avoid and what to ask itself.

Citi’s manual transfer of $900 million in August 2020 to creditors of the cosmetics firm Revlon is likely the highest-profile recent case of a bank making an errant, nine-figure payout from its own reserves.

For Santander, the $175 million represents duplicate payments. About 75,000 people and companies received one-off or scheduled payments from 2,000 businesses — in many cases, their employers or suppliers — that have accounts with the bank. Then, they received a second identical payment from Santander.

Find out more HERE.