Weekly Crypto Policy Roundup January 7, 2022

Every week we bring you the latest cryptocurrency policy developments from around the world.

LONDON CALLING! Old Lady chews the fat on CBDCs

On 6 January 2022, the Bank of England (BOE) published the minutes of its CBDC Technology Forum’s meeting of 30 November 2021. The BOE discussed the main models of CBDC rollout, including platform, pooled account, intermediated token, and bearer instrument models.

The minutes reflect the views of the presenters to the meeting and note that the platform model potentially places increased technical requirements on a core ledger as compared to the pooled account-model but some members challenged this view.

To facilitate more detailed technical discussions the meeting concluded that a standard set of architecturally-significant use cases and customer personas should be developed so that the Forum could evaluate different CBDC models.

You can have a look at the slides in more detail here.

Ripple Release White Paper on the Future of CBDCs

In the same week, Ripple, a member of the Digital Pound Foundation released a white paper discussing the future of CBDCs. The paper discusses the framework for building CBDCs, and identifies “three keys to overcoming every CBDC challenge”:

• Interoperability
• Public and Private Partnerships
• Neutral Bridge Currencies

Download and read the entire white paper from Ripple’s website.

Polymarket Fined $1.4 Million

Crypto betting platform, Polymarket, has been fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

The CFTC’s press release stated that the enforcement action was issued due to Polymarket “offering off-exchange event-based binary options contracts and failure to obtain designation as a designated contract market (DCM) or registration as a swap execution facility (SEF)”.

Essentially, Polymarket was fined for offering options contracts as an unlicensed entity. Users could place bets on the outcome of certain events, by buying or selling binary options contracts. Polymarket allowed users to bet on things such as whether Trump would win the 2020 election, or whether Ethereum would reach a particular price by a given date.

Iran Puts a Stop to Crypto Mining

Iran has temporarily put a halt to all authorized cryptocurrency mining. All mining operations must now cease until the beginning of March 2022 in an attempt to reduce the burden on the power grid and avoid further power outages. The Iranians also banned crypto during summer 2021 for the same reason.

ESMA Seeks Feedback on DLT

On January 4th, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s securities markets regulator, published a request for input from stakeholders regarding the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) for trading and settlement. As well as this, ESMA will examine whether there is a need to amend the regulatory technical standards (RTS) on regulatory reporting and transparency requirements.

Stakeholders were given until 4 March 2022 to provide feedback.

EU Legislators Agree Distributed Ledger Technology Package 

On 21 December 2021, the Council of the EU and the EU Parliament agreed on the final text of a law on the pilot regime for market infrastructures based on DLT.

The law sets the conditions for obtaining permission to operate a DLT market infrastructure in the EU. 

The law will eventually be formally adopted by the EU Council and the EU Parliament. It will enter force 20 days after it is published in the Official Journal of the EU, and will apply nine months after that date. 

Boston Fed Hiring CBDC Manager

According to a job posting the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is hiring a director-level position to work on CBDCs as part of its partnership with MIT to work closely with engineering, operations, policy, and design to build “a hypothetical general-purpose digital currency”.

Forbes Reports that Congress saw 35 Crypto Bills in 2021

The bills include what has now become the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act (H.R. 3684) (and its broad language on crypto tax reporting), and a bill to repeal the information and reporting requirements of that Act (S. 3206).

See the full article here.