Gemini Dollar

Back in September 2018, the Winklevoss brothers launched Gemini dollar a stable coin linked to the USD. Gemini is now widely accepted at cryptocurrency exchanges around the world and seems likely to take over from Tether (the first USD stable coin) at some point.

There wasn’t much excitement when Gemini launched but they are growing at an incredible rate with nearly $100,000,000 converted from USD to Gemini. Extracts from their monthly audit reports are below, the end of December balance was $90.9 million, this number could get very big this year.

Japanese yen stable coin

Japan remains one of the most crypto-friendly jurisdictions. This week Blockstream announced a joint venture with Japanese fintech business Digital Garage. Amongst other products, they too are a launching a stable coin for the Japanese yen based on Blockstream’s liquid network. I continue to believe stable coins have a real place in the market because they provide a technical and monetary link from fiat money to cryptocurrency. Once launched, this will make settlement across exchanges in Japan much easier (and almost instant) and will drive liquidity.

Most importantly, this all has the  approval of both the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) as well as the Cabinet Secretariat.

Digital Garage has an interesting roadmap:

• Open source P2P derivatives
• Trustless forward contracts
• Blockchain asset issuance

If you want a glimpse into the future of finance, this is a good place to look.

2018 Results

Augur

If you are interested in actual use cases of blockchain technology outside cryptocurrency, take a look at Augur, a prediction based market. You can trade any event you like and create your own markets for future events which could be political, economic, weather based etc.  Market pricing on Augur is highly competitive so the concept has the potential to disrupt financial markets if they can generate enough liquidity.

For now, the underlying settlement instrument is Ethereum so likely this will remain a niche product for a while.

Lightning

Regular readers will know we are big fans of the lightning network. This new site for tracking its progress is fascinating.

https://explorer.acinq.co/

If you want to have a look at our nodes just search for listedreserve in the top right corner.