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BBVA and USAA are among a group of participants in a $75 million investment in the Bitcoin wallet provider Coinbase, an unusual move given the cool posture most financial institutions have taken toward virtual currency.
January 20 -
Benjamin Lawsky, New York's top regulator, sharply criticized banks on Thursday for their failure to speed up the payment system, threatening that the government may step in if they continue to lag behind.
December 18 -
Rigid state licensing laws have compelled some payments startups to partner with licensed money transmitters in order to get their programs off the ground. That's a good thing.
December 17 -
One big question in the debate over regulating cryptocurrencies is whether to apply existing rules to these new technologies or craft new ones. A state regulators' trade group recognizes that there may be no one right answer.
December 16 -
Earthport, a cross-border payments service provider, has partnered with the digital currency network provider Ripple Labs to allow enterprise businesses, including banks, to more efficiently transmit money worldwide.
December 4
The Federal Reserve appears to have looked at Bitcoin as a potential set of rails for real-time payments in the banking system but shelved the concept for now.
The agency's
One such transfer vehicle, which goes unnamed in the paper, "was not considered a sufficiently mature technology at this time, but was identified for further exploration and monitoring given significant interest in the marketplace," the Fed said. Of the
However, the white paper acknowledges similarities between the Cryptocurrency That Dare Not Speak Its Name and one of the design options that the Fed deemed worthy of closer consideration.
Like Bitcoin, this option would take advantage of the
Unlike Bitcoin, however, the parties in the Fed's Option 2 would be financial institutions, not individual users (and the Fed notably uses the term "point-to-point" instead of "peer-to-peer"). And very much unlike Bitcoin, which relies on a distributed public ledger known as the blockchain, Option 2 calls for a central ledger and a central authority to set the rules.
During a conference call with reporters Monday, Fed staffers were asked why the paper made no mention of Bitcoin. They responded by saying that they plan to monitor developments with digital currency, and that later, as those technologies mature, regulators will possibly have a different strategy.
It's understandable why the Fed might be reticent to wholeheartedly embrace Bitcoin's distributed model, and not only because of the currency's association with black markets. As Vigna and Casey write,
Without a CEO in charge of the currency or anyone to subpoena, how do you control the bitcoin economy? The law is designed to deal with centralized institutions in which identifiable managers are deemed responsible for an organization's conduct.
More on the Fed's white paper
Marc Hochstein is the editor in chief of American Banker. The views expressed are his own. He owns some bitcoins, but he owns a lot more U.S. dollars.