BREAKDOWN: Most Important Crypto Regulation Yet? Banks Can Treat Public Blockchains Like SWIFT and ACH
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2021
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A new interpretive letter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency paves the way for stablecoins and public blockchains to be fully integrated in the financial infrastructure.
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.
Yesterday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released Interpretive Letter 1174. The letter allows banks to participate as nodes in “independent node verification networks” (which you might better know as blockchain networks) as well as use stablecoins for payments settlement.
In this episode of The Breakdown, NLW looks at:
- Crypto Twitter’s response to the news
- A review of key passages from the letter
- The response of critics
- The implications for CBDCs and the geopolitical battle between the U.S. dollar and China’s emerging digital currency
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | For me, though, the final and most interesting point has to do with the larger question of |
| 0:06.4 | CBDCs and geopolitics. |
| 0:09.7 | Celia Wan, who was previously at the block and is now investing with Huobi wrote, given that |
| 0:14.3 | the U.S. is already late in the CBDC race, legitimizing dollar-backed stable coins as a cross-border payment vehicle is an ingenious |
| 0:23.3 | shortcut to strengthen dollar dominance against China's DeSep threat. Welcome back to The Breakdown |
| 0:31.0 | with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:40.1 | The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:46.8 | What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, January 5th, and today we are talking about yesterday's late breaking news. A new missive from the office |
| 0:56.4 | of the comptroller of the currency says that banks have to treat open permissionless blockchains |
| 1:02.8 | like they treat the current SWIFT system. This has massive implications, so let's dive in. |
| 1:09.6 | One quick note, you'll notice again that there's no brief |
| 1:12.1 | today. I promise that feature is coming back. It's just that both yesterday and today have had |
| 1:16.4 | such important topics that are so big, I wanted to dive right in. But the brief for those of you |
| 1:21.8 | who rely on that for some more traditional markets news will be coming back. Anyways, yesterday, we discussed interpretations of Bitcoin's massive move up over 30,000, |
| 1:32.4 | followed by its dip back down under 30,000, followed by its move back up to between |
| 1:36.6 | $31,000 and $32,000, where it's been for the past, I don't know, 18 to 24 hours. |
| 1:42.1 | One of the interpretations we mentioned had to do with the price being contrasted |
| 1:48.0 | to uncertain regulatory futures. That contrast, which came from the New York Times, was of course |
| 1:53.8 | discussing the proposed new rules on self-hosted wallets and the FinCent implications, so let's |
| 1:59.5 | start on this regulatory-focused episode with a |
| 2:02.4 | quick review of that. Yesterday was originally the end of the comment period on this midnight |
| 2:08.7 | legislation from Stephen Mnuchin, but they agreed to extend it to January 7th, which frankly was |
... |
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