Category Archives: Fintech Opinions

NCFA’s Fintech Confidential Magazine (Issue 4 October 2021)

It's here!  Checkout the latest issue of Fintech Confidential, NCFA's digital magazine

Welcome to Fintech Confidential, your essential guide to the global fintech and funding landscape. Brought to you by the National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association of Canada (NCFA) and our partners, each issue dives into the latest trends, innovations, and insights in the fintech world. From insider views to regulatory developments, we keep you informed and inspired. Enjoy the read and share the knowledge. Onwards and upwards in the world of fintech!

Checkout FFCON21: BREAKING BARRIERS for more information about the annual conference, on-demand videos and ways to participate


The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org

NCFA Financial Innovation MapNCFA Innovation Opportunity BriefsNCFA Fintech Insights
NCFA Fintech WhispererNCFA Fintech Fridays PodcastNCFA Weekly Newsletter

 

Hot off the press: NCFA’s Fintech Confidential Issue 4, October 2021

About NCFA Canada | Craig Asano | Oct 7, 2021

NCFA Fintech Confidential Issue 4 cover

Welcome Letter

Dear Global Fintech & Funding Communities,

The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association of Canada (NCFA) and partners are excited to present Vol. 1 Issue 4, FINTECH CONFIDENTIAL, a digital pop-up of the 7th annual 2021 Fintech & Financing Conference and Expo (FFCON21) held virtually from May 11-13 and co-hosted by NCFA and Toronto Finance International (TFI).

As global economies strive to contain the latest Covid outbreak and recover fragile sectors, fintech innovators continue to ‘BREAK BARRIERS’, the main theme of this year’s conference, and the second year in partnership with TFI, reflecting the growth and emerging challenges that the Canadian Fintech industry must navigate to achieve mass adoption and scale.

Fintech is not a niche but a permanent technological evolution that is changing the world of finance by high growth fintech companies and incumbent financial institutions.  It’s setting new standards and demanding new regulations.  It’s about delivering better financial products, services, and outcomes for everyone especially consumers and small to midsize enterprises (SMEs).

It’s been another unprecedented year with covid accelerating trends such as bitcoin’s institutionalization, the growing power of retail investors, the 2nd round of Open Banking consultations and the advisory committee’s recommendations to the federal government, payment modernization efforts, adoption of harmonized Crowdfunding regulation, AI roadmap, emergence of digital identity as a ‘right’ and core data infrastructure (ie., vaccine passports), growing support for Purpose (not just shareholder profit), green finance solutions tackling shared global problems such as SDGs and climate change, EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion), and regulatory push back and a firm ‘line in the sand’ for Big Tech.

FFCON21 was a successful event attracting over 100+ thought leaders, 75 partners, 500+ attendees, an NFT charity fundraiser in partnership with CanadaHelps for front line workers, and our second annual 2021 Fintech Draft competition -- a pitching event inspired by sports league drafts and designed to identity emerging high growth fintech ventures.  A hearty congratulations to the winners:  Agryo (Overall) and Copia Wealth Studios (People’s Choice)!

NCFA Fintech Confidential Issue 4 featured article TOC

Thank you to all the partners, speakers, attendees, volunteers, and the entire organizing team for making ‘Breaking Barriers’ an impactful and amazing online experience and for being part of Canada’s fintech and funding community.  We hope you enjoy reading this special edition of Fintech Confidential.

Finally, we continue to encourage the community to be mindful of others, and to do the right thing.  Dream big, be open to partnerships, and execute like your life depends on it -- it’s not too late to participate.  The world is changing because of you but there is a long bridge to cross, and more glass ceilings to break.  Onwards and upwards…

All the best
Craig Asano
Founder and CEO
NCFA Canada

 

Read the 85 page Fintech Confidential Issue 4 Digital Magazine --> Now

Note to readers:   the publishing platform's 'hot spot editor' is currently down (but we wanted to publish before Canada's Thanksgiving Long Weekend.  We'll add in audio and links to the document shortly.  Thanks for your patience!

 


The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org

NCFA Financial Innovation MapNCFA Innovation Opportunity BriefsNCFA Fintech Insights
NCFA Fintech WhispererNCFA Fintech Fridays PodcastNCFA Weekly Newsletter

 

Is the fintech policy agenda overrated? It depends on who’s asking

PayTechs of Canada | Alex Vronces | Oct 7, 2021

NCFA Fintech Confidential fintech policy overrated or underrated

Overrated or underrated?

It’s a question Tyler Cowen, one of my favourite public intellectuals, poses to guests on his podcast. The question turns simple conversation into meta-conversation. It moves you from discussing something to discussing the discussion of something. The question is almost magical, like a spell that makes you disappear only to reappear on a new cognitive plane.

So let’s pop the question: is the fintech policy agenda overrated or underrated? The answer depends on who’s asking.

Currently, the federal government is reviewing Canada’s approach to financial sector policy to put fintechs on a level playing with banks. Open banking is supposed to let fintechs access Canadians’ financial information, giving fintechs the means to offer better products and services. The government is also exploring whether to give fintechs access to the payments infrastructure our economy runs on — a privilege exclusively afforded to financial institutions, such as banks. Let’s call these two initiatives the fintech policy agenda.

See:  Reflections on Canada’s open banking report

If the median voter is asking whether the agenda is overrated or underrated, then it’s grossly underrated.

The median voter likely doesn’t even know what the fintech agenda is. Is open banking about keeping my bank branch open longer? I make payments whenever I tap my card at the point of sale, so what’s the problem? In fact, the median voter likely doesn’t know what a fintech is, let alone what problems the fintech agenda is meant to solve and how it would solve them.

But if a fintech advocate is asking? Then the agenda is overrated.

It’s not that payments modernization and open banking don’t belong on the fintech policy agenda. They do, but they’re not the only things that do.

For example, how future proofed is the fintech policy policy agenda when payments modernization and open banking are at risk of having a short shelf life? Consider DeFi, or decentralized finance, a contender for crypto’s killer app. DeFi refers to the distribution of financial services on the blockchain. As Stephanie Choo, a partner at Portage Ventures, recently wrote, DeFi “has the potential to become for financial services what the Internet has been for media production and distribution.”

See:  How open-source software shapes AI policy

The promise of DeFi comes from innovation in governance. It erodes the power that rent-seeking intermediaries, such as banks and legacy payment networks, have long had, while circumventing the barrier to entry-laden oversight that governments have long had.

The risk of obsolescence DeFi brings to payments modernization is easy to see.

An endangered intermediary, Payments Canada is building a real-time payment system called the real-time rail, while the government consults on giving fintechs access to it. Fintechs support both initiatives — and for good reason — but DeFi could obliterate the need for both if it matures into something more ubiquitous. It’s no wonder someone once told me that Canada is building railroads while the world is building airplanes.

The risk of obsolescence DeFi brings to open banking is also easy to see.

Another intermediary-centric initiative, open banking compels banks to open their data-loaded vaults to financial-app developers. What I said of payments modernization is also true of open banking: fintechs support open banking, and for good reason. But open banking does little good in a world where financial services have been disintermediated and user data is on the blockchain.

See:  WEF: Decentralized Finance: (DeFi) Policy-Maker Toolkit

Jon Stokes, who co-founded Ars Technica, recently described the status quo of data governance as a “decentralized network of siloed (user data) tables connected by access-controlled APIs.” Stokes thinks we could see the de-siloing and aggregation of user data on the blockchain. If open banking promotes competition, then blockchain-based data portability promotes competition on steroids.

If you think such visions are speculative, you’re not alone. No one knows what the future of financial services has in store, just like no one knew what the future of media distribution before the Internet had in store.

DeFi is going to be tricky

It’s too early to tell which way DeFi will go, which is why experimentation is so important. But DeFi experimentation is going to be tricky, as it’s prone to undermining itself.

The government’s response to DeFi has so far been an ambiguous combination of supportive and fearful — the latter state being one from which little good has ever come. For example, although the Ontario Securities Commission is allowing for some experimentation with crypto, the experimentation is limited and controlled. Moreover, the Bank of Canada announced it’s exploring how it could issue its own digital currency to crowd out the privately-issued competition, should it ever mature.

See:  Decentralized Finance—Risks, Regulation, and the Road Ahead

It’s not hard to see the risk that the government extinguishes too many future possibilities, killing DeFi before its potential is even meaningfully tested. This is why DeFi deserves more space on the fintech policy agenda.

Then again, perhaps you’re a DeFi bear and think DeFi deserves no more attention than it’s getting.

If that’s you, then substitute for DeFi for another idea you think is underrated. Maybe your underrated idea is sandboxing under the Bank Act, making it easier for fintechs to become banks, or maybe it’s better coordination and alignment between the provincial regulators on modernizing consumer protection and market conduct regulation. Alternatively, maybe Canada’s competition laws need to be reformed and authorities better equipped to level the playing field between incumbents and challengers.

The point is, no matter what you pick, we get to the same place: the fintech policy agenda is overrated because it’s not inclusive of what’s underrated.

If you’ve gotten this far, rest assured that there’s a way to make the fintech policy agenda appropriately rated — not overrated, not underrated, and just right. In fact, it ought to be obvious by now. Take a cue from Tyler Cowen: gather your smartest friends and play a few rounds of “overrated versus underrated” with them.

Authored by Alexander Vronces, Executive Director of PayTechs of Canada, representing the diverse community of payment technology companies operating in Canada. Using his payments and policy knowledge and network, Alex leads the push for a more competitive and innovative Canadian payments ecosystem.

 


NCFA Fintech Confidential Issue 4_250

This article is featured in NCFA's digital magazine, Fintech Confidential (Issue 4 Oct 2021). Click to read the latest thought leadership, insights and trends about Fintech in Canada:

Checkout NCFA's digital magazine, Fintech Confidential (Issue 4) --> here

 


The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org

NCFA Financial Innovation MapNCFA Innovation Opportunity BriefsNCFA Fintech Insights
NCFA Fintech WhispererNCFA Fintech Fridays PodcastNCFA Weekly Newsletter

 

Digital Identity Should Be A Big Business For Banks

Forbes | David G.W. Birch | Sep 16, 2021

liquid avatar technologies ID verification apps prevent Identity theftI got an e-mail to remind me to pay my credit card bill, so I went to log in to pay it. The browser filled in my username, I entered the missing digits from my PIN and I opened 1Password to get the password and typed it in, but it was rejected.

I thought maybe I typed it wrong, so I typed it again. Nope. So I clicked on “lost password” and got taken to another page where I had to enter all sorts of personal details, including my credit limit. Catch 22. I need the credit limit to reset the password but I don’t know what my credit limit is without the password.

I give up on the web and open the app on the phone. It lets me log in without having to remember a password, so I select pay. My credit card provider likes a heritage approach to payments, so instead of an xPay option it presents me with a web screen from the 1990s and I have to get out my debit card and type in the details.

See:  Top 7 Steps for Preventing Loan Application Fraud

I then get redirected to my bank app and I have to enter my PIN number, OK the transaction, enter my PIN number again (I don’t know why) and then get a message saying that the transaction has been declined.

Oh well. That’s 2021 for you.

What should have happened, of course, is that I go to my credit card provider, enter my username, authenticate the log in from my bank app using my fingerprint. Then I select pay, approve the transaction from my bank app and go about my business.

Change. Yes.

There has been a change in the environment around digital identity over the past year. The coronavirus catastrophe has required many individuals, companies and organisations, who never had to do business online before, to shift to the new normal in double-quick time. This has in turn meant that the ability to create digital identities, to bind those identities to real-world legal entities and to use those digital identities to support online persona with the necessary collection of credentials to enable online transactions has become central to business and government.  There has also been a change of attitude toward the business of identity and the perception of digital identity as a fundamental rather than as a “nice to have”.

See:  Fintech & Cybersecurity: Key Risks and Solutions

Now, however, while we may be no nearer calculating the costs of having a digital identity infrastructure we now have some very accurate figures for the costs of not having a digital identity infrastructure. This is because the escalation of fraud through the pandemic has been staggering.

Why Banks?

Why do I single out the banking industry? Well, in the past two years, 37% of American consumers have been victims of application fraud and slightly more have experienced account takeovers. Since financial institutions are on the front line, surely we should look to them for some co-ordinated action to bring the problem back under control? Where is the “bank identity”? The “financial services passport”? The “money monicker” or whatever we choose to label it?

Many countries already have some form of bank ID. Norway, for example, where the pandemic experience was utterly different from that of the USA or the UK. In Norway, the Ministry of Finance and stakeholders delivered the SME loan guarantee scheme within three weeks and the first loan was granted and on account one hour after the scheme was authorised. The pandemic compensation scheme was similarly developed within three weeks. They were able to do this because they decided to create wholly digital schemes to process applications and deliver automated payments.

Continue to the full article --> here


The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org

NCFA Financial Innovation MapNCFA Innovation Opportunity BriefsNCFA Fintech Insights
NCFA Fintech WhispererNCFA Fintech Fridays PodcastNCFA Weekly Newsletter

 

Canadian Women in VC – 3rd Annual Compensation Survey (Deadline Oct 11)

Canadian Women in VC | Sep 28, 2021

WiVC 3rd Annual Compensation Survey

The 3rd Annual Canadian Venture Capital Compensation Survey is open for participation!

Over the past 2 years, your participation has helped shine a light on wage standards and discrepancies and facilitated confident conversations and raises across venture capital funds in Canada.

Did you know that:

  • Except at the entry-level, men tend to earn more than women in investment roles by 9% and 26% at mid and senior-level roles, respectively.
  • Further education has inconsistent effects on salary, indicating that the industry is open to individuals irrespective of their background.

Your participation this year will inform a 2021 Benchmark Report that will be produced by Canadian Women in VC in mid-November.

The deadline to participate is COB on October 11th.

Access the survey HERE --> https://bit.ly/3igS5NF

See:

Why is venture capital still ignoring women? The case for investing is clear.

Women In Fintech Will Play A Crucial Part In The Covid-19 Recovery Plan

Culture: Why regulators should care about diversity and inclusion


The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org

NCFA Financial Innovation MapNCFA Innovation Opportunity BriefsNCFA Fintech Insights
NCFA Fintech WhispererNCFA Fintech Fridays PodcastNCFA Weekly Newsletter

 

Opinion: Evergrande and Crypto Where is Bitcoin Heading

Trading View | Michael Wang Opinion | Sep 28, 2021

Evergrande crisis explained

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. This is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not responsible for the profits or loss generated from your investments. Trade and invest at your own risk.

About Tether
- Tether offers $USDT, a stablecoin that is convertable for 1 USD.
- Essentially, what it does is not so different from what banks used to do, and continue to do today.
- During the gold standard, when you took $500 to the bank, they'd give you an ounce of gold .
- Tether guarantees that they'll provide 1 USD per 1 USDT
- But, some say that Tether is faced with a bank-run like situation, looking at its reserves.
- According to their March 2021 Reserves update, commercial paper accounts for 65% of Tether's cash reserves.
- For those of you who don't know, commercial paper, or CP, is a way to finance extremely short term loans at a very cheap rate.
- Tether did not disclose whose CPs they were, in order to protect their partner's privacy.

Tether's Commercial Paper
- Back in July this year, Tether’s CTO and general counsel had an interview with CNBC, and made a few important points.
- They said that they have about $30B in AA rated International Commercial Paper, and these were rated AA by S&P and Fitch.
- The point that some people are making is that Tether’s commercial paper might actually be Evergrande’s commercial paper.
- This may seem like a conspiracy theory, but there are certain points that line up.

See:  Bitcoin Tumbles on Evergrande Bond Obligation Struggles

Reason #1
- First, Tether currently has $30B in commercial papers, and that’s an insane amount of money.
- Reuters reported that Shengjing Bank, the bank affiliated with Evergrande, is under investigation for providing illegal loans up to $20B.
- Considering that even a more renowned company like JP Morgan can’t write $20B loans, there is plausible reason to doubt that the capital may have come from Tether.
- So taking into consideration the size of the loan, some say that it’s highly likely that the capital flowed into Chinese real estate companies.

Reason #2
- Secondly, even after Bitcoin peaked in mid April, Tether continued to print more USDT. To be precise, they printed $15B between mid April and early June.
- In case you don’t know what bitcoin has to do with this, there have been claims that Tether has been arbitrarily printing USDT.
- This USDT would be used to manipulate the price of Bitcoin , and the overall cryptocurrency market in general.
- While Tether has been printing money like crazy, and as soon as Evergrande CPs defaulted on June 7, they stopped printing USDT.
- Now this is a chicken or egg question where we don’t know if Evergrande’s liquidity problem caused Tether’s collateral to impair, or whether Tether’s cutoff caused the liquidity issues at Evergrande, but something sure smells fishy.

See:  Tether banned on Canada’s first 2 licensed digital currency exchanges

Conclusion
So many answers still remain unanswered. Where does Tether put its billions? Who issues $30B in AA International Commercial paper, willing to pay anything? Why did Tether stop printing money as soon as Evergrande’s liquidity died? As I've said in the previous post, the best thing we can do as investors is to prepare for all probable situations. In my personal opinion, the Chinese government seems willing to indirectly solve the issue by injecting capital via open market operations, so it's more likely that this situation will be settled at one point, as opposed to leading to the entire global financial market collapsing.

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The Globe and Mail | and | Sep 28, 2021

Beijing is prodding government-owned firms and state-backed property developers such as China Vanke Co Ltd to purchase some of embattled China Evergrande Group’s assets, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Evergrande, saddled with $305-billion in liabilities, is teetering on the brink of collapse. But the central government is unlikely to intervene directly to resolve Evergrande’s crisis in the form of a bailout, according to six people, including four in government and regulatory bodies.

See:  Twitter to allow Bitcoin tipping to their favourite creators

Authorities are hoping, however, that asset purchases will ward off or at least mitigate any social unrest that could occur if Evergrande were to suffer a messy collapse, they said, declining to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

A handful of government-owned enterprises have already done due diligence on assets in the southern Chinese city Guangzhou, said one person.

In one emblematic example, Guangzhou City Construction Investment Group is close to acquiring Evergrande’s Guangzhou FC Soccer stadium and surrounding residential projects, according to the person, who has direct knowledge of the matter.

Set to cost around 12 billion yuan ($1.9-billion), the stadium has been designed to seat more than 100,000, making it the world’s largest venue built for soccer by capacity.

See:  On the Brink Podcast: George Selgin of the Cato Institute on Stablecoins, Bitcoin and Free Banking

Potential buyers of Evergrande’s core assets in Guangzhou have been “arranged” with “both political and commercial considerations” in mind, the person said, adding that authorities don’t want to see just a few companies bidding for the same assets.

Continue to the full article --> here

 


The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org

NCFA Financial Innovation MapNCFA Innovation Opportunity BriefsNCFA Fintech Insights
NCFA Fintech WhispererNCFA Fintech Fridays PodcastNCFA Weekly Newsletter

 

The dream of a low-friction financial system is just the beginning

The Economist | Sep 18, 2021

DeFi and Alice in wonderland

Although the terminology is intimidating (fees are “gas”; the main currency is ether, and title deeds over digital assets are known as NFTs), the basic activities taking place on DeFi are familiar. These include trading on exchanges and issuing loans and taking deposits through self-executing agreements called smart contracts. One yardstick of activity is the value of digital instruments being used as collateral: from almost nothing in early 2018 it has reached $90bn. Another is the value of transactions that Ethereum is verifying. In the second quarter this reached $2.5trn, around the same sum as Visa processes and equivalent to a sixth of the activity on Nasdaq, a stock exchange.

The dream of a low-friction financial system is just the beginning.

DeFi is spreading to more ambitious terrain. MetaMask, a DeFi wallet with more than 10m users, acts as a digital identity. To enter a decentralised “metaverse”, a looking-glass world with shops run by its users, you link your wallet to a cartoonish avatar who roams around. These digital worlds will become the subject of intensifying competition as more spending shifts online. Big tech firms could impose huge taxes on these mini-economies: imagine Apple’s App Store charging fees, or Facebook selling your avatar’s intimate secrets. A better alternative might be decentralised networks that host applications and are run mutually by users. DeFi could provide payments and property rights.

See:  The Intersection of Ecommerce and NFTs: How NFT Technology is Changing DeFi

Crypto-enthusiasts see a Utopia. But there is a long way to go before DeFi is as reliable as, say, JPMorgan Chase or PayPal. Some problems are prosaic. A common criticism is that blockchain platforms do not scale easily and that the computers they harness consume wasteful amounts of electricity. But Ethereum is a self-improvement machine. When it is in high demand the fees it charges for verification can climb, encouraging developers to work on minimising the intensity with which they use it. There will be new versions of Ethereum; other, better blockchains could one day replace it.

Yet DeFi also raises questions about how a virtual economy with its own norms interacts with the real world.

One worry is the lack of an external anchor of value. Cryptocurrencies are no different from the dollar, in that they rely on people having a shared expectation of their utility. However, conventional money is also backed by states with a monopoly on force and central banks that are lenders of last resort. Without these, DeFi will be vulnerable to panics. Contract enforcement outside the virtual world is also a concern. A blockchain contract may say you own a house but only the police can enforce an eviction.

Governance and accountability in DeFi-land are rudimentary.

A sequence of large irrevocable transactions that humans cannot override could be dangerous, especially as coding errors are inevitable.

See:  WEF: Decentralized Finance: (DeFi) Policy-Maker Toolkit

Money-laundering has thrived in the ungoverned grey zone of services lying between Ethereum and the banking system. Despite the claims of decentralisation, some programmers and app owners hold disproportionate sway over the DeFi system. And a malign actor could even gain control over a majority of the computers that run a blockchain.

Continue to the full article --> here


The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org

NCFA Financial Innovation MapNCFA Innovation Opportunity BriefsNCFA Fintech Insights
NCFA Fintech WhispererNCFA Fintech Fridays PodcastNCFA Weekly Newsletter