Weekly Flip Thru: Digital Dollar Gets a Trial Run While Crypto World Sorts Out FTX Aftermath
Mahalo, fellow crypto fanatics. It’s kind of a frenetic time in the crypto industry these days. But with all the news comes genuine excitement over what comes next, because despite some negative headlines surrounding certain centralized crypto exchanges (more on that below), good people are still plugging away at building good products in crypto.
Read on for the biggest crypto news stories for the week of November 21, 2022.
New York Federal Reserve and Other Banks Test Out ‘Digital Dollar’ (CoinDesk)
A group of banks will team up with the New York Federal Reserve Bank to test a digital token representing digital dollars in a 12-week pilot program. The participating banks include BNY Mellon, Citigroup, HSBC, Wells Fargo, and Mastercard. Call it the “dream team” of legacy financial institutions? The pilot members will partake in an experimental (and entirely simulated) trial that uses a digital token to settle balances between the financial institutions (again, no actual customer funds are at stake during the simulated test) and a central bank. The pilot program differs from the concept of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), which would be available to the public in addition to banks.
Hardware Crypto Wallets See Surge of Sales & Interest Following FTX Fallout (CoinTelegraph)
Crypto investors are surging to hardware wallet manufacturer websites and other retailers that sell offline, or “cold,” wallet solutions. Hardware wallets require a crypto investor to safeguard their own private keys in addition to the public keys that are needed to authorize crypto transactions. A spokesperson for hardware wallet maker Trezor said that the spike in sales and website traffic can certainly be attributed to the FTX fiasco. Rival hardware wallet maker Ledger has also reported an uptick in interest from crypto investors as more elect to go the self-custody route.
California AG Publishes Advisory Page to Warn About Crypto Scams (CoinTelegraph)
With a flood of crypto news in recent days, the California Attorney General’s office has shown some deft timing with the publication of a page that contains guidance for first-time crypto investors. California is home to nearly 40 million people and is ranked among the world’s top 5 economies, so there is a lot of potential exposure for novice investors to get hoodwinked by bad actors. The page is upfront about cryptocurrency’s attendant risks, which are just as real as other investment vehicles even though coins and tokens are virtual. That’s why CoinFlip is always trying to inform our customers about the most common types of crypto scams and give them the tools they need to avoid falling victim.
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