Daily Digest 11/18

Insight on the biggest stories of the day.

Many countries are exploring how they can or if it is worth it for them to start issuing a central bank digital currency after a lot of the world shifted to digital during the pandemic.
Russias is one of the first countries that is going to spear head the movement as well as China as they are both looking to launch pilot programs for their digital currencies. The Russian central bank is taking it a step further by planning on taking a commission for digital Ruble transactions.
The Bank of Russias director of financial technologies, Kirill Pronin, has stated that the commission’s charged on the digital CBDC transactions will not be higher than those implemented within Russia’s Faster Payment System (FPS).
“We maintain an extremely negative stance on cryptocurrencies as private currencies that claim to be money. But as people need alternatives, we should work on this with the help of our projects. We should develop the digital ruble as I have already said.”

FTX continues to be at the forefront of innovation in the crypto space and this time he has partnered with Maple Finance to launch on-chain syndicated loans.
A syndicated loan is a loan that is usually provided by a group of lenders and coordinated through a bank. This is generally tough for crypto as it is decentralized and there is no middleman or bank in this scenario.
In this case Alameda will be the only borrower in the pool and they will be leveraging their own portfolio to get better pricing as more lenders throw in.
Alameda has chosen Maple as their partner for their key advantage of making it so their borrowers do not have to provide more than 100% of the collateral to borrow an asset where as Maker DAO charges $1.50 for every $1 bought of ETH.

As Metaverses continue to make their way into the mainstream. We have been seeing many things pop up in metaverses like malls, casinos, and nightclubs.
Barbados now says that they planning to establish the first so-called “metaverse embassy” after signing an agreement with Decentraland to “outline the baseline development elements for its metaverse embassy.”
Gabriel Abed, who is the current ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, is taking the lead on the project and said one of the features that would be in the works is an “e-visa” for travel between metaverses. This will be important as they also are in talks with other companies to try and put their embassy in as many meta verses as possible.

The total supply on exchange for BTC is continuing its sharp decline as users continue to move their crypto into safe cold storage solutions. Using cold storage means that your crypto is held securely offline on a Trezor or Ledger device.
We can see from this that BTC is becoming more and more scarce by the day and it is also becoming more popular by the day. If we continue on this pace of supply shock we may also see a sharp increase in price as the demand continues to rise in the near future.

Sotheby’s Holds First Auction in Ethereum, Banksy Sells For 1,696 ETH