Igor Mikhalev is an expert principal at BCG helping clients develop business models with blockchain technologies and digital currencies. Kaj Burchardi is a Managing Director with BCG and leads the blockchain practice of BCG/Platinion globally. Digital currencies hold a long-term promise to change the way nations, corporations, and people transact value. Some of them – combining both cryptocurrency benefits (disintermediation, high speed, and low cost of transactions) as well as qualities of traditional currencies (e.g. price stability and being able to act as legal tender) – challenge traditional financial systems at the core. While first-generation digital currencies deployed by consortia of industry players may only deliver incremental changes such as the reduction in money movement pric...

JK Rowling asked Twitter to explain bitcoin to her, and was bombarded by replies – including from Elon Musk. Rowling ultimately gave up engaging with the topic, a decision Musk supported. In the process, he took a swipe at conventional central banks, which he said had undermined their credibility and made even bitcoin “look solid by comparison.” Banks like the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank have pumped trillions of dollars into the global economy via quantitative easing programs. Many of these have been expanded in an attempt to mitigate the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories. Elon Musk intervened in a Twitter thread to attempt to explain bitcoin to J.K. Rowling, and ended up attacking cen...

Top Chinese political advisers have proposed a regional digital currency that would be backed by four major Asian currencies including the Japanese yen, Korean won, Hong Kong dollar and the yuan.  The proposal unveiled Thursday describes the currency as a “stablecoin,” a term for cryptocurrencies designed to hold their value and backed by a reserve currency, although it does not explicitly mention crypto or blockchains. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) would lead the proposed effort. The basket of underlying collateral would follow the special drawing rights (SDR) model of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where each country’s currency is assigned a different weight based on its economy. As such, the proposal resembles the original vision for libra, before that Facebook-spawned proj...

The token economy just gained an organized structure for collaborating with world leaders.  The World Economic Forum revealed its Presidio Principles on Friday, a “blockchain bill of rights,” according to the nonprofit focused on fostering diplomacy and international business partnerships. The document includes signatories from the Government of Colombia, Deloitte Consulting LLP, ConsenSys, Electric Coin Company, CoinShares and the United Nations’ World Food Program, just to name a few.  “We supported the creation of the Presidio Principles – as well as guidelines and design principles for public institutions – because we wanted to ensure that progress can continue rapidly and responsibly, ensuring that basic characteristics like security and data privacy are secured for our citizens,” Vic...

caption Representations of virtual currency Bitcoin and U.S. dollar banknotes are seen in this picture illustration source Reuters An investor in cryptocurrency hedge funds saw nearly 99% of a $250,000 investment wiped out after his chosen fund collapsed during the market meltdown. “I don’t really know what happened,” Vlad Matveev told the Financial Times. Matveev detailed Cryptolab Capital’s explanation in a Medium blog post: the fund took a leveraged position in March, and a lack of liquidity and rejection of sell orders stopped it from pulling out when crypto prices tanked. Crypto hedge funds lost an average of 26% in March, while traditional hedge funds lost about 8%, the Financial Times said, citing HFR data. Visit Busines...

China-based bitcoin miner manufacturer Canaan has reported a net loss of $5.6 million for Q1 2020, even though it had cut down the prices for its hardware by more than half in an effort to sell more machines. In an earnings report released on Friday, the firm said it made $9.4 million in revenue for the first three months this year with a growth of 44.6% compared to the same period last year. But it also incurred $9.3 million and $5.9 million expenses in cost of goods sold and R&D, respectively. For that revenue, Canaan sold 0.9 million terahashes per second (TH/s) of Bitcoin computing power, which accounts for less than 1% of the network’s current total. That means Canaan had cut down the prices for its mining hardware sold in the first three months by more than 50% to just $10 per ...