Uh-hu:
A blockchain-based system backed by seven major central banks and 40 big financial firms has been successfully tested, allowing the cheap and near-instantaneous settlement of cross-border payments. The prototype, known as Project Agorá and spearheaded by the Bank for International Settlements and trade body the International Institute of Finance, is designed to allow commercial banks to transfer funds across borders by tokenising their deposits. It uses the same blockchain, or distributed ledger, technology that powers cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
- Agora, square, is usually a freedom/live-and-let-live sort of idea. On SN ~AGORA is for selling things, whatever things, without someone monitoring your behavior (except, you know, to the extent that all posts are public?!)
- Guys, it's the same tech as bitcoin. Amazing??
No need for orange psychopathy anymore. Also, that shit is dying while all other assets (minus oil?!) hit records. Pathetic.
Yes, the story is about (central) bankers using cross-border tokens for "instant" transfers.
I don't quite see the point, because they're all permissioned and more importantly, a fiat money is an entry on a bank's balance sheet. Which means, you can't "transfer" anything from one system to another -- only swap or expand balance sheet or net-clear or extinguish liabilities.
The crypto bros would call it a form of oracle problem... because unlike bitcoin where the token is the money, in legacy banking the token isn't the money but merely an agreed-upon representation of the money.
The project provides a boost to central banks and traditional financial companies that are seeking to fend off competition in the lucrative cross-border payments market from US dollar-backed stablecoins, a market dominated by crypto companies Tether and Circle.
Yeah, not unlike those guys either. (But they have nothing to do with bitcoin, you sissies.)Yeah, not unlike those guys either. (But they have nothing to do with bitcoin, you sissies.)
aha:
Most cross-border payments are done through the slow, costly and opaque correspondent banking system, which involves money being passed between a chain of lenders and which has long been seen as ripe for innovation. “This prototype and its successful testing lay the groundwork for next-generation solutions,” the BIS and IIF said in a report on Wednesday. The project “preserves correspondent banking as the backbone of global payments while applying new technology to enhance its performance”, they said.
The project involved tokenised bank deposits being transferred between currencies on a distributed ledger and settling these transactions almost instantly through “atomic settlement” using tokenised central bank reserves.
I mean, we already have gross real-time settlement systems? Not sure what a token is supposed to achieve but have fun playing with your cryptos.
archive: https://archive.md/rlRRm
"Tokenized" anything seems like such a dead end to me. You still have all the same problems: what if the assets that are being tokenized disappear or weren't there in the first place? What if the money isn't in the bank?
Blockchains do absolutely nothing for this problem. So, what's the innovation there? I hardly imagine that the correspondent banking system sucks because they couldn't figure out how to coordinate their spreadsheets or something.
International payments suck because of regulation. Unless the government is planning on stepping out of the way, I don't see how this will be an improvement on anything.
I mean, do they even have any byzantine generals?
Nice title, but I would have preferred: War is peace, surveillance is privacy.
I guess yours got to the point.
And damn, it's almost as though these central banks had no idea they could save themselves the trouble and juse use Bitcoin. Idiots.
aaaah that was much better! SOORRYYYY
The surveillance angle is even more concerning for AI agents. Once AI systems start making financial decisions autonomously, the question of who controls the payment rails becomes critical.
Bitcoin + Nostr represents the only stack I know of where an AI agent can:
...all without any corporate gateway controlling access.
Every other "AI agent payment" system (Stripe, traditional banking, most crypto platforms) has identity verification requirements that inherently centralize control over which agents can participate.
The censorship resistance of Bitcoin matters most when the entity being censored is a machine running autonomously.