The European Central Bank (ECB) Eurosystem digital euro project’s two-year investigative phase has reached its halfway point. The ECB published a progress report Sept. 29 that looked at design and policy issues that are under consideration or have been decided. The report said commerce in physical stores and online is the biggest use case for a euro central bank digital currency (CBDC). Currently, most digital payment solutions are limited in reach and not of European origin. Thus, a digital euro could harmonize payment solutions and strengthen European strategic autonomy, in line with policy goals. The report said: “A digital euro …

In a recent interview, BitMEX chief executive Alexander Höptner shared his thoughts about institutional investors who, in his view, still have an appetite for crypto and Ethereum. Speaking at the Token2049 conference in Singapore on Sept. 28, the crypto executive told Cointelegraph that there has not been a “single slowdown of institutional push into crypto” during this bear market. He added that institutions and finance industry players typically use bear markets for innovation. There is a lot more pressure to deliver in a bull market, but bear markets offer the luxury of more time. Höptner also commented that adoption for …

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) published a paper outlining the state of research on its proposed retail central bank digital currency (rCBDC) and plans for its further development. This is the third paper the HKMA has published on the e-HKD, as the proposed CBDC is called. The proposed rCBDC would have a two-tier structure consisting of a wholesale interbank system and the retail user wallet system. No wholesale Hong Kong CBDC has been introduced yet, but research on it began in 2017, four years before rCBDC planning started. The rCBDC would be disintermediated. The paper notes: “While it appears …

Governments across the globe see central bank digital currencies (CBDC) as a means to improve the existing fiat ecosystem. Cryptocurrency’s technical prowess supported by the central bank’s underlying trust is key to enabling a rich monetary ecosystem, suggests an International Monetary Fund (IMF) publication. “Digital technologies promise a bright future for the monetary system,” reads the publication attributed to IMF deputy managing director Agustín Carstens and BIS executives Jon Frost and Hyun Song Shin. A BIS study from June revealed that cryptocurrencies outdo fiat ecosystems when it comes to achieving the high-level goals of a future monetary system. Some of …

Three-quarters of United States retailers plan to accept crypto or stablecoin payments within the next two years, according to a new survey published by Deloitte. It also found that more than half of large retailers with revenues over $500 million are currently spending $1 million or more building the required infrastructure to make it happen. The information was revealed in Deloitte’s “Merchants Getting Ready For Crypto” report released in collaboration with PayPal on Wednesday. A large majority, around 85%, of the surveyed merchants said they anticipate that cryptocurrency payments will be ubiquitous in their respective industries in five years. The …

Executives at two of Australia’s “big four” banks have ruled out allowing retail customers to trade cryptocurrency on their platforms, with one reasoning that customers don’t understand “basic financial well-being.” Speaking at the Australian Financial Review Banking Summit on Tuesday Maile Carnegie, executive for retail banking at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), said that from speaking to retail customers, she believed “the vast majority of them don’t understand really basic financial well-being concepts.” “Are we really going to make it easier and less friction and implicitly endorse speculating on crypto when they don’t understand basic financial well-being? The …

Even though the cryptocurrency market seems to be going through a bit of a lull at the moment, there’s no denying the fact that the industry has grown from strength to strength over the last few years, especially from an adoption perspective. To this point, a recent study revealed that the number of adults in the United States using digital assets for everyday purchases will increase by 70% by the end of the year when compared to 2021, with the metric rising from 1.08 million to 3.6 million users. The study’s chief author suggests that as the crypto market’s volatility …

Popular retail trading platform Robinhood has fired 9% of its workforce amid a firesale of its stock that has seen HOOD plunge to all-time lows. In the past 30 days alone, HOOD has tanked roughly 38% to sit at $9.99 at the time of writing, marking the lowest price since the initial public offering launch in mid-2021. The decline is part of a longer-term bearish trend that has seen the price of HOOD continually decrease since its all-time high of roughly $70.39 on Aug. 4, 2021, according to TradingView. Robinhood publicly announced its staff readjustment via a Tuesday blog post …

Social media giant Facebook's parent company, Meta, will be opening a retail store in the San Francisco Peninsula offering hardware for the virtual reality space. In a Monday announcement, Meta said it would be opening a retail store in Burlingame, California on May 9 aimed at providing interactive demos for the company’s hardware products, including virtual reality headsets, video communications displays and smart glasses. The store, which will be located on Meta's Burlingame campus — its headquarters is in Menlo Park — will feature a wall-to-wall curved LED screen that displays what users see using Meta headsets. “The Meta Store …

Austrians have “sufficient funds” for more Bitcoin ATMs — that’s the verdict that MediaMarkt, a German electronics retailer, reached following a successful Bitcoin ATM pilot in Austria. MediaMarkt has rolled out Bitcoin (BTC) ATMs in 12 branches across the country, including Seiersberg and Klagenfurt. Confinity and its spinoff ATM company, Kurant, manage over 200 Bitcoin ATMs in Austria, Germany, Spain and Greece. Kurant's Head of Marketing & Sales, Europe, Thomas Sperneder told Cointelegraph: "MediaMarkt stores across the country have been equipped with Bitcoin vending machines. In total, these are now present in twelve markets and enable the simple and secure …

Crypto investors from the United States realized crypto gains nearly six times higher in total than the United Kingdom, the second-highest country in terms of realized gains. According to a report by Chainalysis, crypto investors in the U.S. accrued a record $46.9 billion in realized gains throughout 2021, leading the rest of the world by a wide margin. The U.S. is followed at quite some distance by the U.K. at $8.1 billion and Germany with $5.8 billion. The report comes as global cryptocurrency adoption continues to gain widespread traction. The U.S. witnessed a massive increase in adoption and realized gains, …

One of the main narratives of hope for cryptocurrency investors is that there will be a major shift in public perception that sparks a new wave of capital from retail and institutional traders. Unfortunately for these hopeful bulls, data indicates that the opposite has occurred for nearly a year, a fact evidenced by the declining rate of searches for the term Bitcoin (BTC) on Google. A similar pattern is seen when looking at the search interest for the top smart contract platform Ethereum (ETH), which saw its peak interest occur during the second week of May 2021, and has been …