BRICS and the US Dollar
by Zain Jaffer Recently in August 2023 representatives from Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, (BRICS) and other interested countries met in South Africa to strengthen the BRICS alliance. It was announced in the meeting that six new countries would officially join the BRICS alliance in January 2024. These six new countries include Saudi Arabia, […]
NY Federal Court decides that Ripple XRP is not a security
Companies and individuals who have been considering the use of cryptotokens for funding, marketing, or even customer rewards programs have been following the SEC vs. Ripple XRP case for some time. Finally last mid-July 2023, Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York Federal Court released her decision on the case. Basically the […]
Shiny Boomer rocks?
Ask most kids these days if they want to receive gold as a gift, you may get some to say yes. But some may say to just give them some Bitcoin or crypto or some type of digital item like a game, or something they can use. Somehow the allure of this precious metal isn’t […]
Should you buy gold and silver now?
During times of crisis, gold and silver often regain their popularity as a safe haven for investors. Both have been considered precious metals since ancient times. At the moment, gold’s price has increased and is hovering for extended periods above or just below the $2,000 per ounce price point, which was previously a ceiling for […]
A $32T bar tab
Imagine you know someone who keeps ordering drinks from a bar, and issuing IOUs for each drink. The bar and its bartender have an understanding to accept those IOUs. So several times a week, your friend keeps ordering drinks. Normally the bar wouldn’t complain if your friend settled his tab perhaps once a month, but […]
AI and BPO reshoring
Numerous social media posts, news articles and reports, are showcasing Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. AI chat conversations, quick summaries, even synthetic speaking voices, images and video. This of course generated a lot of discussions online about how AI would replace humans in many job functions such as call contact centers and the like. Screenwriters in […]
Are Ordinal NFTs destroying Bitcoin?
Recently the Bitcoin world has been divided by something called Ordinal NFTs. When the Bitcoin network implemented the Taproot upgrade, a developer found a way to inscribe NFTs on one Satoshi, which is a subunit of Bitcoin. For the uninitiated, one hundred million Satoshis equals one Bitcoin. The NFTs are in a format called Ordinals. […]
Controlling crypto through USD stablecoins
All is not well in the world of crypto stablecoins. In February 2023, the New York Department of Financial Services regulator told stablecoin issuer Paxos to stop minting more of the BUSD stablecoin for Binance. [1] Last year, the hugely popular UST stablecoin from Terraform Labs and its founders Daniel Shin and Do Kwon depegged […]
Making Twitter a payment service is brilliant
In early April 2023, Elon Musk replaced Twitter’s logo with the Doge coin crypto symbol. It seems that dogs can now fly and birds can now bark. There were many who criticized him for spending $40bn to acquire Twitter, which was not really profitable, had too many bots, and was bloated in terms of employee […]