#301—The rise of digital dollar consortiums
Also, DHS is building verifiable credentials
Welcome to Yaka Stuff, our weekly newsletter that covers news, industry perspectives, and updates from the Hard Yaka ecosystem. Check out our last report here.
This week:
State Street explores stablecoins and deposit tokens
DHS is building verifiable credentials
Stuff happens
1. State Street explores stablecoins and deposit tokens
Financial behemoth State Street wants to get in the digital dollar game. That could mean developing their own stablecoin, or, as Bloomberg reports, potentially joining a consortium. (via Jun Hiraga)
Here’s Bloomberg:
The Boston-based asset manager, which reported higher-than-expected revenue and interest income on Tuesday, is exploring creating its own stablecoin — a cryptocurrency that runs on a blockchain and is pegged to an asset such as the dollar. It’s also considering creating its own deposit token, which would represent customer deposits on a blockchain, according to the person, who asked for anonymity because the work hasn’t been made public. A State Street spokesperson declined to comment.
State Street is also evaluating joining digital-cash consortium efforts and is looking at settlement options through its investment in Fnality, a blockchain payment startup that’s expanding into the US, the person said. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment.
Relevant:
2. DHS is building verifiable credentials
Here’s PhocusWire:
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) has awarded contracts to six startups to develop digital credentials that could be used for cross-border travel and other purposes.
…
And said Anil John, technical director of S&T’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program, “DHS is the authoritative source of some of the most highly valued credentials issued by the U.S. Federal Government for cross-border travel, demonstrating employment eligibility, residency status and citizenship. The capabilities developed under this solicitation will ensure that those credentials can be stored securely and verified properly while preserving the privacy of individuals using openly developed standards that are globally acceptable, highly secure and accessible to all.”
Notably, DHS is choosing to build these credentials around the W3C’s open standards.
Here’s BiometricUpdate:
Together, S&T and USCIS’s Office of Intake and Document Production (OIDP), which designs and secures vendors to produce immigration documents, decided to use two open global standards – the Verifiable Credentials Data Model (VCDM) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs).
“Created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a global standards development organization, with the support of S&T, USCIS, and many other like-minded partners, these standards describe how a secure, privacy respecting digital credentialing process can be implemented,” the article says.