tl;dr
BIS is going to have to make up even more ridiculous reasons to adopt CBDCs, a tool of oppression, coercion, and control. The UK regulator has the wrong priorities.
Market Snap
Market Wrap
There is not much to report. Spot BTC ETF flows have been largely negative all week, so price action is soft.
Curious Cryptos’ meme corner
h/t The Milk Road with some changes.
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and stablecoins
Quick recap – BIS is known as the “central bankers’ central bank”. Based in Basel, Switzerland, it is a taxpayer-funded institution that refuses to publish a detailed annual expenditure budget, simply because it doesn’t think it should, and no one questions that assertion. I wonder what HMRC would say if I decided not to divulge my income?
Its employees pay no tax, with (allegedly) eye-watering personal expense accounts. It exists merely to perpetuate itself whilst enriching those unfortunate souls in its employ. Unfortunate souls they are, for they have no role, no duty, no responsibility to anyone of import. There is no glamour in the trappings of life – the fine meals, even finer wines, and all those trips on private jets – if those trappings are derived from others’ endeavours, and not your own.
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On the 28th of June, BIS published its annual crypto-bashing report including the frankly bizarre and deluded claim “… that current stablecoin designs resemble exchange-traded fund (ETF) shares rather than a means of payment” (source: P.90 of the BIS Annual Economic Report 2026). Regular readers are familiar with the BIS’ frequent barrel-bottom-scraping that the BIS presents as serious analysis, but that one really does take the biscuit.
The criticism that USDC – pegged to the USD but trading at $0.9998 at the time of writing – fails the test of money for that reason alone, thus leading to the inevitable BIS conclusion that therefore we should all adopt CBDCs instead, convinces absolutely no-one.
Having said that, two initiatives aim to provide a guaranteed 1:1 exchange rate between stablecoins and the pegged fiat currency.
The Better Money Company aims to be a clearinghouse for any stablecoin on any network. Ubyx guarantees to exchange any approved USD stablecoin for physical dollars at a 1:1 ratio.
BIS itself says that “The singleness of money is not a statement about the credit risk embedded in bank deposits but a statement about the payment”.
If successful, these two initiatives ensure that by the time of the next BIS report the barrel-bottom-scraping required to come to its foregone conclusion of wanting a world of CBDCs will have to be even more desperate than this year’s convolutions.
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Incidentally, The Better Money Company has published a handy guide explaining why TradFi’s claimed reasons for opposing the CLARITY Act (a fear of losing deposits) are a badly disguised attempt to shore up their regulatory moat at the expense of the rest of us.
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The four-year cycle
Just sayin’ is all.
Note the log scale.
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Does anyone else think this is nonsense?
Yesterday I opened an account with Interactive Brokers, with the sole purpose of investing in a little-known rare-earth miner that trades on the even less well-known OTC exchange OTCQB in Canada, a miner that might well prove central to Elon Musk’s plans. IB is the only online broker I can find that has access to OTCQB.
As part of the signing up process, I was told this:
Let’s tick them off, shall we?
“Health conditions” – six years ago, I was given a 50% chance of living for five years after a diagnosis of very aggressive bladder cancer. I am still here. I am not going anywhere, but I guess the FCA considers me vulnerable. As does Thames Water, incidentally, granting me a medical exemption from the hosepipe restriction.
“Major life events” – seriously, who doesn’t have a string of major life events behind them, not least birth itself? As for relationship breakdowns, where do you want me to start?
“Capability” – I am quietly confident of passing this test.
“Resilience” – this one too, though it seems it is a trait that is no longer taught, nor sought amongst huge swathes of the population.
My point is a simple one.
If financial regulation now delves deep into our personal lives, where does it end?
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And it does not end there.
Last week I tried to transfer £7.55 to a friend of mine using my banking app.
The app refused to make the transfer unless I justified the reason for sending the money. I hope you already know my reaction to that request.