By June , cryptocurrency had begun to be offered by some wealth managers in the US for k s. Cryptocurrency prices are much more volatile than established financial assets such as stocks. The falls were attributed to warnings about inflation. By comparison, in the same week, the Nasdaq tech stock index fell 7. In the longer term, of the 10 leading cryptocurrencies identified by the total value of coins in circulation in January , only four Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano and Ripple XRP were still in that position in early There are also centralized databases, outside of blockchains, that store crypto market data.

Compared to the blockchain, databases perform fast as there is no verification process. Four of the most popular cryptocurrency market databases are CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, BraveNewCoin, and Cryptocompare. According to Alan Feuer of The New York Times , libertarians and anarcho-capitalists were attracted to the philosophical idea behind Bitcoin.

Early Bitcoin supporter Roger Ver said: "At first, almost everyone who got involved did so for philosophical reasons. We saw Bitcoin as a great idea, as a way to separate money from the state.

Nigel Dodd argues in The social life of Bitcoin that the essence of the Bitcoin ideology is to remove money from both social and governmental control. Bitcoin undermines governments and disrupts institutions because Bitcoin is fundamentally humanitarian. David Golumbia says that the ideas influencing Bitcoin advocates emerge from right-wing extremist movements such as the Liberty Lobby and the John Birch Society and their anti-Central Bank rhetoric, or, more recently, Ron Paul and Tea Party -style libertarianism.

Bitcoin's founder, Satoshi Nakamoto has supported the idea that cryptocurrencies go well with libertarianism: "It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly.

According to the European Central Bank , the decentralization of money offered by Bitcoin has its theoretical roots in the Austrian school of economics , especially with Friedrich von Hayek in his book Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined , [] in which Hayek advocates a complete free market in the production, distribution and management of money to end the monopoly of central banks. The rise in the popularity of cryptocurrencies and their adoption by financial institutions has led some governments to assess whether regulation is needed to protect users.

The Financial Action Task Force FATF has defined cryptocurrency-related services as "virtual asset service providers" VASPs and recommended that they be regulated with the same money laundering AML and know your customer KYC requirements as financial institutions.

In May , the Joint Working Group on interVASP Messaging Standards published "IVMS ", a universal common language for communication of required originator and beneficiary information between VASPs. The FATF and financial regulators were informed as the data model was developed.

In June , FATF updated its guidance to include the "Travel Rule" for cryptocurrencies, a measure which mandates that VASPs obtain, hold, and exchange information about the originators and beneficiaries of virtual asset transfers. As of December , the IVMS data model has yet to be finalized and ratified by the three global standard setting bodies that created it.

The European Commission published a digital finance strategy in September This included a draft regulation on Markets in Crypto-Assets MiCA , which aimed to provide a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets in the EU.

On 10 June , the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision proposed that banks that held cryptocurrency assets must set aside capital to cover all potential losses. This is a more extreme standard than banks are usually held to when it comes to other assets. However, this is a proposal and not a regulation. The IMF is seeking a co-ordinated, consistent and comprehensive approach to supervising cryptocurrencies. Tobias Adrian , the IMF's financial counsellor and head of its monetary and capital markets department said in a January interview that "Agreeing global regulations is never quick.

But if we start now, we can achieve the goal of maintaining financial stability while also enjoying the benefits which the underlying technological innovations bring," []. In , 17 states passed laws and resolutions concerning cryptocurrency regulation. Securities and Exchange Commission SEC is considering what steps to take. On 8 July , Senator Elizabeth Warren , part of the Senate Banking Committee , wrote to the chairman of the SEC and demanded that it provide answers on cryptocurrency regulation by 28 July , [] [ needs update ] due to the increase in cryptocurrency exchange use and the danger this poses to consumers.

On 17 February , the Justice department named Eun Young Choi as the first director of a National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team to aid in identification of and dealing with misuse of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets. In September , China banned ICOs to cause abnormal return from cryptocurrency decreasing during announcement window. The liquidity changes by banning ICOs in China was temporarily negative while the liquidity effect became positive after news.

On 18 May , China banned financial institutions and payment companies from being able to provide cryptocurrency transaction related services. In September , the Chinese government declared all cryptocurrency transactions of any kind illegal, completing its crackdown on cryptocurrency. In the United Kingdom, as of 10 January , all cryptocurrency firms, such as exchanges, advisors and professionals that have either a presence, market product or provide services within the UK market must register with the Financial Conduct Authority.

Additionally, on 27 June , the financial watchdog demanded that Binance , the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, [] cease all regulated activities in the UK. South Africa, who has seen a large amount of scams related to cryptocurrency is said to be putting a regulatory timeline in place, that will produce a regulatory framework. In March , South Korea implemented new legislation to strengthen their oversight of digital assets.

This legislation requires all digital asset managers, providers and exchanges to be registered with the Korea Financial Intelligence Unit in order to operate in South Korea.

It also requires that the CEO and board members of the exchanges have not been convicted of any crimes and that the exchange holds sufficient levels of deposit insurance to cover losses arising from hacks.

On 30 April , the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey banned the use of cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets for making purchases on the grounds that the use of cryptocurrencies for such payments poses significant transaction risks. On 9 June , El Salvador announced that it will adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, the first country to do so. At present, India neither prohibits nor allows investment in the cryptocurrency market. In , the Supreme Court of India had lifted the ban on cryptocurrency, which was imposed by the Reserve Bank of India.

But it is being contemplated that the Indian Parliament will soon pass a specific law to either ban or regulate the cryptocurrency market in India. He favoured following IMF and FATF guidelines in this regard. The legal status of cryptocurrencies varies substantially from country to country and is still undefined or changing in many of them. At least one study has shown that broad generalizations about the use of Bitcoin in illicit finance are significantly overstated and that blockchain analysis is an effective crime fighting and intelligence gathering tool.

According to the Library of Congress in , an "absolute ban" on trading or using cryptocurrencies applies in eight countries: Algeria, Bolivia, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Nepal, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates. An "implicit ban" applies in another 15 countries, which include Bahrain, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, Lesotho, Lithuania, Macau, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan.

Various government agencies, departments, and courts have classified Bitcoin differently. China Central Bank banned the handling of Bitcoins by financial institutions in China in early In Russia, though owning cryptocurrency is legal, its residents are only allowed to purchase goods from other residents using Russian ruble while nonresidents are allowed to use foreign currency. In August , the Bank of Thailand announced its plans to create its own cryptocurrency, the Central Bank Digital Currency CBDC.

On 25 March , the United States Internal Revenue Service IRS ruled that Bitcoin will be treated as property for tax purposes. Therefore, virtual currencies are considered commodities subject to capital gains tax.

As the popularity and demand for online currencies has increased since the inception of Bitcoin in , [] so have concerns that such an unregulated person to person global economy that cryptocurrencies offer may become a threat to society.

Concerns abound that altcoins may become tools for anonymous web criminals. Cryptocurrency networks display a lack of regulation that has been criticized as enabling criminals who seek to evade taxes and launder money. Money laundering issues are also present in regular bank transfers , however with bank-to-bank wire transfers for instance, the account holder must at least provide a proven identity. Transactions that occur through the use and exchange of these altcoins are independent from formal banking systems, and therefore can make tax evasion simpler for individuals.

Since charting taxable income is based upon what a recipient reports to the revenue service, it becomes extremely difficult to account for transactions made using existing cryptocurrencies, a mode of exchange that is complex and difficult to track. Systems of anonymity that most cryptocurrencies offer can also serve as a simpler means to launder money. Rather than laundering money through an intricate net of financial actors and offshore bank accounts, laundering money through altcoins can be achieved through anonymous transactions.

Cryptocurrency makes legal enforcement against extremist groups more complicated, which consequently strengthens them. In February , the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox , declared bankruptcy. Likely due to theft, the company claimed that it had lost nearly , Bitcoins belonging to their clients.

Gox blamed hackers, who had exploited the transaction malleability problems in the network. On 19 December , Yapian, the owner of South Korean exchange Youbit, filed for bankruptcy after suffering two hacks that year. In May , Bitcoin Gold had its transactions hijacked and abused by unknown hackers. On 13 September , Homero Josh Garza was sentenced to 21 months of imprisonment, followed by three years of supervised release.

The U. The SEC's complaint stated that Garza, through his companies, had fraudulently sold "investment contracts representing shares in the profits they claimed would be generated" from mining. A EU report found that users had lost crypto-assets worth hundreds of millions of US dollars in security breaches at exchanges and storage providers. Between and , reported breaches ranged from four to twelve a year. In , more than a billion dollars worth of cryptoassets was reported stolen.

Stolen assets "typically find their way to illegal markets and are used to fund further criminal activity". According to a report produced by the United States Attorney General 's Cyber-Digital Task Force, the following three categories make up the majority of illicit cryptocurrency uses: " 1 financial transactions associated with the commission of crimes; 2 money laundering and the shielding of legitimate activity from tax , reporting, or other legal requirements; or 3 crimes, such as theft, directly implicating the cryptocurrency marketplace itself.

According to the UK national risk assessment—a comprehensive assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing risk in the UK—the risk of using cryptoassets such as Bitcoin for money laundering and terrorism financing is assessed as "medium" from "low" in the previous report.

According to Bloomberg and the New York Times, Federation Tower, a two skyscraper complex in the heart of Moscow City, is home to many cryptocurrency businesses under suspicion of facilitated extensive money laundering, including accepting illicit cryptocurrency funds obtained through scams, darknet markets, and ransomware. in Properties of cryptocurrencies gave them popularity in applications such as a safe haven in banking crises and means of payment, which also led to the cryptocurrency use in controversial settings in the form of online black markets , such as Silk Road.

In the year following the initial shutdown of Silk Road, the number of prominent dark markets increased from four to twelve, while the amount of drug listings increased from 18, to 32, Darknet markets present challenges in regard to legality.

Cryptocurrency used in dark markets are not clearly or legally classified in almost all parts of the world. In the U. Various studies have found that crypto-trading is rife with wash trading. Wash trading is a process, illegal in some jurisdictions, involving buyers and sellers being the same person or group, and may be used to manipulate the price of a cryptocurrency or inflate volume artificially.

Exchanges with higher volumes can demand higher premiums from token issuers. In , cryptocurrencies attracted attention when Western nations imposed severe economic sanctions on Russia in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine in February. However, American sources warned in March that some crypto-transactions could potentially be used to evade economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. In April , the computer programmer Virgil Griffith received a five-year prison sentence in the US for attending a Pyongyang cryptocurrency conference, where he gave a presentation on blockchains which might be used for sanctions evasion.

The Bank for International Settlements summarized several criticisms of cryptocurrencies in Chapter V of their annual report. The criticisms include the lack of stability in their price, the high energy consumption, high and variable transactions costs, the poor security and fraud at cryptocurrency exchanges, vulnerability to debasement from forking , and the influence of miners. Cryptocurrencies have been compared to Ponzi schemes , pyramid schemes [] and economic bubbles , [] such as housing market bubbles.

Regulators in several countries have warned against cryptocurrency and some have taken measures to dissuade users. Many banks do not offer virtual currency services themselves and can refuse to do business with virtual currency companies.

One of the features cryptocurrency lacks in comparison to credit cards, for example, is consumer protection against fraud, such as chargebacks. The French regulator Autorité des marchés financiers AMF lists 16 websites of companies that solicit investment in cryptocurrency without being authorized to do so in France. An October paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Bitcoin suffers from systemic risk as the top 10, addresses control about one-third of all Bitcoin in circulation.

A paper by John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas , and Amin Shams, a graduate student found that in the price of Bitcoin had been substantially inflated using another cryptocurrency, Tether. Non-fungible tokens NFTs are digital assets that represent art, collectibles, gaming, etc.

Like crypto, their data is stored on the blockchain. NFTs are bought and traded using cryptocurrency. The Ethereum blockchain was the first place where NFTs were implemented, but now many other blockchains have created their own versions of NFTs.

The popularity of NFTs has increased since As the first big Wall Street bank to embrace cryptocurrencies, Morgan Stanley announced on 17 March that they will be offering access to Bitcoin funds for their wealthy clients through three funds which enable Bitcoin ownership for investors with an aggressive risk tolerance.

On 20 April , [] Venmo added support to its platform to enable customers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies. In October , financial services company Mastercard announced it is working with digital asset manager Bakkt on a platform that would allow any bank or merchant on the Mastercard network to offer cryptocurrency services.

Mining for proof-of-work cryptocurrencies requires enormous amounts of electricity and consequently comes with a large carbon footprint due to causing greenhouse gas emissions. Critics have also identified a large electronic waste problem in disposing of mining rigs. Bitcoin is the least energy-efficient cryptocurrency, using The world's second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, uses Although the biggest PoW blockchains consume energy on the scale of medium-sized countries, the annual power demand from proof-of-stake PoS blockchains is on a scale equivalent to a housing estate.

The Times identified six "environmentally friendly" cryptocurrencies: Chia , IOTA , Cardano , Nano , Solarcoin and Bitgreen. A study of the six largest proof-of-stake networks in May concluded:. This equates to Polkadot consuming 7 times the electricity of an average U. home, Cardano 57 homes and Solana times as much. The research concluded that PoS networks consumed 0. Variable renewable energy power stations could invest in Bitcoin mining to reduce curtailment , hedge electricity price risk , stabilize the grid, increase the profitability of renewable energy power stations and therefore accelerate transition to sustainable energy.

There are also purely technical elements to consider. For example, technological advancement in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin result in high up-front costs to miners in the form of specialized hardware and software. Additionally, cryptocurrency private keys can be permanently lost from local storage due to malware, data loss or the destruction of the physical media.

This precludes the cryptocurrency from being spent, resulting in its effective removal from the markets. In September , the establishment of the peer-reviewed academic journal Ledger ISSN was announced.

It covers studies of cryptocurrencies and related technologies, and is published by the University of Pittsburgh. The journal encourages authors to digitally sign a file hash of submitted papers, which will then be timestamped into the Bitcoin blockchain. Authors are also asked to include a personal Bitcoin address in the first page of their papers.

A number of aid agencies have started accepting donations in cryptocurrencies, including UNICEF. However, in , there was a backlash against donations in Bitcoin because of the environmental emissions it caused. Some agencies stopped accepting Bitcoin and others turned to "greener" cryptocurrencies. arm of Greenpeace stopped accepting bitcoin donations after seven years. It said: "As the amount of energy needed to run Bitcoin became clearer, this policy became no longer tenable.

Bitcoin has been characterized as a speculative bubble by eight winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences : Paul Krugman , [] Robert J. Shiller , [] Joseph Stiglitz , [] Richard Thaler , [] James Heckman , [] Thomas Sargent , [] Angus Deaton , [] and Oliver Hart ; [] and by central bank officials including Alan Greenspan , [] Agustín Carstens , [] Vítor Constâncio , [] and Nout Wellink.

The investors Warren Buffett and George Soros have respectively characterized it as a "mirage" [] and a "bubble"; [] while the business executives Jack Ma and J. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon have called it a "bubble" [] and a "fraud", [] respectively, although Jamie Dimon later said he regretted dubbing Bitcoin a fraud.

Fink called Bitcoin an "index of money laundering ". In , an increase in crypto-related suicides was noticed after the cryptocurrency market crashed in August.

The situation was particularly critical in Korea as crypto traders were on "suicide watch". A cryptocurrency forum on Reddit even started providing suicide prevention support to affected investors. The May collapse of the Luna currency operated by Terra also led to reports of suicidal investors in crypto-related subreddits. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Encrypted medium of digital exchange. Not to be confused with Virtual currency.

See also: History of bitcoin. Further information: List of cryptocurrencies. This section duplicates the scope of other articles , specifically Blockchain. Please discuss this issue on the talk page and edit it to conform with Wikipedia's Manual of Style by replacing the section with a link and a summary of the repeated material or by spinning off the repeated text into an article in its own right.

August Main article: Blockchain. Main article: Cryptocurrency wallet. Main article: Privacy and blockchain. Main article: Cryptocurrency exchange. See also: Crypto-anarchism and Cypherpunk. Main article: Legality of cryptocurrency by country or territory.

Main article: Cryptocurrency and crime. See also: Cryptocurrency and crime. Main article: Darknet market. See also: Cryptocurrency bubble , Cryptocurrency and crime , and Criminal activity on Bitcoin's network. Main article: Environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. See also: Bitcoin § Environmental impact. Main article: Ledger journal. Bitcoin: And the Future of Money. Triumph Books. ISBN Archived from the original on 21 January Retrieved 20 January doi : ISSN X. The New York Times.

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Retrieved 1 March Bitcoin Magazine: Bitcoin News, Articles, Charts, and Guides. Retrieved 10 March von Friedrich August Denationalisation of money : the argument refined ; an analysis of the theory and practice of concurrent currencies. Internet Archive. London : Institute of Economic Affairs. Retrieved 13 October To that point, the CFPB issued new guidance to credit-reporting agencies Thursday about omitting what it called "junk data" from credit reports.

The CFPB has faced several challenges to its existence over its 11 years in business. In , the Supreme Court ruled that restrictions on when its leader can be removed were unconstitutional, but rejected a plea to strike down the agency as a whole. The most significant fear from progressive lawmakers and consumer groups is that the CFPB could see its resources chopped if left to the whims of Congress. Public Interest Research Group.

The new court decision comes as the CFPB, under Biden-appointed director Rohit Chopra , has taken a more aggressive stance toward the financial industry than his Trump administration predecessors. Chopra has also promised scrutiny over the way large technology companies are expanding into financial services.

But the agency is also taking up initiatives with fintech industry support, including finally setting up open-banking rules to guide data-sharing between financial institutions and tech companies. What the ruling means for the fintech industry remains to be seen. While regulators and companies can occasionally come into conflict, the agencies also serve an important role in providing rules of the road and certainty for business models.

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. The ways Zia Faruqui right has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster. Veronica Irwin vronirwin is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle.

Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc. One hundred percent electronic. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui. His rulings have made smart references to "The Big Lebowski," "Dr. Strangelove," and "SNL" parodies of the McLaughlin Group. Rather, before taking the judge position Faruqui was one of a group of prosecutors in the U. There, Faruqui prosecuted cases that involved terrorism, child pornography, and weapons proliferation.

But the ways Faruqui has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster. Crypto lawyers have drawn on his prior decisions in the context of the Tornado Cash sanctions, for example. Faruqui spoke with Protocol about the power of his position, and what people in crypto should understand about the law. There was another prosecutor, Christopher Brown — you know, the other Chris Brown — and he had taken an interest in this when we were both working on financial crime in the Washington, D.

Our U. attorney at the time, Jessie Liu, had this idea of using financial investigations in a way that was not limited to just white collar crime, or even narcotics cases, but also for cyber investigations, to national security investigations, and in civil cases. A lot of what we were investigating was related to following the money and so she wanted us to be this multidisciplinary unit. But I have to say, we started with the goal of wanting to make T-shirts, and we never did that while I was there.

Your decisions have also gotten a lot of attention. We're public servants! And in order for the public to have faith and trust us, they need to understand what it is that we're doing and what we're saying.

Humor is one way, not using a lot of legalese is another way. But I think there are many judges who are trying to make the judiciary more accessible, and so people can see the work that we're doing and understand what we're doing and then make their own opinions about if it's right or wrong.

But at least, if it's understandable, then there's still some trust in the framework even if you don't agree with how our decisions are stated. We are ambassadors for the judiciary to the people in our courtroom — it's a very frightening proposition being in court if you've been federally charged, and people have perceptions of what they think can happen there in terms of fairness or unfairness.

But then it goes far beyond that. I do a lot of work with the Administrative Office of the Courts, our central body doing civic education and outreach to high schools, because I want college and high school students and law students to have an experience where they get a chance to talk to a judge. So my goal is certainly not just getting to one segment of the population, but it's making decisions accessible to whoever's interested in reading them.

What has it felt like for you switching from that prosecutor role to magistrate judge? Lawyers are trying to take different frameworks from one topic and apply them to another, and then convince you that that is or is not appropriate. Being a judge is very different because you're evaluating what the parties present to you as the applicable legal frameworks, and deciding how new, groundbreaking technology fits into legal frameworks that were written 10 or 15 years ago.

But that's not really a place where judges get involved in saying how it ought to be regulated. There was, famously, a judge in Florida that said cryptocurrency was not money because you couldn't put it underneath your bed, and that's what money is: something that is tangible.

So different people are going to have different decisions. And that's not just true for crypto, but also other areas of the law. Your best-known crypto decisions strongly assert that crypto is traceable. One way people try to make it less traceable is with mixers, and Tornado Cash was sanctioned by OFAC not too long ago. Do you think the legal reasoning was sound enough for similar sanctions to be applied to other mixers, or decentralized exchanges?

I don't know. I think there's been some discussion that people may litigate some of these things, so I can't comment, because those frequently do come to our courthouse. And I think there are certainly people opining on that, yes and no.

So much of what judges do is that we rely on the parties that are before us to tell us what's right and what's wrong. And then, you know, obviously, they'll have different views, and we make a decision based on what people say in front of us.

Are you aware that some legal analysis of the Tornado Cash sanctions references your recent decision in a cryptocurrency sanctions case? That's what good lawyers will always do. Even legislators might look at that as they try to think about where the gaps are. As a prosecutor I had a case where we sued three Chinese banks to give us their bank records, and it had never been done before.

Afterwards, Congress passed a new law, using the decisions from judges in this court and the D. circuit court, the court above us. So I'm sure people look at prior decisions and try to apply them in the ways that they want to. Are there any misconceptions about how the law applies to crypto, or how your decisions should be interpreted, that you wish you could get across?

One misconception is that the judges can't understand this technology — we can. People have these views in two extremes. The lawyer's fundamental job is to take super complex and technical things and boil them down to very easily digestible arguments for a judge, for a jury, or whoever it might be.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more. Financial technology is breaking down barriers to financial services and delivering value to consumers, small businesses, and the economy. Fintech puts American consumers at the center of their finances and helps them manage their money responsibly.

From payment apps to budgeting and investing tools and alternative credit options, fintech makes it easier for consumers to pay for their purchases and build better financial habits. Fintech also arms small businesses with the financial tools for success, including low-cost banking services, digital accounting services, and expanded access to capital.

We advocate for modernized financial policies and regulations that allow fintech innovation to drive competition in the economy and expand consumer choice. Spots are still available for this hybrid event, and you can RSVP here to save your seat.

Join us as we discuss how to shape the future of finance. In its broadest sense, Open Banking has created a secure and connected ecosystem that has led to an explosion of new and innovative solutions that benefit the customer, rapidly revolutionizing not just the banking industry but the way all companies do business.

Target benefits are delivered through speed, transparency, and security, and their impact can be seen across a diverse range of use cases. Sharing financial data across providers can enable a customer individual or business to have real-time access to multiple bank accounts across multiple institutions all in one platform, saving time and helping consumers get a more accurate picture of their own finances before taking on debt, providing a more reliable indication than most lending guidelines currently do.

Companies can also create carefully refined marketing profiles and therefore, finely tune their services to the specific need. Open Banking platforms like Klarna Kosma also provide a unique opportunity for businesses to overlay additional tools that add real value for users and deepen their customer relationships.

The increased transparency brought about by Open Banking brings a vast array of additional benefits, such as helping fraud detection companies better monitor customer accounts and identify problems much earlier. The list of new value-add solutions continues to grow. The speed of business has never been faster than it is today. For small business owners, time is at a premium as they are wearing multiple hats every day.

Macroeconomic challenges like inflation and supply chain issues are making successful money and cash flow management even more challenging. This presents a tremendous opportunity that innovation in fintech can solve by speeding up money movement, increasing access to capital, and making it easier to manage business operations in a central place.

Fintech offers innovative products and services where outdated practices and processes offer limited options. For example, fintech is enabling increased access to capital for business owners from diverse and varying backgrounds by leveraging alternative data to evaluate creditworthiness and risk models. This can positively impact all types of business owners, but especially those underserved by traditional financial service models. When we look across the Intuit QuickBooks platform and the overall fintech ecosystem, we see a variety of innovations fueled by AI and data science that are helping small businesses succeed.

By efficiently embedding and connecting financial services like banking, payments, and lending to help small businesses, we can reinvent how SMBs get paid and enable greater access to the vital funds they need at critical points in their journey.

Overall, we see fintech as empowering people who have been left behind by antiquated financial systems, giving them real-time insights, tips, and tools they need to turn their financial dreams into a reality.

Innovations in payments and financial technologies have helped transform daily life for millions of people. People who are unbanked often rely on more expensive alternative financial products AFPs such as payday loans, money orders, and other expensive credit facilities that typically charge higher fees and interest rates, making it more likely that people have to dip into their savings to stay afloat. A few examples include:.

Mobile wallets - The unbanked may not have traditional bank accounts but can have verified mobile wallet accounts for shopping and bill payments.

Their mobile wallet identity can be used to open a virtual bank account for secure and convenient online banking. Minimal to no-fee banking services - Fintech companies typically have much lower acquisition and operating costs than traditional financial institutions. They are then able to pass on these savings in the form of no-fee or no-minimum-balance products to their customers.

This enables immigrants and other populations that may be underbanked to move up the credit lifecycle to get additional forms of credit such as auto, home and education loans, etc.

Entrepreneurs from every background, in every part of the world, should be empowered to start and scale global businesses.

Most businesses still face daunting challenges with very basic matters. These are still very manually intensive processes, and they are barriers to entrepreneurship in the form of paperwork, PDFs, faxes, and forms.

Stripe is working to solve these rather mundane and boring challenges, almost always with an application programming interface that simplifies complex processes into a few clicks. Stripe powers nearly half a million businesses in rural America. The internet economy is just beginning to make a real difference for businesses of all sizes in all kinds of places. We are excited about this future. The way we make decisions on credit should be fair and inclusive and done in a way that takes into account a greater picture of a person.

Lenders can better serve their borrowers with more data and better math. Zest AI has successfully built a compliant, consistent, and equitable AI-automated underwriting technology that lenders can utilize to help make their credit decisions. While artificial intelligence AI systems have been a tool historically used by sophisticated investors to maximize their returns, newer and more advanced AI systems will be the key innovation to democratize access to financial systems in the future.

D espite privacy, ethics, and bias issues that remain to be resolved with AI systems, the good news is that as large r datasets become progressively easier to interconnect, AI and related natural language processing NLP technology innovations are increasingly able to equalize access.

T he even better news is that this democratization is taking multiple forms. AI can be used to provide risk assessments necessary to bank those under-served or denied access. AI systems can also retrieve troves of data not used in traditional credit reports, including personal cash flow, payment applications usage, on-time utility payments, and other data buried within large datasets, to create fair and more accurate risk assessments essential to obtain credit and other financial services.

By expanding credit availability to historically underserved communities, AI enables them to gain credit and build wealth. Additionally, personalized portfolio management will become available to more people with the implementation and advancement of AI. Sophisticated financial advice and routine oversight, typically reserved for traditional investors, will allow individuals, including marginalized and low-income people, to maximize the value of their financial portfolios.

Moreover, when coupled with NLP technologies, even greater democratization can result as inexperienced investors can interact with AI systems in plain English, while providing an easier interface to financial markets than existing execution tools. Open finance technology enables millions of people to use the apps and services that they rely on to manage their financial lives — from overdraft protection, to money management, investing for retirement, or building credit.

More than 8 in 10 Americans are now using digital finance tools powered by open finance. This is because consumers see something they like or want — a new choice, more options, or lower costs. What is open finance? At its core, it is about putting consumers in control of their own data and allowing them to use it to get a better deal.

When people can easily switch to another company and bring their financial history with them, that presents real competition to legacy services and forces everyone to improve, with positive results for consumers.

For example, we see the impact this is having on large players being forced to drop overdraft fees or to compete to deliver products consumers want. We see the benefits of open finance first hand at Plaid, as we support thousands of companies, from the biggest fintechs, to startups, to large and small banks.

All are building products that depend on one thing - consumers' ability to securely share their data to use different services. Open finance has supported more inclusive, competitive financial systems for consumers and small businesses in the U.

and across the globe — and there is room to do much more. As an example, the National Consumer Law Consumer recently put out a new report that looked at consumers providing access to their bank account data so their rent payments could inform their mortgage underwriting and help build credit.

This is part of the promise of open finance. At Plaid, we believe a consumer should have a right to their own data, and agency over that data, no matter where it sits.

This will be essential to securing benefits of open finance for consumers for many years to come. As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times. Donna Goodison dgoodison is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald.

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services. Both prongs of that are important. But cost-cutting is a reality for many customers given the worldwide economic turmoil, and AWS has seen an increase in customers looking to control their cloud spending. By the way, they should be doing that all the time.

The motivation's just a little bit higher in the current economic situation. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Besides the sheer growth of AWS, what do you think has changed the most while you were at Tableau? Were you surprised by anything? The number of customers who are now deeply deployed on AWS, deployed in the cloud, in a way that's fundamental to their business and fundamental to their success surprised me. There was a time years ago where there were not that many enterprise CEOs who were well-versed in the cloud.

It's not just about deploying technology. The conversation that I most end up having with CEOs is about organizational transformation. It is about how they can put data at the center of their decision-making in a way that most organizations have never actually done in their history. And it's about using the cloud to innovate more quickly and to drive speed into their organizations.

Those are cultural characteristics, not technology characteristics, and those have organizational implications about how they organize and what teams they need to have.

It turns out that while the technology is sophisticated, deploying the technology is arguably the lesser challenge compared with how do you mold and shape the organization to best take advantage of all the benefits that the cloud is providing. How has your experience at Tableau affected AWS and how you think about putting your stamp on AWS? I, personally, have just spent almost five years deeply immersed in the world of data and analytics and business intelligence, and hopefully I learned something during that time about those topics.

I'm able to bring back a real insider's view, if you will, about where that world is heading — data, analytics, databases, machine learning, and how all those things come together, and how you really need to view what's happening with data as an end-to-end story.

It's not about having a point solution for a database or an analytic service, it's really about understanding the flow of data from when it comes into your organization all the way through the other end, where people are collaborating and sharing and making decisions based on that data.

AWS has tremendous resources devoted in all these areas. Can you talk about the intersection of data and machine learning and how you see that playing out in the next couple of years?

What we're seeing is three areas really coming together: You've got databases, analytics capabilities, and machine learning, and it's sort of like a Venn diagram with a partial overlap of those three circles. There are areas of each which are arguably still independent from each other, but there's a very large and a very powerful intersection of the three — to the point where we've actually organized inside of AWS around that and have a single leader for all of those areas to really help bring those together.

There's so much data in the world, and the amount of it continues to explode. We were saying that five years ago, and it's even more true today. The rate of growth is only accelerating.

It's a huge opportunity and a huge problem. A lot of people are drowning in their data and don't know how to use it to make decisions. Other organizations have figured out how to use these very powerful technologies to really gain insights rapidly from their data.

What we're really trying to do is to look at that end-to-end journey of data and to build really compelling, powerful capabilities and services at each stop in that data journey and then…knit all that together with strong concepts like governance. By putting good governance in place about who has access to what data and where you want to be careful within those guardrails that you set up, you can then set people free to be creative and to explore all the data that's available to them.

AWS has more than services now. Have you hit the peak for that or can you sustain that growth? We're not done building yet, and I don't know when we ever will be.

We continue to both release new services because customers need them and they ask us for them and, at the same time, we've put tremendous effort into adding new capabilities inside of the existing services that we've already built.

We don't just build a service and move on. Inside of each of our services — you can pick any example — we're just adding new capabilities all the time. One of our focuses now is to make sure that we're really helping customers to connect and integrate between our different services. So those kinds of capabilities — both building new services, deepening our feature set within existing services, and integrating across our services — are all really important areas that we'll continue to invest in.

Do customers still want those fundamental building blocks and to piece them together themselves, or do they just want AWS to take care of all that? There's no one-size-fits-all solution to what customers want. It is interesting, and I will say somewhat surprising to me, how much basic capabilities, such as price performance of compute, are still absolutely vital to our customers.

But it's absolutely vital. Part of that is because of the size of datasets and because of the machine learning capabilities which are now being created. They require vast amounts of compute, but nobody will be able to do that compute unless we keep dramatically improving the price performance. We also absolutely have more and more customers who want to interact with AWS at a higher level of abstraction…more at the application layer or broader solutions, and we're putting a lot of energy, a lot of resources, into a number of higher-level solutions.

One of the biggest of those … is Amazon Connect, which is our contact center solution.

Sports betting is the activity of predicting sports results and placing a wager on the outcome. The frequency of sports bet upon varies by culture, with the vast majority of bets being placed on association football , American football , basketball , baseball , hockey , track cycling , auto racing , mixed martial arts , and boxing at both the amateur and professional levels.

Sports betting can also extend to non-athletic events, such as reality show contests and political elections, and non-human contests such as horse racing , greyhound racing , and cockfighting. It is not uncommon for sports betting websites to offer wagers for entertainment events such as the Grammy Awards , the Oscars , and the Emmy Awards.

The term "book" is a reference to the books used by wage brokers to track wagers, payouts, and debts. Many legal sportsbooks are found online, operated over the Internet from jurisdictions separate from the clients they serve, usually to get around various gambling laws such as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of in the United States in select markets, such as Las Vegas , Nevada , or on gambling cruises through self-serve kiosks.

They take bets "up-front", meaning the bettor must pay the sportsbook before placing the bet. Illegal bookies, due to the nature of their business, can operate anywhere but only require money from losing bettors and don't require the wagered money up front, creating the possibility of debt to the bookie from the bettor.

This creates a number of other criminal elements, thus furthering their illegality. There have been a number of sports betting scandals, affecting the integrity of sports events through various acts including point shaving players affecting the score by missing shots , spot-fixing a player action is fixed , bad calls from officials at key moments, and overall match fixing the overall result of the event is fixed.

Examples include the World Series , the alleged and later admitted illegal gambling of former baseball player Pete Rose , and former NBA referee Tim Donaghy. For example, before game 5 of the NBA Finals , the Miami Heat were expected to beat the Oklahoma City Thunder.

In the above example, if the bettor chose Miami, for him to win his bet, Miami would have to win the game by 4 points or more. If the final adjusted score is a tie, the bet is considered a push. The half point at the end is sometimes added to eliminate the possibility of a push.

This is the most common type of bet in American sports betting. The possible payout of the parlay is determined by the combined likelihood of all bets placed. A parlay of riskier bets more underdogs will pay greater than a parlay of more likely bets more favorites. In a parlay, all bets need to win in order for the parlay to win.

If one of the bets on a parlay loses, the whole parlay loses. In the event of a push, the pushed bet would be taken out of the parlay and the parlay would bump down to a set of odds without that bet. Parlays are very appealing to bettors because they pay out much more than the total winnings of their constituent straight bets. However, it is much more difficult to hit on a parlay than it is on a single wager.

Although the rules to win his bet are the same as a parlay, he is paid less than a regular parlay due to the increased odds of winning. A sportsbook may choose to buy in-play futures wagers at a price below the actual payout before a championship is decided if the potential payout is very high and thus, damaging to the sportsbook due to the money that may be lost. The bookmaker functions as a market maker for sports wagers, most of which have a binary outcome: a team either wins or loses.

The bookmaker accepts both wagers, and maintains a spread the vigorish which will ensure a profit regardless of the outcome of the wager. The Federal Wire Act of was an attempt by the US government to prevent illegal bookmaking. Bookmakers usually hold an 11—10 advantage over their customers—for small wagers it is closer to a 6—5 advantage—so the bookmaker will most likely survive over the long term. Successful bookmakers must be able to withstand a large short term loss. Boyd, Many of the leading gambling bookmakers from the s to the s got their start during the prohibition era of the s.

They were often descendants of the influx of immigrants coming into the USA at this time. Although the common stereotype is that these bookies were of Italian descent, many leading bookies were of eastern European ancestry. Odds for different outcomes in single bet are presented either in European format decimal odds , UK format fractional odds , or American format money line odds.

European format decimal odds are used in continental Europe, Canada, and Australia. They are the ratio of the full payout to the stake, in a decimal format.

Decimal odds of 2. UK format fractional odds are used by British bookmakers. US format odds are the amount won on a stake when positive, and the stake needed to win when negative. US odds of are an even bet.

In Asian betting markets, other frequently used formats for expressing odds include Hong Kong, Malaysian, and Indonesian-style odds formats. Odds are also quite often expressed in terms of implied probability , which corresponds to the probability with which the event in question would need to occur for the bet to be a break-even proposition on the average.

In setting odds , the bookmaker is subject to a number of limitations: [7]. In many countries, bookmaking the profession of accepting sports wagers is regulated but not criminalized.

The opinions of betting from sport authorities are mixed. The United States National Football League was previously fully against any sort of legalization of sports betting prior to the late s, strongly protesting it as to not bring corruption into the game.

Online sports betting is a gray area and is not banned by any particular law in the Indian legal system. That is because specific provisions distinguish between games of chance and games of skill.

In the United States, it was previously illegal under the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of PASPA for states to authorize legal sports betting, hence making it effectively illegal.

The states of Delaware , Montana , Nevada , and Oregon —which had pre-existing sports lotteries and sports betting frameworks, were grandfathered in and exempted from the effects of the Act. National Collegiate Athletic Association in , paving the way for other states to legalize sports betting. have operational legalized sports betting, while an additional four states have legalized it, but have not yet launched legal sportsbooks. The positions of the four major American sports leagues representing American football , baseball , basketball , and ice hockey have become more complex since their decision to embrace daily fantasy sports DFS in , which are described by those within the industry as "almost identical to a casino" in nature.

With the contention by critics that such activities blur the lines between gambling and fantasy sports, the endorsement of all four major sports leagues and many individual franchises provided a marked contrast to their positions on betting. While the National Basketball Association NBA was once active in preventing sports betting law relaxation, current NBA Commissioner Adam Silver became the first major sports leader to break from previous administrative opposition to gambling.

In he stated in a New York Times op-ed, "I believe that sports betting should be brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated. We remain in favor of a federal framework that would provide a uniform approach to sports gambling in states that choose to permit it, but we will remain active in ongoing discussions with state legislatures. Regardless of the particulars of any future sports betting law, the integrity of our game remains our highest priority.

Major League Baseball MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has also advocated the league changing its stance on sports betting, with both Manfred and Silver noting that the scale of illegal sports betting makes opposition to betting meaningless. He also stated a willingness to "try to shape" any future legislation at federal level. This was noted as a marked contrast to former Commissioner of the MLB Bud Selig , with Manfred going beyond tacit approval and stating, "There is this buzz out there in terms of people feeling that there may be an opportunity here for additional legalized sports betting.

MLB released the following statement when the Supreme Court overturned PASPA: "Today's decision by the United States Supreme Court will have profound effects on Major League Baseball.

As each state considers whether to allow sports betting, we will continue to seek the proper protections for our sport, in partnership with other professional sports. Our most important priority is protecting the integrity of our games. We will continue to support legislation that creates air-tight coordination and partnerships between the state, the casino operators and the governing bodies in sports toward that goal.

In April , league-owned television channel MLB Network launched Pregame Spread , a weekday afternoon show hosted by Matt Vasgersian dedicated to analysis of betting lines and other aspects of sports gambling. The National Football League NFL remains the only sports league to maintain public opposition to sports betting, however critics have noted that with the move of the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas in , the NFL has positioned itself for legalization, while simultaneously contradicting its long-held position that sports betting in NFL markets would lead to potential match-fixing.

Like the NBA and MLB, the NFL issued a statement on May 14, It emphasized the league's commitment to protecting the integrity of the game: "The NFL's long-standing and unwavering commitment to protecting the integrity of our game remains absolute. Given that history, we intend to call on Congress again, this time to enact a core regulatory framework for legalized sports betting. The National Hockey League NHL has not stated a public position for or against sports betting, with Commissioner Gary Bettman noting that they are smaller than the NBA and NFL and less vulnerable to negative issues as a result.

The NHL was the first major professional league to place a team in Nevada, when the expansion Vegas Golden Knights took the ice in since then the league has signed sponsorship agreements with William Hill and MGM Resorts International that include betting partnerships and access to in-play data.

Other clubs in states with legal sports gambling, such as the New Jersey Devils and Philadelphia Flyers , also have similar sponsorships with bookmakers. Following other US professional sports leagues, the NHL acknowledged the Supreme Court's PASPA decision with an internal review of its policies.

We will review our current practices and policies and decide whether adjustments are needed, and if so, what those adjustments will look like. Major League Soccer MLS the top soccer league in the United States and Canada has expressed sports betting as a possible way to gain popularity.

Commissioner Don Garber has stated about sports gambling, " We have a project going on now to really dig in deeply and understand it. The Alliance of American Football and XFL have both publicly endorsed gambling on their games, with the AAF securing a partnership with MGM Resorts International [24] and the XFL partnering with DraftKings.

The American Gaming Association stated in June , that a coalition will advocate for the repeal of the United States' sports betting ban. In February , a lobbying document surfaced advocating a new position held by the NBA and MLB — that sports leagues should be financially compensated for betting activity. Perhaps the most extreme ban on sports betting is imposed by the NCAA , the main governing body for U.

college sports. The NCAA reified their position in the wake of various betting scandals, including the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Arizona State University Point shaving scandals. In , NCAA President Mark Emmert talked about Las Vegas possibly hosting the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament in the future. NCAA President Mark Emmert acknowledged the Supreme Court's overturn of PASPA on May 14, , [31] [32] restating the NCAA's strong commitment to competition and its student-athletes.

As of the —22 school year, the official manuals for all three NCAA divisions still expressly ban a member institution's athletic department staff, non-athletic staff with responsibilities related to athletic activities, athletic conference staff, and student athletes from knowingly participating in sports wagering activities.

This ban covers all competitions, whether intercollegiate, amateur, or professional, as well as team practices, in any sport in which the NCAA conducts a championship, plus Division I FBS football whose championships have never been operated by the NCAA and all sports within the scope of the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program.

The NCAA maintains that "Sports wagering has the potential to undermine the integrity of sports contests and jeopardizes the well-being of student-athletes and the intercollegiate athletics community. It also demeans the competition and competitors alike by spreading a message that is contrary to the purpose and meaning of 'sport.

The Football Association , the governing body for association football in England , has imposed football betting bans on all individuals involved in the sport—players, managers, match officials, and club staff. The scope of these bans varies based on level of the English football pyramid. The following individuals are banned from betting on any football-related matter worldwide, or providing inside information to any individual who can reasonably be assumed to use said information for betting purposes:.

Individuals who are associated at clubs at lower levels of the men's or women's league systems, plus match officials at FA Level 4 or below, are only banned with respect to the match or competition in which they are involved or can influence, and also to the league in which they participate. All individuals are banned from advertising or promoting any football betting activity in which FA regulations prohibit them from engaging.

This, however, only applies to individuals in their personal capacities. For example, if a club is sponsored by a betting company and said company places its logo on the club's kit, the team's players are not in violation of the betting rules. The World Baseball Softball Confederation , the international governing body for baseball and softball , has betting rules similar to those of Major League Baseball.

Participants in any WBSC-sanctioned event are banned from betting on the following: [42].

May 25, Some cryptocurrencies have no transaction fees, and instead rely on client-side proof-of-work as the transaction prioritization and anti-spam mechanism. Journal of Financial Economics. Either way, the simple fact that Microsoft is apparently willing to maintain any restrictions on its own ability to put first-party games on Game Pass is rather remarkable, given that making Game Pass more appealing is one of the reasons for its acquisition spree. It emphasized the league's commitment to protecting the integrity of the game: "The NFL's long-standing and unwavering commitment to protecting the integrity of our game remains absolute.

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