The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, recently approved a license modification for ErisX’s clearing house. The license amendment allows ErisX freedom to offer more trading products. “The significance of the Amended Order is that it expands our licensed activities allowing us to clear products on other commodities beyond just virtual currencies or crypto,” ErisX general counsel Laurian Cristea told. “Now we may list futures or swaps across the commodities spectrum from new crypto related contracts such as hash rate futures or crypto indices, to event contracts, and contracts on other commodities including, for example, tokenized base metals, precious metals, and

When Will a G20 Central Bank Issue a Digital Currency? Central bank governors and finance ministers of many G20 countries have been working on their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), particularly in response to Facebook’s planned Libra coin. Mark Cliffe, chief economist and head of global research at ING Group, expects to see the first G20 central bank digital currency soon. In a blog post published Friday, he wrote: When might we see a fully-fledged digital currency from a G20 central bank? … they’ll be making moves towards just that in the next two to three years. Philip Middleton Last

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are already set to become part of national financial systems. In part one of a two-part series, Bitt.com’s Simon Chantry describes how the design and configuration of these networks is trending and how this is likely to affect us in the future interconnected world. Simon Chantry is co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Bitt.com. He is a member of the OECD’s Blockchain Expert Policy Advisory Board (BEPAB) and the WEF’s Digital Currency Governance Consortium. Efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have impacted all industries, with the financial and payments industries being no exception.