Seeds of Wisdom RV and Economic Updates Monday Evening 11-4-24

05/11/2024

Good Evening ,

SINGAPORE ADVANCES ASSET TOKENIZATION WITH NEW MAS FRAMEWORKS

The Monetary Authority of Singapore is pulling together the projects and participants needed for the next step in its asset tokenization trials.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has announced a multipronged effort to advance the commercialization of asset tokenization. To achieve its goals, the MAS has drawn from various projects and produced new frameworks to provide guidance.

Scaling up successful tokenization tests
Speaking at the first MAS Layer One Summit, deputy managing director Leong Sing Chiong reviewed the successes of the large financial institutions participating in Project Guardian in demonstrating the potential for tokenization in foreign exchange and funds. More than 40 institutions have carried out more than 15 trials across seven jurisdictions using six currencies.

The central banker also identified the limitations of those trials:

“No one has really succeeded in achieving scale. Many promising use cases have not yet gained industry wide traction. Further, there is a need for supporting infrastructure to enable good use cases to scale beyond individual networks.”

To deploy tokenized assets at scale, liquidity, infrastructure, standardized frameworks and common settlement assets are needed, he said. The MAS is addressing each of those issues.

A masterplan for commercialization
Launched in 2022, Project Guardian already facilitates deepening liquidity through capital raising, secondary trading and asset servicing and settlement, the MAS said in a statement.

To address infrastructure needs, the MAS’s Global Layer One, launched in 2023 and developed by BNY, Citi, JPMorgan, MUFG and Societe Generale-FORGE, will expand its scope in the coming year. Euroclear and HSBC will join the initiative as it develops principles for use and its ecosystem.

The Project Guardian industry group created two frameworks for the implementation of tokenization that were also published on Nov. 4.

The Guardian Fixed Income Framework integrates international organizations’ standards and principles into a guide to implementing tokenization in debt capital markets.

The Guardian Funds Framework recommends best practices for fund tokenization. This includes the Guardian Composable Token Taxonomy.

Finally, the SGD Testnet will be made available to facilitate access to mutually agreeable tokenized money for payments and securities settlements. Participants in Project Guardian and Project Orchid will participate using Singapore dollar wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Project Orchid developed use cases for retail CBDC and introduced the concept of purpose-bound money — a form of programmability — which will be implemented on the testnet.

Commercialization is the logical next step when a project achieves its goals. mBridge announced its launch as a minimum viable product in October 2023.

@ Newshounds News™

Source: CoinTelegraph

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THE DAO DILEMMA: STRIVING FOR DECENTRALIZATION

The idea of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is kind of incredible, when you really think about it.

What is a DAO?

A DAO is like a private company that is perfectly okay with hundreds of token (equity) holders debating publicly on an open forum about product and organizational strategy.

A private company where the core security underlying the company’s product (smart contracts) are fully viewable, where all the data you need to write a scathing data analysis on a company you don’t like is readily available.

In the non-Web3 world, markets would kill to have any clue as to what their competitors are thinking of launching, let alone detailed forum discussions of how that conversation is taking shape.

Having all that information out in the open would invite endless media and regulatory scrutiny, taking precious time away from actually building to fend off annoying lines of inquiry.

These are handicaps that no startup wants. And yet in Web3, $21.4 billion of value rests on these norms. In Web3, it’s par for the course.

Of course, most DAOs are actually only partially decentralized.

When Uniswap announced its plans around Unichain last month, Stanford Blockchain Club’s head of governance Billy Gao said the announcement left most DAO delegates “in the dark,” and excluded them via their lack of “a voice at any stage of the process — whether through forums, private discussions or any other means.”

It’s not just Uniswap either. Optimism DAO’s governance contracts are not controlled by its tokenholders, so voting with OP largely serves as an informal signal to the Optimism Foundation (for now).

And it’s widely known that most DAO treasuries or smart contracts are still controlled by a few trusted stakeholders via a multisig wallet.

So when we tout DAOs as decentralized autonomous organizations, in truth, there are many shades of gray within that spectrum of decentralization. The devil’s in the details.

When I asked Tally founder and CEO Dennison Bertram about it, he begrudgingly agreed that DAOs have a ways to go regarding decentralization, but also that partial transparency is still better than complete opaqueness, which would be “much more dangerous.”

Bertram pointed to how Twitter/X under Elon Musk could unilaterally turn off its API, or how Facebook choked off the wildly popular FarmVille game by Zynga from its platform.

Yet, despite the many shortcomings around DAOs, the real silver lining — I think — is the industry’s overarching commitment to the values of decentralization, which to me seems wildly underrated.

DAOs can hand-wave and virtue signal about decentralizing all they like, but the fact that they operate in an industry where “decentralization” is still held up as a beloved virtue is what allows the crypto industry to call out and question the centralization vectors that DAOs are still riddled with.

That informal institution has slowly been eroded and will only continue to do so as crypto continues to go “mainstream.” Cherish it while it still lasts.

@ Newshounds News™