Another e-CNY scam busted; SCMP to tokenize history

Transcript

Tokenizing history – one international newspaper’s paving the way, and we’ve got it covered.

Welcome to The Daily Forkast November 23, 2021. I’m Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News covering all things blockchain.

Well, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper has released a white paper on tokenizing history, alongside announcing a debut NFT collection from its archives.

We’re going to take a look at how the past could help shape the future of news and a whole lot more coming up.

Let’s get you up to speed from Asia to the world.

Let’s kick off with some of the top stories coming out of Asia today.

First up, police in China’s Inner Mongolia region have busted another e-CNY fraud case, with one suspect arrested in what appears to be a tele-scam involving a total of eight million yuan. That’s US$1.25 million.

Now, China has seen a wave of fraud and money laundering cases involving the e-CNY over the past month.

However, Shanghai based fintech consultant Richard Turrin told Forkast.News that criminals need to be aware that the e-CNY is the last place they should put stolen money. And July’s PBoC white paper did note that it is not a 100% anonymous system.

Over in Korea, the country’s Financial Services Commission says NFTs will be taxed from next year, contradicting what the finance minister said just last month.

The FSC’s vice chairman has now said that current regulations overseeing virtual assets can encompass NFTs as well, with the Finance Ministry preparing to tax them. However, the full scope of that tax is yet to be defined.

Profit from virtual assets is set to be taxed as other income starting January 1, though the National Assembly in Korea is pushing for a delay in that start date.

It’s a really interesting story and set of developments coming out of South Korea.

You can find more at Forkast.News.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong based newspaper The South China Morning Post, or SCMP, is aiming to set a standard for recording history on the blockchain.

In a newly published white paper, the SCMP says factual accounts of events should be immutable and ownership of them should be decentralized. But what could such a project actually mean for the future of media?

Forkast.News Carolyn Wright reports.

With its Artifact project, the 118 year old newspaper says it aims to tokenize historic news reports with assets including everything from single news stories and photos to whole front pages.

The white paper outlines how the project aims to set a metadata standard with its structure to be developed by an international committee of interdisciplinary experts. Artifact will be governed by a non-profit foundation which will look to get museums, publishers, universities and more involved.

Speaking at Forkast.News Bitcoin and Beyond Virtual Summit earlier this month, SCMP CEO Gary Liu explained the importance of the project.

“Our goal is not to necessarily catch the current wave and inevitable depreciation of of NFTs, but it is actually to set a standard that long term will allow traditional organizations that are guardians of history to be able to translate that not only to a digital world first, but then eventually onto blockchain for immutable recording and do it in a way that benefits both the world by making it open, but also benefits the original IP owners by allowing us to actually monetize that.”

The first “Artifacts by SCMP” collection covers events from 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s handover from the UK to China.

SCMP has partnered with DapperLabs, the company behind the hot selling NBA Top Shot video collection, to build the Artifacts on its Flow blockchain.

For Forkast.News, I’m Carolyn Wright.

And now for the DeFi download.

In this decentralized world of finance, we dive into what’s top of mind as you make your way through it. The goal to avoid those hidden dangers. And this week we are talking about illiquid assets and how to price it.

Could DeFi be one way? One man who can help break it down is David Lighton, co-founder of Lithium Finance.

Angie: It’s good to see you, David.

David: Hey, Angie. Great to be here with you. Thank you.

Angie: All right. Let’s kick off with the big question of how do you figure out the right price for an asset now in the news, earlier this month, real estate info company Zillow pulled out of the house flipping market because of the unpredictability of forecasting home prices. Now, if they can’t do it, how’s everybody else supposed to and extending that thought to crypto assets like NFTs? What’s the takeaway for digital assets? How do we think about pricing here?

David: In every industry from hedge funds up until the recent experience with Zillow. We’ve had a lot of very smart people building very, very technical, very elegant mathematical models on valuation that are driven by fundamentals.

But despite how clever and sophisticated their models are, they happen to be wrong. And the reason that they’re wrong is that there are too driven by fundamentals data.

Angie: So where does DeFi fit into all of this?

David: Well, DeFi fits in the broadest sense in a way that people could start to trade more assets on chain like they were able to price them.

Defi can enable more peer-to-peer commerce. Right. And that’s really the that’s the revolution of Web 3. We want to we want to eliminate all of these verifiers guarantors, financial institutions from from the flow, from the exchange of goods and services because we don’t really need them.

Angie: Thanks for the DeFi Download, David.

That was David Lighton, co-founder at Lithium Finance.

And that’s The Daily Forkast from our vantage point right here in Asia. And you know what I’m about to ask you YouTubers, hit like, hit subscribe, and we always appreciate it and hit that alert button.

We publish Monday to Friday, and it helps us reach our goal to reach more of you. For more, visit Forkast.News. I’m Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau. Until next time.