Michael Bacina, Tom Skevington, Louisa Xu and Petros Xenos of the Piper Alderman Blockchain Group bring you the latest legal, regulatory and project updates in Blockchain and Digital Law.
Sydney woman jailed for $400k Ripple theft
Judge Chris Craigie recently sentenced Australian woman Kathryn Nguyen to a maximum of two years and three months in jail for stealing over 100,000 Ripple (XRP) tokens in early 2018. After being arrested in October 2018, Ms Nguyen was one of the first Australians to be charged with the theft of digital assets in Australia.
The theft was relatively straightforward. Ms Nguyen and an accomplice hacked an elderly man’s email account in January 2018 and subsequently accessed his digital currency holdings and changed the man’s two-factor authentication code to her mobile number. This allowed Ms Nguyen to transfer over 100,000XRP to her account, which was equivalent to approximately $400,000 (close to Ripple’s all time high at the time).
FedNow fired into full throttle following Commissioner support
In a letter addressed to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, Rohit Chopra, a commissioner at the United States Federal Trade Commission expressed his support for the Fed’s proposal to launch a real-time payments system, named the “FedNow Service.”
The FedNow Service was pitched as a new, 24/7/365 real-time payments and settlements service in a public announcement by the Fed this month.
The service will reportedly be made available for both enterprise use and the general public, as it is intended to enable consumers to manage their funds more flexibly and complete time-sensitive payments outside of conventional banking hours.
Clearly anticipating the inevitable comparison to Libra, Commissioner Chopra stated that:
The laundry list of risks raised by the Libra project will take time to unpack and address. But regardless of Libra’s ultimate fate, the proposal’s emergence underscores the appetite for real-time payments and the urgency of intervention by the Federal Reserve.
While there isn’t really enough detail to go on at this point, our view is that FedNow bears much more in common with the Australian New Payments Platform (NPP) launched in February 2018. The NPP is an open access infrastructure for fast payments across Australia, and was developed via industry collaboration to enable households, businesses and government agencies to make simply addressed payments, and much like the FedNow service, delivers a nearly real-time funds availability to the recipient, on a 24/7 basis.
Both FedNow and the NPP have demonstrated the willingness and capacity of central banks to not only acknowledge the rapidly changing financial landscape, but actively create systems which facilitate this change by developing expedient and more dynamic payment methods. Whether a US, Australian or other central bank will take the leap of faith and commit to developing a CBDC remains to be seen.
