Italy’s State-Owned Bank Trials Digital Bonds on Polygon Blockchain
The European Central Bank initiated the trial to explore how blockchains can enhance central bank settlement.
The chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the United States Rostin Behman has said that Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake is going to help the energy consumption from the network, but that the industry might still need to deal with crypto energy use as an issue.
At a conference, the chairman remarked on the issue of the enormous amounts of energy that are required to mine cryptocurrency. He suggested that Ethereum’s Merge would be reducing the need for massive energy consumption, but there is still a need to fully resolve the problem.
“We’ve all heard the statistics about the amazing amount of energy used to mine coins. I would say that an event occurred last night with Ethereum which is going to reduce energy consumption — a step in the right direction, but certainly not resolving the problem.”
It’s been estimated that Bitcoin consumes energy at an annual rate of around 127 terawatt-hours – which is more than the entire annual energy used by the country of Norway. Before the Merge, Bitcoin’s energy use per transaction was 11 more than Ethereum. Since the Merge, it’s been said that the network is 99% more efficient. As it stands, there’s still a massive need for the industry as a whole to become more efficient on electricity.
Authority expanding control over cryptocurrency
In a written report, Behman noted that he backed the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act. The Act, which aims to expand the Future Trading Commission’s control over the cryptocurrency market, is designed to help protect users against fraud, market manipulation, and volatility according to Behman. He noted that the government authority has the experience to be the regulators of the digital assets market and the cryptocurrency industry. This would be set up to help regulate the crypto space against malicious entities in the space. He noted:
“The Act would provide the authority to the CFTC to regulate markets. This volatility, the fraud, the manipulation — much of it would probably go away because we now have a regulator, a cop on the beat, and this would deter activity by bad actors.”