I was at #ArtBasel Hong Kong exhibition in March 2019. If you don’t know about Art Basel – it’s one of the most prestigious art fairs, mainly focused on contemporary art. One of my main curiosity points this time around was my interest in startups and small businesses – I Read more…
Based on my observations, 2018 was a year when smart FinTech startups deliberately focused on building online communities. From what I have seen, very few startups were able to improve their profitability or add substantial new revenue streams. Very often, existing sources or revenues actually shrunk 🙁 However, here is what Read more…
It is not uncommon to see regulatory requests for cryptocurrency-focused businesses to split activities into 2 parts: regulated and non-regulated. For example, the licensed (e.g. regulated) entity may be dedicated to operations with fiat funds and fiat deposits, and non-regulated entity would be facilitating transactions with cryptocurrencies or managing cryptocurrency wallets. Read more…
“How to get more partnerships and get them faster” has been a common theme during 2018. Many startups joined acceleration programs not because they needed exposure to get funding, but because they needed exposure to secure partnerships. Even regulatory approvals seemed easier in a way, comparing to getting sign offs Read more…
It’s been reported recently by a number of news outlets (here or here) that Luxembourg introduced a new Blockchain law. Why I refer to it as an “unfortunate hype” is because, factually speaking, this regulatory statement did not introduce any significant changes and did not really provide a lot of clarity. Read more…
If you work in compliance, you have told your business partners (multiple times) that they must “own their risks” and make the final decisions – and that the role of compliance is to remain independent and to offer expert advice. You probably think that this is just the way things Read more…
Regulator provided clear distinction between e-money (formerly stored value) and digital payments tokens. Digital payment token: Expressed as a unit Not denominated as a currency and isn’t pegged to one Is / will be a medium of exchange, will be accepted as payment for goods and services OR debt Read more…
I was recently preparing a team for an external on-site audit visit and the basic guiding principle I declared was: “You are going to do all the work and they are going to get paid”. I meant it. It sounds a bit odd and potentially provocative, but the truth of Read more…
