Debtors jumped on the opportunity to grab a discount on their loan repayments when USDC and DAI de-pegged from the dollar.

Merchants within the euro area could be obliged to accept a digital euro if it is deemed to be legal tender, according to a paper set to be put before finance ministers later Monday and seen by CoinDesk.

The pre-trial stage of the project to introduce a digital Iranian rial has been completed successfully, the country’s central bank announced. The authorities in Tehran plan to expand the use of the state-backed currency and integrate it into Iran’s payment system.

United States Congressman Tom Emmer believes that the introduction of programmable central bank digital currency in the country will jeopardize the financial privacy of American citizens.

“Recent actions from the Biden administration make it clear that they’re not only itching to create a digital dollar, but they’re willing to trade Americans’ right to financial privacy for surveillance-style CBDC,” Emmer told an audience at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.

Those startups include Alchemy, Blockchain.com, Chainalysis, Kraken, ConsenSys, Blockdaemon, CoinDCX and OpenSea.

A project run by interbank messaging company SWIFT to interconnect central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) offers “clear potential and value,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Losses from crypto scams in Hong Kong amounted to 1.7 billion Hong Kong dollars ($216.6 million) last year, surging 106% from a year before, according to the local police.

Major business players are joining the Hong Kong-Mainland China “cross-border” digital yuan pilot – including the e-commerce giant JD.com and the Bank of China.

The Digital Euro Association (DEA) has issued a report, arguing that Europe can use stablecoins for machine-to-machine (M2M) payments – A growing category of financial transactions.