This idea is now being considered by Club Atlético Peñarol, in Uruguay, that could be used by fans to pay for tickets, as a type of loyalty scheme, as well as getting access to discounted club merchandise.

Also, in South America, two Brazilian football teams, Atlético-PR and Corinthians, have reportedly signed partnerships with Hong Kong-based crypto start-up Inoovi, which recently launched its “IVI” token, specifically for football clubs. Inoovi is looking at offering fans access to Virtual Reality and 360º streaming technology, so allowing fans an experience as if they were actually attending the match.

Meanwhile, in the USA, The Miami Dolphins football team have recently agreed to adopt Litecoin, which has a market capitalisation of over $6 billion, as its official cryptocurrency coin. Charlie Lee, Litecoin’s founder and managing director, said “This collaboration propels Litecoin in front of an audience of millions of people around the world at a time where adoption of cryptocurrencies continues to gain momentum and the ecosystem is able to support real-world use cases in ways previously not possible. We see this as a powerful way to raise awareness and educate people about Litecoin and cryptocurrencies on a tremendous scale.”

These examples of how Cryptocurrencies are being used globally by sporting clubs illustrate how sentiment is turning more positive to this New Asset class, and organisations are understanding how they can use them!

This will also offer comfort to buyers that the honey is from sustainable sources as it will provide full transparency of the honey-supply chains. This is welcomed by those involved in buying and selling honey due to the recent concerns over fake honey in Australia, as it has been found that some honey has had sugar syrup from cane or corn added.

Fake honey has proved to be a real challenge in Australia, but an Israeli firm, called Security Matters, has developed a solution using both Blockchain technology and an innovative process that can track honey at the molecular level. Security Matters has created a commercial version of a technology that was developed at a nuclear research facility by the Israeli government. This innovation can introduce a permanent and irremovable marker, or code, to any matter be it gas, liquid, or solid, thus enabling a product to be tracked. To further enhance provenance, Security Matters will record all the details in a Blockchain. This will ensure that every step in the supply chain of the honey is visible and traceable.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, coffee farmers will soon have access to a Cryptocurrency called “coffeecoin”. According to a report on Bloomberg, coffeecoin is being launched by one of Brazil’s biggest arabica-coffee co-operatives, Minasul. The coffeecoin will enable coffee farmers to buy machinery and fertilizer as well as non-farm products like cars and food. 

Coffeecoin is part of Minasul’s strategy to encourage farmers to embrace new technology. As a result, they will be able to sell coffee beans via a mobile phone thus cutting out unnecessary intermediaries and, by using coffeecoins, allow farmers greater transparency of the price of coffee beans.

Coffee beans are the second most traded commodity globally after crude oil, with estimated market size of $100 billion, and this is due to grow by a further 4.7% in 2019! The fact that a Cryptocurrency is being introduced into Brazil (which is the world’s largest producer of coffee) will no doubt mean other major coffee-producing countries, like Vietnam and Columbia, will be looking with interest to see how successful coffeecoin will be in making the coffee market more efficient and how much it helps Brazilian farmers.

If coffeecoin is a success, other commodity producers will probably look to create their own version - “wheatcoin”, “corncoin”, “tobaccocoin”, etc. - which, provided there is sufficient liquidity for these coins, could this then offer an alternative way for commodity traders and investors to get exposure to these commodities?

Potentially, Cryptocurrencies (backed by commodities), which could trade 24/7, could form part of the asset allocation for a global digital currency. Facebook’s Libra is reportedly going to be linked to a selection of just fiat currencies. However, a global currency may prove to be more appealing to different jurisdictions if the digital currency was linked to a variety of different assets, with less reliance on the US$!

The company has an impressive team with Rui Guo, the CEO, being a former technical director at Alibaba Security and also an employee of IBM. Other team members come also from Alibaba, like the co-founder, Ning Li, who was technical director of the Alipay Blockchain team, and Yufeng Shen from AliOS and Google.

Ultrain Blockchain has been designed to be able to handle high volumes of data created by Internet of Things (IoT), while also utilising automated decision-making and employing Smart Contracts via Artificial Intelligence (AI). It claims that it will be able to handle 200,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS), this compares to Ethereum’s 10-20 TPS.

Ultrain issued its token (UGAS) in April 2019, and at one stage it was worth over $31 million. However, despite the recent rally we have seen in the Cryptocurrencies in the last few months, Ultrain is only valued at around $18 million. 

Recently, the Chairman of Asia Pacific for Nasdaq visited Ultrain, which is being widely used in travel, luxury goods, supply chain, sharing economy, medical, retail and media entertainment. It already has a strong global presence with partnerships in over 16 countries. 

This is a Blockchain to keep an eye on, given its very impressive tech team and its relatively high processing speeds (TPS), which is what a number of larger organisations like Nasdaq will require as they integrate Blockchain technology into their own businesses, more and more.

Facebook’s Libra Digital Currency would appear to have polarised those who are more receptive than others. In India and China, Libra has not had a positive reception, with both governments potentially banning Facebook’s Crypto from being used by their citizens.

There has been mixed news from the USA, with Trump tweeting “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behaviour, including drug trade and other illegal activity....” Although also in the USA, the Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, seemed to contradict Trump.  Powell likened Bitcoin to gold, as a speculative form of value. Powell did not say Bitcoin is like gold, but how some Bitcoin’s users currently treat Bitcoin as if it were! He was stating what his thoughts were. However, it does offer a degree of legitimacy to Bitcoin’s claim to be a digital replacement for gold!

However, in the USA, there is a draft bill to try and prevent large tech firms to launch their own Cryptocurrency. The situation in the US was aptly summarised in a recent article in The Cryptoeconomist: “The current exclusive administrators of monetary policy, whether direct or indirect, do not seem to tolerate competition very well, but their reaction so far still appears to be fragmented and disorganised. However, it cannot be excluded that at some point they will be able to organise themselves and develop effective reactionary measures”

The French are less positive on Libra, with French Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, saying during a radio interview that Facebook’s latest foray into Cryptocurrencies “must not happen.” However, the French have confirmed that they are looking to introduce legislation so that companies, which voluntarily abide by standards on capital requirements, consumer protection and pay tax in France, will then receive approval from the regulator. Authorities in France are encouraging the European Union to create European-wide standards for Cryptocurrencies. Indeed, the French are looking at unveiling their own regulations around custody and asset management of digital assets, digital exchanges and Cryptocurrencies. In Singapore, regulators have actively tried to engage and embrace Cryptocurrencies as its Payments Service Act specifically includes Cryptocurrencies and domestic as well as cross-border transfers. In the third-biggest economy in the world (Japan), the view of its regulator the Financial Services Agency (FSA), which oversees Crypto exchanges, is that under current regulations, stablecoins are not considered to be a Cryptocurrency. Indeed, we have already seen one of Japan’s biggest banks, Mizuho, earlier this year launch a stablecoin pegged to the Yen.

The UK seems to be taking a more accommodative approach, with the FCA having pioneered the highly successful “sandbox” which allows regulated companies to, in effect, experiment and trial products and services. The soon-to-be Ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, confirmed that in his opinion the British government would not stand in the way of Libra.

Turkey plans to be the First Country to Issue Central Bank Cryptocurrency, according to reports from Coinape. Currently, over 18% of people in Turkey own some form of Cryptocurrency, so there would seem to be reasonable interest already in this asset class.

Finally, it has been reported that “Samsung Coin” has been filed as a trademark, and while Samsung says it is not responsible, one cannot help wondering how long it will be before we see the likes of a Samsung issuing its own Cryptocurrency to pay staff, suppliers, and possibly even use it as part of a loyalty scheme for its customers?

FAC is using the open-source Blockchain platform, R3’s Corda, with which FAC would appear to have very close links. The new CEO of FAC, Brian McNulty, was a former managing director at R3. One of the advisors for FAC is the founder of R3, David Rutter, formerly CEO of the electronic broking division of ICAP- the world’s biggest inter-dealer broker. 

FAC, which will be based in London, claims the asset management industry is over $100 trillion. It is building a Blockchain-powered platform giving access to IFAs/distributors, transfer agents, custodians, and other intermediaries, who buy and sell units in a fund, to one common database which has military-grade security. FAC claims that for a fund manager who has £100 billion under management, its platform will save the fund manager over £30 million a year. The cost of registry, depositary, and transactions will be 0.5 basis points as opposed to the current standard 5 basis points, and FAC’s McNulty has confirmed that FAC is in discussion with 25 asset management firms ready to use its platform.

There are other companies also using Blockchain technology to reduce the costs for asset managers such as AMUN, Calstone, and Funds DLT. The potential savings of using Blockchain technology are massive, at $3.4 billion a year, according to Calstone which processes over $170 billion transactions a month.

FundsDLT was developed by Fundsquare, a subsidiary of the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, carried out its first test in 2017, and now boasts a number of fund managers using its platform including Credit Suisse, Banco Best, in Portugal, and AcomeA SGR, in Italy.

Lowering administration costs is very much a focus for fund managers as they continue to be pressurised by regulators to ensure that customers are “being treated fairly”, and because we are seeing new types of fund pricing being introduced:

zero-fee Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) 

low-cost funds with performance fees.

In 2019, in a report from Deloitte on the asset management sector, State Street Global Advisors’ and Investment Company Institute’s data estimated that, globally, ETFs could grow to $25 trillion by the end of 2025, up from $4.8 trillion in 2018! This growth is partly being driven by the advent of “zero-fee” ETFs, which means that asset managers have a massive incentive to crush costs as they are, in effect, subsidising some funds in order to attract additional assets under management. 

Deloitte, in its report, also highlighted Allianz Global Investors have been one of the early adopters of a performance-based fee model in the United Kingdom. Investors are charged a base fee of 20 basis points and an incentive fee of 20% of any performance over the fund’s stated benchmark.

Another way that Blockchain technology is being used in the asset management sector is the tokenisation of funds, which Deloitte summarised as: “Tokenisation allows the creation of a new financial system- one that is more democratic, more efficient and vaster than anything we have seen”

Tokenisation of an existing fund enables it to be more relevant and suitable for younger fund buyers i.e. generation X and millennials, who are increasingly looking to buy and sell funds digitally on mobile devices without the need for face-to-face financial advice. Tokenisation can create more transparency, and it is possible to build-in stronger compliance monitoring due to automation-increased efficiency and lower transactions costs. This makes tokenisation of a fund a powerful incentive for asset managers to adopt.

Potentially, the additional compliance controls - using Smart Contracts – which carry out pre-authorisation checks before a fund manager trades or before a client buys a fund, coupled with greater transparency and traceability to improve KYC and AML checks, make the use of Blockchain technology highly compelling. 

Ironically, it was concerns over the “dark web” and anonymity of Bitcoin - that uses Blockchain technology – that made regulators suspicious, and initially cautious, of this new Asset Class and the Blockchain technology. However, now we could well see Blockchain technology being actively encouraged to be implemented by these very same sceptics.