Amp made its mark in Brazil this month as part of the Hashdex DeFi ETF launched February 17, Kucoin listed the AMP–USDT pair, Atomic Wallet added Amp, and SimpleHold added Amp to its non-custodial wallet. 

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In case you missed it…

Amp included in Brazil’s Hashdex DeFi ETF

Hashdex, the largest asset manager in South America, included Amp as one of twelve assets in the world’s first DeFi ETF (ticker DEFI11). The ETF, which launched February 17th on Sao Paulo’s B3 exchange, tracks CF Benchmark’s Modified Composite Index and shows the building global interest in gaining exposure to top DeFi assets.

The Block publishes paper on blockchain finality

Flexa commissioned a deep dive into finality, a crucial concept that is vital to understanding digital payments. What is finality? When is a transaction irreversible? Do proof-of-stake networks provide universal, instant finality? The Block team dives into all those questions and more in this excellent primer.

Amp on Kucoin, Atomic Wallet, SimpleHold, RocketX

Kucoin, a top-ten global cryptocurrency exchange, made an AMP–USDT pair available for trading on February 3 and opened withdrawals the next day. In addition, Atomic Wallet added the AMP–USD pair and SimpleHold added Amp to its non-custodial wallet. RocketX added the AMP–ETH pair to its DeFi/CeFi exchange aggregator.

Metrics update

Current TVL of Flexa Capacity — $827.3 million

Earn rewards for staking your Amp on the Flexa network toward the apps and network transformers below:

Stake Gemini

Stake SPEDN

Stake Lightning

Did You Know?

Each new wallet app on the Flexa network needs its own Amp collateral pool to ensure that it can operate independently without risk from other pools.

DeFi and payments news

Solana launches native payment framework

Solana launched its native payment protocol, Solana Pay, earlier this month, enabling a set of products for users to pay for goods and services over the Solana blockchain. Though currently in early stages, Solana Pay signals increasing attention and investment into digital payments. As an asset-agnostic payments network, Flexa will look to build collaboratively with all players attempting to improve payments.  

Apple launches in-person payments using Apple Pay

Apple announced contactless in-person payments using iOS devices, to launch later this year: “The service will allow merchants to use iOS devices to seamlessly and securely accept Apple Pay, contactless credit and debit cards, and other digital wallets through a simple tap to their iPhone.” Apple’s announcement demonstrates continued digital payments momentum in 2022, even outside of the crypto industry.

Fed releases digital dollar research report

The US Federal Reserve released its much-anticipated report on digital dollars, “Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation.” The 35-page report walks through existing forms of money, current and recent improvements to the payments system, and benefits and risks of CBDCs. 

Banks rush to crypto to keep deposits from leaving customer accounts

As the crypto ecosystem matures, banks are looking to add crypto services to supplement their current offerings. Doug Brown, President of NCR Digital Banking, commented “With banks [and credit unions] we’re seeing... a lot of interest, and it’s following that cadence, moving from speculative to strategy to execution. C-levels are now engaging and focusing on it because they’re getting inbound inquiries and customers asking for it.”

Boston Fed and MIT build high-performance CBDC on OpenCBDC

A report released earlier this month as a result of the multi-year ‘Project Hamilton’ collaboration between the Boston Fed and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described a theoretical high-performance transaction processor for CBDCs built on top of the open-source project OpenCBDC. According to the report, the processor can handle 1.7 million transactions per second with finality under 2 seconds.

From the community

Community member @bubby_io created an Amp analytics dashboard for the Amp community to better understand Amp’s growth in usage since inception.

Tweet of the week

IS₳₳C @minombreeszach

Finally got it in. 4% back in $AMP on everything!

January 29th 2022

6 Retweets104 Likes

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