Currency.com joins Global Digital Finance to advocate for best practises in Web3

Promoting Best Practises in the Crypto Assets Industry

This week, Currency.com became a member of the Global Digital Finance (GFD), a major industry association that promotes standards and best practices in the crypto asset and digital finance sectors.

The GFD brings together an international community of industry players by holding quarterly global summits. By joining the GDF, Currency.com will play a key role in developing market and behaviour standards and establishing best practices for players in the crypto asset and digital finance industries.

Experts from the crypto/digital asset, financial services, legal, and academic industries are part of GDF's working groups. Coinbase, Crypto.com and DLA Piper are among the members. Currency.com will provide its expertise to the working groups KYC/AML/CTF and Market Surveillance, which are tasked with developing shared surveillance data standards and frameworks for digital asset markets to address global regulatory concerns with cross-market manipulability.

The CEO of Currency.com US, Steve Gregory, said:

We are proud to join this group of like-minded leaders working together to ensure the digital asset space grows in step with regulation. As a member of Global Digital Finance, we aim to collectively support and drive the adoption of standards and best practices. This will build greater trust and confidence among new entrants and policymakers and accelerate the development of the entire digital finance ecosystem.

Currency.com is one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchanges that easily connects the rising world of cryptocurrencies with conventional financial assets. The platform uses simple, clean, and intuitive technology to enable investors to purchase, trade, and invest in major cryptocurrencies using both crypto and fiat currencies safely and securely.

Brazil is the big Latin American bet for crypto exchanges

Several worldwide exchanges envision Brazil as Latin America's primary market in 2022, owing to crypto growth in the nation. In 2021, Brazil saw 10% inflation and a persistent devaluation of the Brazilian real against the US dollar, pushing the local currency from $0.25 in January 2020 to $0.18 this month.

A mix of macroeconomic imbalances has fueled the crypto explosion in recent years. Brazilian stablecoin dealers quadrupled in number by 2020, according to crypto exchanges. According to Receita Federal, the Brazilian tax office, locals exchanged $11.4 billion in stablecoins between January and November 2021, almost double the quantity sold in 2020, while bitcoin trading hit $10.8 billion over the same time.

Brazilians are incentivised to buy cryptocurrency instead of dollars to protect themselves against inflation and devaluation. Brazilians must pay a tax on financial activities – IOF in Portuguese – that varies from 1.1 percent to 6.38 percent when purchasing foreign currency. Stablecoins are exempt from the tax.

Furthermore, the Brazilian Central Bank forbids Brazilians from storing US cash in domestic bank accounts. To be sure, the monetary body lifted the ban in December 2021 when it approved a new exchange rate system, but it has yet to be implemented.

Brazilians also place a higher value on cryptocurrency than on more conventional assets. According to statistics from the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), Brazilians had $50 billion in cryptocurrency as of August 2021, compared to $16 billion in securities.

Locals are acquainted with digital currency since the nation leads Latin America in digital payments. The BCB debuted Pix, a real-time retail payment system, in October 2020, with more than 104 million users — in a population of 214 million – and accounting for more than 70% of all transactions by November 2021.

In the crypto space, the BCB wants to test its CBDC for the first time in 2022, while the local parliament will debate three legislation to establish laws for the country's crypto economy.

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Image credits: Milad Fakurian, Filip Urban and Agustin Diaz Gargiulo.