Ethereum is a 'dictatorship,' Claims Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson

Economic

Summary:

Hoskinson says the Ethereum network is more like a “dictatorship” where Vitalik Buterin exerts too much influence over the development of the decentralized network.

Cardano’s Voltaire-era governance overhaul prevents it from becoming a “dictatorship” like Ethereum and sidesteps the “anarchy” of Bitcoin, its founder Charles Hoskinson said.

Speaking to Cointelegraph at Token2049 in Singapore, Hoskinson attacked Ethereum’s governance model, claiming it relies too heavily on its co-founder Vitalik Buterin for direction.

Hoskinson said that blockchains can elect to keep the protocol forever simple, like Bitcoin, or “pick a king” to run things. However, Cardano’s new governance model solves the “governance trilemma” of “efficiency, effectiveness and integrity” by using delegated representatives and a members-based organization called Intersect to distill complex governance topics down for a vote.

“If you have those three things, then you have a fair shot of avoiding the anarchy of Bitcoin or the dictatorship of Ethereum, and you actually have something that can move forward with one voice, but it’s still decentralized at the end of the day because it represents everybody.”

Pressed to explain his controversial remark comparing Ethereum to a dictatorship, Hoskinson stated that Ethereum’s “entire vision” starts and ends with the 30-year-old Buterin.

“Everybody looks to him for the roadmap. Everybody looks to him for inspiration, and he’s also the only person who has enough power to rally people,” he said. “If you were to remove him from the equation right now, what’s the next hard fork going to look like, and how quickly can they actually get there?” he asked.

Hoskinson said Buterin was primarily responsible for altering the Ethereum roadmap away from sharding-based optimization of the base chain and toward rollups and layer-2 networks for scalability.

In recent months, the Ethereum roadmap has been heavily criticized for empowering “extractive L2s” as fee revenue and activity on the L1 dropped.

“Where does this idea of embracing layer 2s or rollups come from? Was it some random Ethereum engineer — or was it Vitalik Buterin writing a blog post about it, talking about it, and advocating for it?”

Although Hoskinson believes Ethereum is heavily influenced by Buterin’s vision, Buterin does not wield unilateral power in the decentralized network.

The blockchain uses a mix of offchain and onchain governance, including the Ethereum Foundation and community and stakeholder input into Ethereum Improvement Protocols, with critical decisions taken at core developer meetings. Contentious decisions can result in a hard fork, as happened with The DAO hack rollback that resulted in Ethereum Classic.

Hoskinson was one of eight original co-founders of Ethereum and CEO of the Ethereum Foundation, but his for-profit vision for the protocol clashed with Buterin’s and the young creator fired him from the project at a meeting in Switzerland in 2014.

While Hoskinson conceded that he had played a broadly similar role in shaping Cardano since 201, he said the network’s new governance model is designed to ensure that “Charles, alive or dead, doesn’t matter. There’s still going to be innovation on a daily basis.”

Cardano’s Chang hard fork in early September turned its Cardano (ADA) asset into a governance token, enabling holders to elect representatives and vote on development proposals and on funding for community projects. The founding entities that have guided the project so far — the Cardano Foundation, Input Output Global and Emurgo — can no longer trigger forks and upgrades.

Hoskinson said the interplay between the members-based organization of researchers and engineers — dubbed Intersect — and the delegate representatives is a much more “collaborative model” that functions with or without an active founder.

“They can talk to each other, vote, and come up with and use a blockchain-based government to ratify a roadmap on a regular basis,” said Hoskinson.

Cardano is still working on finalizing a constitution that will likely set hard limits on some core issues, such as supply and how governance works.

Source: COINTELEGRAPH

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Warren Takunda

Economic

It's a big week ahead for the Kiwi as the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) looks set to cut by 50 basis points, representing a step-up in the urgency to address a stagnant economy.

Typically, such an acceleration in the rate cutting cycle would weigh on a currency, as it diminishes the attractiveness of New Zealand's assets to foreign investors that are on the hunt for higher returns.

"We think the disinflationary information that we have received will dominate and that this will, ultimately, encourage the RBNZ to accelerate the easing process," says Stephen Toplis, Head of Research at BNZ.

Although the NZD can initially come under some pressure, Jane Foley, Senior FX Strategist at Rabobank, thinks the currency can ultimately withstand the move.

"While an announcement of a 50-bps rate cut next week would likely still push the NZD lower, we would expect buyers to emerge on dips below the NZD/USD0.62 level," she says.

"In view of expectations that further rate cuts are on the cards from the Fed, the ECB and various other G10 central banks during Q4, the impact of RBNZ policy easing on the NZD crosses will likely be offset," she adds.

A 50bp rate cut from the RBNZ would come in the context of a similar-sized cut at the Federal Reserve in September.

The European Central Bank has meanwhile indicated it could step up the pace it cuts rates, while the Bank of England's Governor hinted Thursday that his central bank could follow suit.

Investment bank GBP/NZD consensus forecasts: The end-2024 and 2025 guide from Corpay has been released. Featuring the median, mean, high and low points forecasted by over 30 investment banks. Please request a copy here.

The context for NZD is therefore important: if others are stepping up the pace, the 50bp move at the RBNZ starts to look unremarkable.

This could leave NZD free to react to a prospective fiscal stimulus announcement from China, which could ultimately be the story of the week for markets.

"Chinese stimulus will boost regional demand for New Zealand exports," says Foley.

If anything, it would be global risks that can put the NZ Dollar under meaningful pressure in the near-term.

"A clear caveat to the recent better tone in both the AUD and the NZD is the outlook for the broader tone of risk appetite. Further escalation in Middle Eastern tensions would support the USD and undermine the AUD and NZD," says Foley.

Source: Poundsterlinglive

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Brookings Institution

Economic

Artificial intelligence (AI) raises an acute set of challenges with respect to export control. On the one hand, AI opens the door to potentially transformative military technologies. The United States has a strong interest in ensuring that U.S.-developed AI technology is not used by geopolitical rivals in ways that threaten national security. A key framework to further that interest is the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 (ECRA). The ECRA gives the Department of Commerce the authority to promulgate new export control rules regarding AI technologies.

On the other hand, the more expansive a system of export control restrictions on AI becomes, the more cumbersome and impractical it is to enforce. In addition, adopting overly broad new export control restrictions aimed at blocking cloud-based access to AI computation by geopolitical rivals also risks impairing AI research at U.S. universities. The result would be a less robust and innovative U.S. AI ecosystem.

Leakiness of current rules

In October 2022, October 2023, and April 2024, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the Department of Commerce released a series of export control rules aimed at limiting access by China to the most advanced chips used for AI computations. Unsurprisingly, this has spurred a thriving black market in smuggled chips.

But smuggling isn’t the only way for entities in export-restricted jurisdictions to access the computing power of the most advanced AI chips. A June article in Computerworld stated that “the existing rules omit the provision of chips-as-a-service, or cloud computing, creating a potential loophole for Chinese companies to benefit from the chips as long as they remain on US soil.” And an August 2024 Wall Street Journal article titled “China’s AI Engineers Are Secretly Accessing Banned Nvidia Chips” explained that “brokers are making overseas computing power available and offering a high degree of anonymity.”

These loopholes underscore that obtaining the benefits of AI computing does not require physical possession of the chips performing the computations. Cloud computing abstracts away the location of computing hardware. Just as a person can benefit from the convenience of performing a Google search without knowing the location of the servers doing the work of generating the search results, a company can train an AI model using cloud-based servers. Rules aimed at preventing a company—or a country—from physically obtaining the actual computing chips used to train AI models have limited effectiveness when those chips can be used from afar.

More restrictions on access to AI?

One possible response is to give the U.S. Department of Commerce the authority to broaden export control rules to restrict access to cloud-based AI computing. This was the goal of H.R. 4683, a bill introduced with bipartisan sponsorship in the House of Representatives in 2023 titled “Closing Loopholes for the Overseas Use and Development of Artificial Intelligence Act.” The bill, which has not made it out of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, would require the Department of Commerce to “prohibit United States persons and United States subsidiaries from providing support for the remote use or cloud use of any integrated circuit listed under Export Control Classification Number 3A090 and 4A090 of the Export Administration Regulations by an entity located in the People’s Republic of China or Macau.”

In May 2024, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced H.R. 8315, titled the “Enhancing National Frameworks for Overseas Restriction of Critical Exports Act” or “ENFORCE Act.” This bill, which received a 43-3 vote in the Committee on Foreign Affairs in late May, would allow the government to require that U.S. persons obtain a license for the “the export, reexport, or in-country transfer” of “covered artificial intelligence systems.”

H.R. 8315 provides an interim definition of “covered artificial intelligence system” that includes “an artificial intelligence system that… exhibits, or could foreseeably be modified to exhibit, capabilities in the form of high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to the national security and foreign policy of the United States or any combination of those matters, even if it is provided to end users with technical safeguards that attempt to prevent users from taking advantage of the relevant capabilities.” Depending on how it is interpreted, this definition could arguably be read to cover the majority of contemporary advanced AI technologies.

The challenge of defining boundaries on restricted AI

If language like this is included in a bill that is passed by Congress and signed into law, BIS wouldn’t necessarily adopt the broadest possible scope of coverage. There is every reason to believe that BIS would proceed with full awareness of the tradeoffs involved. But it is nonetheless important to consider the potential consequences of broad interpretations of controlled AI technology, which would risk sweeping in a host of technologies that have many applications unrelated to national security.

A good example is AI-based image recognition. Image recognition has a long list of civilian applications. It is used to enable AI systems to describe paintings to sight-impaired persons and to recognize faces for identity authentication. It is also used to help analyze medical images and to enable driverless vehicles to perceive their environment and navigate accordingly.

Image recognition has national security-relevant applications as well. For instance, it can be used in a military context for identifying targets. Image recognition is thus a classic example of dual use technology—that is, one with both civilian and military applications. Many—and perhaps most—categories of advanced AI technologies will fall into this dual-use category.

AI, “deemed exports,” and U.S. universities

An additional important policy consideration is that export control rules cover more than the physical transfer of restricted items to entities in targeted countries. As BIS explains, “[t]he obligation to obtain an export license from BIS before ‘releasing’ controlled technology to a foreign person is informally referred to as a deemed export. Releases of controlled technology to foreign persons in the U.S. are ‘deemed’ to be an export to the person’s country or countries of nationality.” In other words, provision of an export-controlled technology to a foreign national in the United States is also an “export.”

If a wide swath of leading-edge AI technology is designated as “controlled,” American universities will no longer be able to effectively perform AI research. According to a 2021 report from the National Foundation for American Policy, 74% of full time electrical engineering graduate students and 72% of those in computer and information sciences are foreign nationals. There are many graduate students in these disciplines who are working on AI. University research, including research by foreign graduate students at U.S. universities, is a key source of AI innovation.

Today, U.S. universities routinely provide their graduate student AI researchers with access to advanced, often cloud-based, AI-computing technologies. But if permitting graduate students to work at the frontiers of AI risks exposing universities to export control violations, universities will be forced to dramatically scale back their AI research.

The alternative—setting up partitioned university research spaces and projects accessible only to graduate students with the proper citizenship—is impractical for the majority of universities. And even if it were practical, it would be bad policy. American universities have a long history of welcoming foreign engineering graduate students who go on to have highly successful decades-long careers in the U.S. Many of them create U.S.-based startups that grow to employ hundreds or thousands of engineers. Choking off that pipeline is a surefire way to impede future American-led AI advances.

Ensuring continued U.S. AI innovation

Unintended consequences are always a concern with technology regulation, and particularly so when it comes to AI export control. Expanding AI export control rules to target cloud-based access to advanced AI computing risks having limited effectiveness against targeted entities, because those entities would still try to access AI cloud computing services through a series of hard-to-disentangle intermediaries.

It also risks undermining AI research at U.S. universities, thereby further accelerating a trend towards increasing industry dominance of American AI research. While industry AI research is extremely important, it should complement, not replace, university research. After all, not only does university AI research generate fundamental advances in knowledge, but it also helps make the U.S. a destination of choice for top foreign talent and provides vital early-career training for future AI professionals.

For the U.S. AI ecosystem to continue to thrive, U.S. universities need to be able to continue attracting the most talented AI researchers from around the world. AI export control rules should be crafted to avoid creating collateral damage to this fundamentally important aspect of the U.S. AI innovation ecosystem.

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Warren Takunda

Stocks

London stocks were flat in early trade on Friday as Israel’s strikes against Lebanon intensified and as investors eyed the latest US non-farm payrolls report.

At 0900 BST, the FTSE 100 was unchanged at 8,286.14.

Patrick Munnelly at Tickmill Group said: "Escalating tensions in the Middle East have cast a shadow over global markets ahead of the weekend, and oil prices are on the brink of their largest weekly gain in over a year on Friday. Despite the fact that the majority of equity indexes and stock futures are in positive territory, investors are speculating about the possibility of imminent retaliatory strikes by Israel against Iran, which is limiting their gains.

"Brent crude futures are anticipated to experience a weekly increase of approximately 8%, which would be the most significant since February 2023. Conversely, US crude futures are expected to experience a weekly increase of 8.2%, which would be the largest since March of last year. Despite the fact that US President Joe Biden has stated that he does not anticipate a ‘all-out war’ in the Middle East, he has previously suggested that the US was considering strikes on Iran's oil facilities as a response to Tehran's missile attack on Israel.

"In spite of the fact that oil prices have returned to the levels they were at just one month ago and oil has recovered from a low base, the pressure on world stocks and investors' risk appetite is beginning to mount. Should oil prices continue to increase and geopolitical tensions persist, investors may need to reevaluate their inflation forecasts."

Looking ahead to the rest of the day, attention will turn to the US non-farm payrolls report for September, which is due at 1330 BST, along with the unemployment rate and average earnings.

The market is expecting payrolls to grow by 146,000 for September, up a touch from the 140,000 jump seen in August. The unemployment rate is expected to be steady at 4.2% and average hourly earnings are also expected to be steady, at 3.8% year-on-year.

On the UK macro front, the S&P Global/CIPS construction PMI for September is scheduled for release at 0930 BST.

In equity markets, JD Wetherspoon edged higher as it posted a 33% drop in full-year pre-tax profit after separately disclosed items, but a 73.5% increase in pre-tax profit before separately disclosed items to £73.9m. The pub chain also said that full-year revenue rose 5.7% to £2.04bn as like-for-like sales grew 7.6%.

Watches of Switzerland gained after saying it had bought Hodinkee, a specialist website for luxury watch enthusiasts, for an undisclosed sum.

SSE was in the red as it emerged that completion of its Dogger Bank A offshore wind project has been pushed back to the second half of 2025.

Source: Sharecast

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NIESR

Economic

Summary & aims

This project aims to look at the policy recommendations outlined in the April 2023 Government White Paper, “High Stakes: Gambling Reform for the Digital Age”, that reduce or limit the consumers’ ability to spend money on gambling products. The White Paper estimates that the overall impact of it’s recommendations would lead to a reduction in the Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) of between 3-8 per cent per year (DCMS,2023). This amounts to around £329-£812 million retained by customers instead of being spent on gambling.

In 2022, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), stated that they expected the fiscal revenue from betting and gaming duties would reach £3.3 billion per year in 2022-23 (OBR,2022). This highlights how important it is to understand the impact of introducing policies/regulations that reduce gambling consumption and therefore reduce the the tax revenue gained by the British economy as well as other economic indicators such as employment.

Our work alongside the University of Glasgow will look at the what happens to the money that is no longer spent on gambling by consumers and whether this money is spent on other goods/services which have greater economic multipliers than that of the gambling industry. If this is the case, the net economic impact may be positive. For example, the Social Market Foundation found that the multiplier effect from economic sectors such as retail were much greater than the gambling industry (SMF, 2021).

Methodology

There are three stages to this project. In the first stage, a new survey of regular gamblers will be carried out in Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) to get an idea about their gambling behaviour.

This will inform the second part of the project, where we will undertake a discrete choice experiment where regular gamblers will be surveyed to collect data on how their personal expenditure could change under new gambling legislation where the amount they gamble will be limited/reduced. Choice modelling will be used to analyse the decisions and estimate the value that respondents place on the different categories of personal expenditure including other goods and services, savings and debt-reduction.

The results from the discrete choice experiment will allow us to derive elasticities between these different aspects of consumer expenditures to inform the third part of the project where we look at the macroeconomic effects of any changes in consumption by scaling these effects into a model of the UK economy.

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Owen Li

Economic

South Korean customers of cryptocurrency exchanges will have a new ally in the Digital Asset User Protection Foundation, which is being set up to ease the return of funds stuck in defunct exchanges.

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) approved an initiative by the self-regulatory Digital Asset Exchange Joint Consultative Group (DAXA) to create the foundation. The foundation may begin activities in October.

Where did all the crypto exchanges go?

The FSC stated that 10 of the 22 cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea have closed and another three have suspended operations, leading to concerns about the return of users’ funds held by the nonfunctioning exchanges.

The safety of customers’ funds in the hands of the exchanges is also a concern as the “private keys to users’ virtual asset wallets are stored at these exchange service providers.” Therefore:

“To make sure that users’ assets are safely protected and properly returned to their owners, it is necessary to have a more systematic management mechanism along with voluntary efforts from those closed down exchange service providers.”

The Digital Asset User Protection Foundation will consult with the exchanges, after which users’ funds and virtual assets will be transferred to the foundation. From there, a bank will be chosen to hold users’ cash, and a “KRW-based [South Korean won-based] exchange service provider” — presumably one of the still functional crypto exchanges — will store and manage their virtual assets.

The foundation will then contact the users to inform them of the return process.

Government backs up the foundation

The Digital Asset User Protection Foundation will have an operating committee made up of representatives of the bank and exchange that will handle the cash and virtual assets, several government agencies and private sector experts. The government will back the foundation:

“Financial authorities plan to provide relevant support to facilitate consultation […] regarding the matter of transfer of users’ assets.”

For exchanges that cease operations in the future, “authorities will guide them accordingly to transfer their customers’ assets to the foundation.”

South Korea enacted the Virtual Asset User Protection Act on July 19. Among the requirements of the act are that exchanges keep customer deposits in banks and keep customer virtual assets separate from their own.

Source: COINTELEGRAPH

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JanusHenderson

Economic

For the third summer in a row, Janus Henderson Investors had the pleasure of hosting interns from Greenwood Project.

Since 2016, Greenwood Project (GP) has worked diligently to create career paths in the financial services industry for Black and Latino college students. GP rigorously trains its scholars in specific career-track skills they will need to succeed in finance, then partners with financial services companies to place students into highly competitive summer internships across the country.

I’ve been fortunate to be able to interact with these college students and learn about their thoughts on financial literacy, how they view those of us who work in financial services, and how they envision their financial futures.

This year, we’re highlighting the views and opinions of GP interns Adin Farmer (The University of Illinois-Chicago, 2027), Kai Washington (Washington University, St. Louis, 2026), Arelys Estrada (DePaul University, 2026), Anthony Armstrong (DePaul University, 2027), Manny Wiley (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2026), and Imani Noel (DePaul University, 2026).

I believe the ideas and data we’re able to gather from our interactions with GP participants provide those of us who advise and educate clients and their families with valuable ideas on how to better reach the next generation as well as help narrow the financial and knowledge gaps that exist for underserved communities. Their insights provide important clues on how our industry should think about young people, what they’re looking for from us, and how we can better educate and engage with younger investors.

“Investing needs a Netflix docuseries.”-Imani Noel

In March 2019, most Americans had never heard of Max Verstappen or Daniel Riccardo. And the only times most people thought about car racing was on Memorial Day or in late February when they stumbled on news about the Indy 500 or Daytona 500.

That all changed when Netflix put out the “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” docuseries. The show, now in its sixth season, attracted a huge following and turned a lot more Americans into fans of the sport.

“Formula 1” gave viewers a better understanding of something that had previously seemed foreign and captured the imagination of fans as they considered what they would do if they were in the driver’s seat.

And that was one of the top takeaways from my time with our interns: The idea that we in financial services need to do a better job of capturing their imaginations. Imani put it best when she said, “Investing needs a Netflix docuseries!”

Imagine a docuseries that has interesting characters, explains the intricacies of investing, and allows viewers to see themselves in the driver’s seat. Admittedly, this may be difficult to pull off since budgeting, investing, and financial planning can be quite boring for most people. (And let’s face it, reinvesting your dividends every quarter or redoing your budget after a life event isn’t quite as exciting as turn one in Baku during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.)

But while it might not be easy, it is up to all of us in financial services to find new and compelling ways to portray our industry and work as inspiring, meaningful, and, yes, exciting. And I truly believe that solid, approachable financial education content may help advisors play a larger role in the lives of young people.

“Social media creates a cat and mouse game.”-Adin Farmer

It’s important to know that young people want more financial education. In fact, Janus Henderson’s 2024 Investor Survey found that 96% of millennials are very or somewhat interested in building their financial literacy.

Too often, however, as Manny stated, “Younger generations rely on the algorithms of social media as their primary source of news information and finance-related material. This negatively affects young Americans’ financial literacy because of information overload from inadequate or inaccurate sources.”

Along with that, lower-income and minority groups are often targeted with educational resources that are not tailored to their specific needs and interests. Arelys talked about this issue from her standpoint. As the daughter of a young mother with family members in Mexico, she felt financial services firms need to do a better job understanding and speaking to families like hers.

Adin also talked about how rap culture plays an outsized role in how minority communities view money and finances. In his words, it has created a “cat and mouse” game for young people who are trying to find success but haven’t developed the right habits or may not have the financial foundation to sustain a “successful” lifestyle. At the same time, rap culture captures young people’s imaginations; that why it’s easy for a hip-hop artist who seems to have everything to be a young person’s hero.

Arely’s and Adin’s comments highlight how important it is for us to investigate how different backgrounds and family histories affect an individual’s understanding of and access to financial education, and how we can better tailor educational offerings to make them more relevant and relatable. This will allow us to “amplify the right voices,” as Imani put it. The way I see it, those are the voices of financial advisors who are consistently going into underserved communities to better understand and educate them.

“Generational wealth is not only wealth but the knowledge of how to build it.”-Anthony Armstrong

We all know that education leads to progress. But the key is staying in front of underserved communities and providing the right education so that this generation is able to build for the next generation.

That brings us to an important point Anthony brought up. He astutely stated: “Generational wealth is not only wealth but the knowledge of how to build it.” He recounted the story of a babysitting job he had for a white family where the 10-year-old he was watching was talking about investing and was, to Anthony’s surprise, familiar with index funds!

On that note, I once again found this year that these young people are willing to step up to the plate and take the lead.

For example, Manny said he views himself as “the financial advisor” of his family. Kai talked about how the conversations she is having with her family have grown to include discussions on savings account interest rates, credit cards, and credit scores. She noted that as she has learned more about finances and investing, she has found herself becoming the teacher for her parents. And Anthony mentioned how, when he returns to Chicago after his internship, he wants to devote more time to helping his mom learn about investing and finances.

“The Kids are Alright”-The Who

Thinking back to the title of the 1966 song, I am happy to report that, yes, the kids are alright.

Every year, I walk away from my time with the GP interns feeling more hopeful about those who will lead us in the future. But those of us who serve in positions where we can educate, provide opportunities, and create financial literacy-related content can’t just “walk away.” We need to walk toward these groups, no matter what our background or ethnicity is, to help build them up their knowledge of finances and investing. Once we do that more consistently, we’ll all be more than alright.

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