$3B video game Fortnite used for money laundering; Worst thing about Chinese Fintech; Re-making Banks with crypto staking -- via Autonomous ?NEXT

Hi fellow futurists -- our top 3 thoughts for this week are:

1. PAYMENTS: $3 Billion revenue video game Fortnite used for money laundering using in-game currency
2.  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: "Financial Deadbeats" map is the worst things about Chinese Fintech
3.  CRYPTO: Re-making Traditional Banks with Custodian/Exchange Staking-as-a-Service

Analysis of these items is below, and this week’s artist is Holger Lippmann.

PAYMENTS: $3 Billion revenue video game Fortnite used for money laundering using in-game currency

Human nature does not change. We can have arcane towers of financial services and regulatory architecture, but the outcomes are a rhyming echo of our DNA. Let's start with this: Fortnite, a virtual place where 200 million people spent time playing a game in 2018, earned $3 billion for its parent company. The video streamer most popular for playing Fortnite on (essentially) TV earned $10 million for the entertainment he provided to 20 millions followers. One of his videos gathered nearly 700,000 views -- for comparison, Conan O'Brien gets about 1.3 million per night.

Fortnite makes money by selling cosmetic upgrades to players, and since they inhabit this rendered world like any other social network, our dopamine center and social pressures motivate purchases for status. Given the payments infrastructure of this game and its virtual currency (not on the blockchain!) are comparatively weak, criminals have started using in-game value for money laundering. A report from The Independent linked below finds that stolen credit card credentials are being used to purchase game currency and then cashed out at discount on eBay. Additionally, over 50,000 instances of online scams related to the game made their way to social media per month. Welcome to the Internet, everyone! We can't help but remind you that Steve Bannon (yes, that one) and Brock Pierce (EOS, Tether, Puerto Rico, etc.) once ran the largest World of Warcraft virtual money exchange.

So should we bring down the financial regulators on Epic (the maker of Fortnite) as hard as New York state came down on Bitcoin companies with the BitPay regime, freezing innovation? Should KYC/AML be required for all video games? Under the Chinese model, Tencent's "Honor of Kings" mobile game generates $2 billion in revenue per year and is under the same strict government control/license as financial products. Players are checked against a registration database to control for age and name, and (we expect) the play time data flows into a social credit score. But recent studies of KYC/AML policies persuade us otherwise. When looking at the amount of criminal proceeds actually seized by authorities based on those policies, the amount is less than 1%. The cost may not be worth the outcome.

Source: Fortnite (Independent, Slate, Bitcoinist), Fortune (Streaming), Interest.co (Ron Pol on AML ineffectiveness), GamesIndustry (Tencent database), AML fines 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: "Financial Deadbeats" map is the worst things about Chinese Fintech 

In our continued amazed gawking at the Chinese fintech landscape, we bring you the following. There is now a feature within WeChat, one of two channels for all mobile chat communication, to show a map of "financial deadbeats" around you. That's right -- a shaming visualization of people who are in financial trouble, like some sort of public sex offender list. We link to the article below, and assume that it is true despite how preposterous the whole thing seems. 

Offenses that could land you on the blacklist include serious ones like being the founder of a digital lender that collapsed with 12 million unpaid accounts, and trivial ones like being a single mother embroiled in a divorce proceeding. Once you are on the list, not only will your full name and financial information be public entertainment on this app, but access to credit, commerce and university admission could be revoked. To add insult to injury, a special ringback tone is added to the "discredited" person's mobile phone, alerting any potential caller about your poor financial management skills.

We add to this soup the idea of algorithmic bias exhibited by AI based on training data. We've covered this issue in the past, but point to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently bringing it up into mainstream conversation. From propaganda bots to algo-racism, these arcane issues are starting to concern the broader Western polity. So when you combine historical training data reflecting past social and economic biases with social media enforcement systems, dystopia calls. One of the most important financial innovations in the West was bankruptcy, allowing entrepreneurs to fail and start over. This normalization of financial wipe-out led to an equilibrium with higher risk-taking and innovation. It is chilling to see technology being used, with potential for error and misuse, to stifle that spirit. Based on the US personal bankruptcy data below, you can see that 6 out of 1000 people would be guilty according to WeChat, skewed in large part to minority populations. No thanks. 

Source: Abacus News (deadbeat map), Independent (deadbeats), Vox (algo-racism), On bankruptcy normalization and bankruptcy zip codes

CRYPTO: Re-making Traditional Banks with Custodian/Exchange Staking-as-a-Service

2019 has started off with a bang in capital markets blockchain -- (1) a $20 million investment by Nasdaq in enterprise blockchain FX player Symbiont, on the heels of Baakt and ErisX, (2) a Security Token Realized conference well attended by financial services execs from companies like State Street, of which 70%+ owned BTC, (3) and meaningful technical developments and financial products from folks like Tokeny, Securitize, Templum, Atomic Capital and others. But let us shift to another leg of the crypto stool this year, which is staking-as-a-service. We recommend reading the Coindesk op-ed from Michael Casey linked below, which outlines how a transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in Ethereum (if it ever happens) could lead to the intermediation of crypto deposit holding on behalf of consumers. If investors get paid for outsourcing private key management to custodians, argues Casey, we re-create the fractional banking system with its pitfalls, like counterparty risk and incentive trends towards leverage. 

We agree, but aren't immediately put off by the comparison because credit is the lifeblood of inter-temporal economic decision making. Staking reminds us of two things from traditional finance -- capital requirements for banks, and interest-bearing deposits within those banks. As soon as users realize that they should be getting some interest return from their outsourced cryptocurrency accounts at exchanges or custodians, there should be broad competition around this product. If Coinbase offers 3% while Binance offers 4% of staking rewards (or vice versa), the consumer choice becomes more clear. This is exactly what banks compete on in terms of attracting deposits.

Users can already get an interest rate on their crypto for margin lending, up to 7% or so depending on the token. As an aside -- that margin lending may be a bad deal for the lender, since you are powering the short-selling of the capital asset you hold. You could also compare staking returns to dividends that corporations pay to their shareholders, as shareholders buy the equity and commit capital to an asset. Given that these staking rewards are raw inflation (rather than cashflow earned by a corporation), the dividends become a value transfer between holders that stake and those that do not -- a tax on the unsophisticated user. Also, a dividend by law has to be passed on to the beneficial owner, which is a good thing. But that's not very anarchist of us.

Source: Forbes (Symbiont), Security Tokens Realised (agenda, video), Coindesk (Staking op-ed), Medium (On fractional banking), Token Daily (on staking as a service), Celsius Network (interest on ETH)

Thanks for reading!

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