The Australian Reserve Bank (RBA) revealed recently that it is considering using the central bank digital currencies in its payment system based on the Ethereum network as we are reading in today’s altcoin news.The Australian Reserve Bank revealed that it has decided to stimulate using CBDC in the wholesale payments system and the plan was to see whether the system will be a good one for banks settles customer payments between themselves and whether they will be able to operate on a permissioned Ethereum-based network. A number of central banks have already started experimenting with digital currencies hoping to create a working system that will soften the impact of Facebook’s Libra. Libra faced regulatory issues and the central banks are advancing their own plans. The bank is still not convicted that cryptocurrencies offer a real alternative to traditional money but they appear to see the value in opting for digital money.For example, the central banks of China, Turkey, Sweden, and other countries are working on developing their CBDCs and the Australian Reserve Bank revealed that it will also conduct trials and test to see how the CBDC might affect modern payment settlement systems. The recent reports show that the bank has a goal to stimulate the role and the impact of the central bank digital currency by creating a system that will allow the financial institutions to settle the customer payments. The bank wanted to see how the CBDC will perform when given to commercial banks as well.The banks will be able to exchange tokens and to settle various obligations and redeem them through the central bank, and if the system functions well, it could secure the role of the banks in the cashless society. The banks are still unconvinced that there’s a real need for the use of these crypto-assets but if they are going to be used, they will bring a lot of advantages because they will mainly reduce the cost of the payments and improve their speed.  The financial institutions now are required to exchange instructions with each other all of the time which consumes a lot of time and increases the cost. Going with CBDC will make the transaction time faster but it will also mean that these systems will execute all parts or none of them.

The Winklevoss' brothers Gemini has launched an insurance company which will cover up for up to $200 million for Gemini Custody which is reportedly the largest amount for any crypto custody service in the world. As Gemini launches an insurance company, the head of risk at the exchange named Yusuf Hussain shared the news and said that the captive insurance company is called Nakamoto, Ltd. and will secure the custodial business of the exchange for up to $200 million.Aiding Nakamoto Ltd. and its launch, there have been a lot of traditional insurance brokers joining this new journey. Aon and Marsh were among them - and the custodial clients of Gemini will also reportedly be able to purchase additional insurance from Nakamoto Ltd. in order to secure their own holdings beyond the general $200 million.According to Hussain, Gemini launches an insurance company as an advancement in its coverage - allowing the institutional clients to continue to meet their own regulatory requirements. He explained that the move “is consistent with Gemini’s approach of being a security-first, compliance-first, and regulatory friendly exchange and custodian.”As a reminder, Gemini initially launched their custody wing in September, when it was in the crypto news for being one of the most impressive exchanges for custodial services.Meanwhile, insurance is still a major barrier to crypto investment services looking to court more risk-averse traditional financial players. The legendary insurance firm Lloyd's of London has gotten involved, securing hot wallet holdings for Coinbase and the Kingdom Trust custody business.As Gemini launches an insurance company, we can definitely relate to the exchange's history with advancing insurance into crypto investments - and specifically the 2018 move to insure hot wallet holdings as further evidence of their desire to provide more security in the industry.

“Obtaining meaningful insurance in the crypto industry remains a challenge, and our captive will help to increase our insurance capacity and move the industry forward," the president of Gemini Cameron Winklevoss added.

In the end, Gemini is not the first to launch an insurance option. Before this, Ledger Vault which is the custody arm of the hardware manufacturer Ledger did the same and acquired a crime insurance policy which supports them with a coverage of up to $150 million in crime losses.

Venezuela’s Maduro, the controversial president announced that he plans to revive the economy of the country and his oil-backed cryptocurrency Petro which never attracted any users as per the reports in the altcoin news.The past few years have brought a lot of economic difficulties for the country of Venezuela whose native currency, bolivar crashed and suffered a loss of value because of the extreme inflation. In the meantime, the cryptocurrencies were entering the markets and became a huge trend around the world which is why the country decided to create its own, national cryptocurrency that was backed by the oil supplies of Venezuela.The coin was supposed to be a safe haven from the worthless bolivar but it also aimed to avoid the US sanctions. Petro was launched in 2018 but it failed to attract users as the people were more interested in Bitcoin and other assets. Venezuela’s Maduro announced that he plans to bring the Petro back. Maduro published a decree that says that the airline flying from Caracas now have to pay for Venezuela’s fuel via Petro:

‘’I decree the sale of all fuel sold by the PDVSA for planes operating international routes be made in petros from now on.’’

He ordered that the coin has to be more widely used throughout the country since the US banned the use of the coin and marked it as a scam which only crashed the popularity of the coin.  Another one of his decrees states that the coin has to be used for paying the state document services such as passports but the people of Venezuela avoid Petro as much as possible since many do not know how to use it. For the tourists and foreigners, they also don’t use it because it was marked as a scam and labeled as a risk. Venezuela showed that it is open to the idea of crypto by using decentralized coins to battle the hyperinflation.Venezuela even attempted to discuss trades in Petro with Russia and both countries had issues with the US and discussed they were discussing methods of getting rid of the use of USD in their trade deals. Maduro approved bonuses for the public employees and pensioners but insisted they should be paid in Petro. The coins were later exchanged for bolivars and used to purchase other currencies. The country banned the possibility of exchanging petro for bolivars.

OXT Research, a tool from Samourai Wallet, some time ago, exposed the essence of the PlusToken Bitcoin sell-off that happened in 2019. Besides a crash course in cryptocurrencies privacy issues, this new information verifies a correlational link between price actions for Bitcoin (BTC) over the previous six months.While the PlusToken scam was over at last in 2019, the on-chain data by OXT Research is still analyzed. Chainalysis performed the first forensic sweep and found out that over $2 billion in assets gathered. There was some uncertainty about their analysis methods.   In the previous report, it seems that the first amount of Bitcoin (BTC) supposedly cashed out is much lower than the most recent data as we are reading in today’s crypto news.They stated:

“The Chainalysis blog post is extremely opaque and we are unable to verify this analysis due to a lack of references including pre-mix addresses and clusters, postmix addresses, and most importantly distribution transaction IDs.”

Really the consequences from the first multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme is still being analyzed and calculated. Probably the most important is the correlational link between the price of Bitcoin and the off-loading procedure of PlusToken. While the concrete figures are uncertain, OXT estimates that the fraud’s “total hoard likely exceeded 1% of BTC’s total supply.”According to the report, the most remarkable characteristic of this scam was its size. “Billion-dollar scams are very rare,” they said. “We did not expect the previously reported 200K BTC volumes to be accurate, but they were.” From this supply, few of addresses identified due to the awful privacy practices on the side of PlusToken started distributing Bitcoin (BTC) at a rate of 1,050 Bitcoin (BTC) per day. The distribution started in 2019 in the first week of August and lasted until the end of November.The report confirms that “this distribution likely had a significant downward effect on price action in the latter half of the year.” From the projected 187,646 BTC, PlusToken has yet to distribute between 55,843 to 75,843 tokens. The epilogue is that the PlusToken fraud is still unraveling. Due to the research from several members of the cryptocurrency community, but it will be easier by far to follow where these coins are going in 2020.