I could have called this : XDC and the Mother Tongue of Global Finance or the First World Crypto for Good or Ill.
A friend of mine is a terribly wonky and straight-laced IT-type for the Government. The Big Government. He enjoys regulatory compliance and the assurance that his network will have high levels of uptime. He said “ISO200222 crypto compliance” and it got my attention.
Before we define ISO 200222 or what it does, I have to let it slip that the following cryptos are ISO 20022 compliant: Ripple () Stellar Lumens () Iota (MIOTA #50) Algorand (ALGO #24) and XinFin (XDC #108
Since XinFin lands squarely in my beat, I must subject you to what I have learned about it.
At first glance, XDC looks like a terribly wonky and straightlaced crypto project. So the founders must be some industry insiders and former SEC regulators, right? Yes. This fellow was a part of SWIFT longer than I knew it existed. Also, the advisors (Roger Ver an early Bitcoin investor, Libertarian and scourge of Twitter) are also amazing.
ISO 20022, Here we go. For any message there is a format (spacing, content areas, language and grammar). Some messaging formatting is chaotic and has little structure (such as this blog)but are very entertaining. For stodgy, uncreative types with a lot of work to do (computers, for example) formatting is a huge deal. An incorrectly formatted message gets rejected (like my movie scripts) regardless of the compelling plot, tight plotting and well-drawn characters. Once stodgy, uncreative types agree on a format, you can bet your ass they will stick to it. They will reward those that use this format with future work. Anything not in format, they will reject. Yes, this creates inflexible silos, but for existing structures that are trying their damndest to modernize, inflexible silos are what they crave. Banking networks have agreed upon ISO 20022 as their official format.
The language is XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The language and its grammar allows users to specify the formatting rather flexibly. Think of it as rules for punctuation and spacing. What is the format you ask? ISO20022 lays it all out for ya, bud. I’m not digging too deep into that abyss. This standard format is set to be adopted by the Federal Reserve in 2023. Does this mean XRP and XLM will be “the new dollar”? I hope not, but if network usage drives token price, then it is likely Ripple and Stellar Lumens networks will see more activity, more hype and more projects building on them.
Networks need utility, else people wouldn’t use them. So what can you do with XDC? A lot of stuff. It's the translator between tradfi and defi.
XDC runs DASL on the Corda network. Transactions, asset primitives and even stuff from legacy platforms like Quickbooks can port over to XDC. Users can tokenize just about everything. There is even talk about stablecoins.
In short, DeFi is seeking to become a legit Wall Street, while XDC is helping Wall Street to become DeFi; everything gets tokenized. The tokenization scheme, thy name is: Stodgy bankers (HSBC, Deutche Bank, ING, AIG and Rabobank) the Federal Reserve, the SWIFT system of international wire transfer settlements, and more.
XDC is a hybrid between private blockchain and public blockchains were anyone can hop on and run a validator. But that doesn’t mean it’s an anarchocapitalist free-for-all.
All users and validators must be KYC’d (government issued ID verification). This is a high throughput network with 2 second block intervals and over 2000 transactions per second (in theory). The max supply is 37.5 billion tokens. In true Roger Ver fashion, the premine was… all of it. All 37.5 billion tokens were pre-mined. 12 billion are in circulation and daily trade volume is about $7 million USD. They minted a similar ERC20 token called XDCE at a similar circulating supply of 12 billion and they are doing tapered burns to match deflation burns of ETH. Savvy.
With low daily volume and a market cap around a billion, I think this is a sleeping giant. Lots of potential here and no hype. But, I've been wrong before- this isn't investment advice, nor should it be considered so.
