Daily Digest - 27th October 2022

Headlines

▌Report : Meta's metaverse losses this year are as high as $9.4 billion

Facebook owner Metareported that its metaverse division Reality Labs posted a $3.7 billion loss in the third quarter of this year. That brings Reality Labs' year-to-date losses to a staggering $9.4 billion. Meta said that it does not "anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses" will grow significantly next year. Meta said Reality Labs generated$285 millionin revenue for the quarter, down from $558 million the previous year. The company's "Family of Apps" business segment, which includes Facebook and Instagram, registered $27.4 billion in revenue. Most recently, Meta shareholder Altimeter Capital Management's CEOsuggested in a blog postthat the company slash its workforce by at least 20% in addition to reducing investment, primarily by limiting Reality Labs' expenditures to no more than $5 billion a year. Less than a month ago, Zuckerbergtold employeesMeta was freezing hiring and restructuring teams to cut costs.

Policies

▌Vietnamese PM calls on government to regulate cryptocurrencies

Pham Minh Chinh, the prime minister of Vietnam, has reportedly said the country's government should study crypto regulation, in part based on residents continuing to trade digital assets despite their lack of legal recognition.Vietnam's National Assembly will discuss the AML bill on Nov. 1 and likely approve or disapprove it by the end of its fourth session on Nov. 15.

Cryptocurrency

▌Fitch: Lack of regulation restricts U.S. banking industry participation in cryptocurrency space

The legislative framework for banking and digital assets at the federal level needs to be approved by the U.S. Congress.Until a comprehensive and desirable global crypto regulatory framework is in place, the U.S. banking industry may tread carefully.

▌Singapore Proposes Ban on Borrowing to Fund Cryptocurrency Purchases

SINGAPORE (Oct 26): Singapore has proposed to ban retail investors from borrowing to fund cryptocurrency purchases, part of a slew of suggestions to further tighten the city-state's regulatory regime for digital assets.

Other potential steps in a Monetary Authority of Singapore consultation paper include stopping companies from using tokens deposited by retail investors for lending or staking to generate yields. Staking is the process of earning rewards by deploying coins for crypto applications.

▌UAE's central bank pilots cbank digital currencies transactions

The Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates (CBUAE) said on Wednesday it has completed the world’s largest pilot of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) transactions, with other regulators including the People’s Bank of China’s Digital Currency Institute. The pilot was part of Project mBridge, which experiments with cross-border payments using a common platform based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) which central banks can use to issue and exchange their CBDCs.

▌Binance launches native oracle network

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by volume, launched its native oracle service on Wednesday to enable smart contracts to run on real-world inputs and outputs, starting with the BNB Chain ecosystem. Binance said its oracle service will directly benefit some 1,400 applications running on BNB Chain, with 10 BNB Chain projects already integrated with the Binance Oracle network.