Lewis McLellan

4 weeks ago | omfif.org | Lewis McLellan |Marcelo M. Prates

Hurdles to blockchain adoption in capital markets are falling away. The US’ abandonment of Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 was a key step and the Eurosystem’s advancing work on cash settlement solutions are welcome. However, there are still major stumbling blocks to be addressed. The Eurosystem announced in February 2025 that it is expanding its work to create a solution for the cash leg settlement of distributed ledger technology transactions in central bank money.

1 month ago | omfif.org | Lewis McLellan

Discussion of stablecoins has exploded among policy-makers and payment system incumbents since the election of US President Donald Trump. Use of the instruments has been growing steadily for several years but remains confined primarily to trading pairs with cryptoassets and for use in cross-border payments by those who prefer not to or are unable to access the traditional banking system.

1 month ago | omfif.org | Lewis McLellan

Digital wallets have already begun to take hold of our payments behaviour, accounting for 29% of card transactions in 2023, up from 8% in 2019. Their capabilities are only set to grow as identity solutions, new forms of money and other functions come online. But regulators are starting to become concerned that there are only really two games in town: Apple and Google. Their respective wallets, bundled with iOS and Android respectively, absolutely dominate the market.

1 month ago | omfif.org | Lewis McLellan

Traditionally, financial market participants exchange electronic messages to coordinate financial transactions, and each institution updates its own books and records based on these messages. The final record, against which the accuracy of each institutions’ own records is assessed, is maintained by a central party. The integrity of the system is based on trust in that central party. Public, permissionless blockchains are upending that order.

Jan 24, 2025 | omfif.org | Lewis McLellan

Just four days after his inauguration, US President Donald Trump is starting to make good on his promises to the crypto market. After heading into office with a brazen husband-and-wife double act ‘memecoin’ issuance, there was little doubt that Trump would fervently back the crypto market. He followed through on that signal, with an executive order entitled ‘Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology’ on Thursday.