Bitcoin Daily: Philippines Central Bank Eyes Issuing Cryptocurrency; Security Firm Ledger Details Data Breach

The Philippines central bank is now considering creating its own central bank digital currency (CDBC), it said during a virtual meeting, having formed a committee to address the issue, Bloomberg reported.

The bank, called Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas or BSP, will look at the feasibility and potential implications of implementing a digital coin.

Benjamin Diokno, governor of the bank, said he doesn’t personally think the digital coins pose a threat to other types of currency. He added that while cryptocurrency is important, the blockchain technology behind it is equally so.

“Cryptocurrency for us has always been beyond the asset itself but more on the blockchain technology that underpins it,” he said, according to Bloomberg.

Several other countries are considering CDBCs, including the U.K., Sweden and Thailand, according to recent PYMNTS reports.

In other news, Ledger, the crypto wallet maker, reported a data breach that resulted in the exposure of 1 million email addresses and other data, according to a blog post on the company’s website.

In addition to email addresses, the data accessed included names, phone numbers, ordered products and postal addresses.

The company said in the post that the breach resulted from an unauthorized third party hacking into the company’s eCommerce and marketing database, which is used for the company’s order confirmations and promotions, through an application programming interface (API) key, which has since been deactivated to stop more data from leaking.

The company said it was able to fix the problem “immediately,” according to the post, and did a third-party investigation through Orange Cyberdefense to determine the issue.

Meanwhile, TradeStation, the U.S. subsidiary of Japan’s Monex, is launching its own crypto lending service called Crypto Earn, according to Cointelgraph.

Monex announced the plan Wednesday (July 29) in its earnings report. Crypto Earn, the company said, will be C2B2B, meaning it will allow for lending to institutions from borrowed assets from clients.

The announcement comes after the company’s cryptocurrency brokerage platform launch last November. That program, called TradeStation Crypto, supported Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin.

Crypto trading is currently available in 40 states in the U.S., Cointelgraph reported.