Blockchain

Corporate FOMO

Published

2 weeks ago

February 18, 2021

Elon, you crazy bastard. You’ve just gone and done it, haven’t you?

Look, I don’t need to tell you what happened: it was covered in pretty much every single news and news-adjacent outlet in the world. But let’s not mince words here. The richest person on Earth announcing that his company, the tenth most valuable asset on Earth, had poured 8% of its cash reserves into bitcoin is the kind of event that even the most fervent BTC maximalist circa 2017 would have straight-up laughed at.

It was amazing when hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones first invested in bitcoin as a hedge against inflation. It was incredible when Michael Saylor catapulted Microstrategy, his small-scale business software player, onto the global scene by investing pretty much all their cash into BTC. It was almost unbelievable when PayPal announced that they were rolling out crypto services to their hundreds of millions of users.

Yet even by those standards Elon’s Tesla bet is a big deal. Sure, he may be a pot-smoking, pot-stirring billionaire eccentric. But he’s also one of the single most prominent corporate figures in the world, with an ironclad, legal obligation to his shareholders to maximise his company’s value. And bitcoin is now part of that strategy. I reckon some other companies might be taking notes.

In retrospect, it was inevitable

Over the long years of bitcoin’s post-2017 winter, the idea that institutions might one day see the purpose and value in crypto was one of those thoughts that kept us warm while the rest of the world viewed us as a laughing stock.

But I can’t recall anyone ever seriously proposing that a publicly listed company would one day hold bitcoin on their balance sheet. Hedge funds making a speculative bet? Sure. A company fleeing the safety of US dollars for bitcoin? Not in a million years. There’d be a shareholder revolt!

It speaks to how profoundly COVID-19 has changed our ideas around money that, while certainly a surprise, Tesla plunging $1.5 billion into bitcoin is being greeted not as the unhinged actions of a madman, but as a rational response to the potential collapse of fiat value. The US has, after all, printed 30% of all the US dollars ever printed in the last 12 months. Not an available option with bitcoin.

Mars mission initiated

The immediate response to the Tesla investment was predictably euphoric. The bitcoin price surged almost 30%, topping out at a shade over US$49,000. Twinned with the retail-fuelled fallout from the Gamespot/Robinhood debacle (which caused exchange sign-ups to surge to unprecedented levels), the whole market started melting up. Major coins were doing 50% days. Minor coins were doubling weekly. Forget $50k; $100k was just a matter of time.

Yet euphoria and a sense of inevitability are two of the most reliable top indicators there are. A correction here would allow the market to execute “maximum pain” on new and leveraged participants, one of its favourite pastimes. And right now most crypto charts look less like an ascending rollercoaster than they do a line drawing of the Burj Khalifa. Gravity is going to kick in sooner or later.

Long story short: it is probably a matter of time until bitcoin starts its irresistible journey to $100k. But nobody knows when that time might be. It could be tomorrow, it could be next week, it could be in six months. The only (almost) certainty is that Tesla won’t be the last company to buy bitcoin. (Two weeks ago, Microstrategy ran a conference to help companies looking to buy bitcoin; more than a thousand attended). Consider this our window before the corporate FOMO really sets in.

Source: https://blog.coinjar.com/corporate-fomo/

Up Next

DeFi aggregator growth ‘set to dwarf 2020’s volume’

Don't Miss

Tea Company Pivots to Bitcoin Mining (Feb. 18, 2021)

Blockchain

Bitcoin price is going to ‘infinity’ — Kraken CEO

Published

1 hour ago

March 4, 2021

Republished by Plato

Bitcoin (BTC) will be worth “infinity” and humanity will soon give up pricing it in U.S. dollars, says the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.

Speaking to Bloomberg on March 4, Jesse Powell was characteristically bullish on Bitcoin as BTC/USD broke above $50,000.

Powell: $1 million Bitcoin in ten years “reasonable”

“Of course, you know, we can only speculate, but when we measure it in terms of dollars, you have to think it’s going to infinity,” he told Bloomberg TV about future price trajectory.

“This national currency’s only fifty years old, it’s already showing extreme signs of weakness, and pretty soon I think people are going to start measuring the price of things in Bitcoin.”

Powell was commenting as the USD weakened alongside a macro market sell-off on Wednesday, an event which had next to no impact on Bitcoin. At the same time, the U.S. national debt quietly passed $28 trillion for the first time in history.

Despite a rejection of $50,000 support, Bitcoin bulls thus remained more than optimistic.

“The people that are believers in Bitcoin see… it’s going to replace all of the world’s currency, so that basically means whatever the market cap of the dollar is, the euro — all of that combined is what Bitcoin could be worth,” Powell continued.

“I think in the near term, people see it surpassing gold as a store of value, so I think $1 million as a price target within the next ten years is pretty reasonable.”

As Cointelegraph noted, Bitcoin closed February 26% above its target dictated by the stock-to-flow-based price models, with creator PlanB still confident that $100,000 will hit at some time this year.

*Bitcoin stock-to-flow chart as of Mar. 3, 2021. Source: Digitalik*

No time for gold

Meanwhile, the gold ecplise argument has been steadily gaining support on social media in particular, often at the expense of gold bugs, who are left with increasingly little ammunition to defend their anti-Bitcoin stance.

As Cointelegraph reported, it was billionaire and former Bitcoin skeptic Mark Cuban who this week took SchiffGold.com CEO Peter Schiff to task over his love of the precious metal. Gold, he told Schiff, “is dead.”

“Bitcoin has been crushing gold since inception,” Kraken growth lead Dan Held added in response to claims by Schiff that a bet against gold was a losing one.

Checkout PrimeXBT
Trade with the Official CFD Partners of AC Milan
Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-price-is-going-to-infinity-kraken-ceo

Blockchain

Giottus technologies offers access to Bitfinex liquidity

Published

2 hours ago

March 4, 2021

Republished by Plato

Giottus Technologies (Giottus), a cryptocurrency exchange, today announced that it will provide access to liquidity on Bitfinex, providing its customers with some of the deepest crypto-to-crypto liquidity in the industry.

Giottus is also introducing the most competitive fee structure in India for its customers.

“Giottus customers can now enjoy high liquidity across BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, XRP/USDT, TRX/USDT, ETH/BTC, and many more. Through the strategic agreement with Bitfinex, we have further strengthened our compliance policies and procedures, both on and off-chain,” said Vikram Subburaj, Co-Founder & CEO at Giottus.

“The commitment to our customers comes first, which is why we have introduced the most competitive fees in India, 0% Maker & 0.075% Taker. Traditionally, the largest global exchanges charge these low fees only to customers trading USD 3Bn+ monthly. Giottus customers can enjoy these fee levels irrespective of their monthly trade volumes,” added Arjun Vijay, Co-Founder & COO at Giottus.

Benefits of this new strategic agreement include,

Some of the deepest crypto to crypto liquidity in the industry
The most competitive fees in India – 0% (Maker) & 0.075% (Taker)
Enhanced on & off-chain compliance and controls

About Giottus

Giottus is changing the way Indian users trade their digital assets by building a platform that is customer-centric along with top-tier customer support on par with the world’s best international exchanges. Preferred by beginners and veterans alike, Giottus offers products and solutions that cater to users of all segments.

Key product features include,

Trading in 100+ crypto pairs
One-Click INR Deposit and Buy
24×7 Banking Support
Multilingual Customer Support (English, Hindi, Tamil & Telugu)
Superfast KYC processing

In the past month, Giottus has launched the trade of 30+ new INR-crypto pairs along with an improved compliance mechanism and upgraded tech-stack to support its growing Indian consumer base.

Giottus is highly rated and loved in India with a greater than 4.8 on 5 average ratings among reviews on Google, Facebook, and Trustscore.

Contact

Srivathsan A R, Chief Marketing Officer, Giottus @ [email protected]

For more details, visit their website or contact them on Telegram

Disclaimer: This is a paid post and should not be taken as news/advice

Checkout PrimeXBT
Trade with the Official CFD Partners of AC Milan
Source: https://ambcrypto.com/giottus-technologies-offers-access-to-bitfinex-liquidity

Blockchain

Coinbase CEO tops China’s Hurun list of blockchain billionaires

Published

2 hours ago

March 4, 2021

Republished by Plato

The CEO of the United States’ largest cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, has topped the list of global industry billionaires by China’s Hurun Research Institute.

Issued on March 2, the latest Hurun report provides a brief overview of the world’s richest, stating that the number of global billionaires has surged nearly 50% to hit over 3,000 people over the past five years. The report includes 17 “blockchain billionaires,” or industry entrepreneurs who made their fortune “mainly from cryptocurrency” as of January 2021.

According to the report, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is the world’s biggest crypto billionaire, with his net worth surging ten-fold from $1 billion last year.

According to Hurun’s data, Armstrong now has an estimated wealth of $11.5 billion ahead of Coinbase’s imminent initial public offering. The company officially announced its IPO plans in December 2020 in a draft filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of Alameda Research and FTX exchange, is ranked the second-richest blockchain billionaire, with a net worth evaluated at $10 billion. The executive is a new entrant in the Hurun list, following the massive growth of FTX in 2020.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, is ranked the third, with total wealth estimated at $8 billion, up more than 200% from last year. In 2020, Zhao was featured as the richest crypto billionaire in the Hurun list, overtaking Bitmain’s co-founder Micree Zhan Ketuan.

The Hurun’s new blockchain billionaires list includes a number of major industry players like Ripple co-founders Chris Larsen, Stellar co-founder Jed McCaleb, Digital Currency Group CEO Barry Silbert, the Winklevoss brothers, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, and others. The list features a total of 11 new entrants in the list including major industry investor Tim Draper and Galaxy Digital founder and CEO Michael Novogratz.