Good morning. Today, NVIDIA considers re-entering the Bitcoin mining market. Meanwhile Joe Biden officially announces Gary Gensler as his pick as the next chairman of U.S. SEC.
Welcome to Tuesday Trades, part of our new series: BitPinas Daily. We will look at the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum and the major cryptocurrencies. Crypto is global, but sometimes news that matters happens while we sleep. So we bring to you what’s happening in our space here and abroad.
Market Price as of January 19, 2021:
| Bitcoin | $36,598.11 | +2.39% |
| Ethereum | $1,253.91 | +2.00% |
| Tether | $1.00 | +2.04% |
| Polkadot | $16.41 | -3.13% |
| XRP | $0.284455 | +2.67% |
| SLP | $0.015 | +25% |
Bitcoin closed January 18, 2021, at $36,598.11 per BTC. We’re up 3.1% in the last 7 days and up 26% since the year began. This is 12% below the previous all-time high of $41,940, which was hit on Jan. 8, 2021.
Bitcoin’s market capitalization stands today at $684,350,016,810 which is 64.99% of the entire cryptocurrency market. The entire crypto market, by the way, now has a market cap of $1,048,327,289,415 (+1.4%).
On the table above, there’s the cryptocurrency SLP. If you wonder what that is, check out this article: Playing Axie Infinity vs Minimum Basic Salary in the Philippines.
Table of Contents.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA considers re-entering bitcoin mining market
NVIDIA is a company and brand especially popular in the video game market for making graphics processing units. During the 2017 crypto boom, NVIDIA’s rigs were of course extremely popular and profitable but every quarter, the company would report that its gaming segment continued to grow and that its cryptocurrency-related revenue remained small.
However, the subsequent market crash hurt the company A LOT and NVIDIA forecasted a significant decline in revenue, which caused the investors to file a case against NVIDIA for misleading them about how much the company relied on its crypto-related business. For them, it made no sense that there would be a significant decline in company revenue if quarter after quarter NVIDIA would report that their crypto business are just a small portion of their revenue.
The legal battle between NVIDIA and these investors continues until now.
Any way, in a recent statement to shareholders, the company’s Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said if crypto demand continues to increase, they may revisit this segment and restart their CMP product line — think NVIDIA’s product without all the video elements and only capable of doing one thing – validating crypto transactions on the blockchain to earn crypto.
“If crypto demand begins or if we see a meaningful amount, we can also use that opportunity to restart the CMP product line to address ongoing mining demand,” Kress said in a statement.
“Decompose”
Coinbase will decompose its application server in wake of recent outage
Coinbase has been hit by outages in recent weeks. Actually, it almost always crashes whenever the price of bitcoin reaches particular milestones. It always happens that it’s now a meme.
Last week, the Coinbase team said it is going to decompose its application server so that it would have different scaling profiles for the functions that its API serves. “Thus, if one surface is affected somehow, it will only affect the APIs or functionality that the particular surface is responsible for, instead of taking down the entire system,” Saniya More reported for The Block.
New U.S. SEC Head
Joe Biden appoints Gary Gensler
Gary Gensler, a professor at MIT and former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has officially been announced by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden to chair the powerful commission formerly led by Jay Clayton.
We have an entire column dedicated to Gary Gensler in this article on what his appointment would mean for the cryptocurrency industry as a whole.
Case in point, Brad Garlinghouse, head of Ripple, a company that owns a sizable amount of XRP, said in previous interviews that he expects the Biden administration to be open-minded about cryptocurrencies.
Before Clayton resigned, he did a power move. In his last day of office, he unveiled that the U.S. SEC has charged Ripple of illegal (and continued) sale of securities (XRP coins).
While Gensler is very knowledgeable on blockchain and cryptocurrencies (he even teaches an online crypto course,) analysts expect him to be in favor of tougher regulation. I assume Ripple and everyone else in this game, including Coinbase, which is waiting SEC approval to go public, will be looking forward and planning ahead with regards to when Gensler finally takes the chair.
Institutional Adoption
Ruffer: We are in the foothills of institutional adoption for Bitcoin
According to institutional firm Ruffer Investment Company, which made headlines last year for putting $74 million into bitcoin, that they put up a portion of their money into digital currency is just a usual day at work for them because they have a history of using “unconventional protections.” Bitcoin, for Ruffer, is an unconventional protection during prolonged periods of low interest rates, Ryan Weeks reported on The Block.
Ruffer thinks they are relatively early into this, thus they are “at the foothills of a long trend of institutional adoption and financialisation of bitcoin.”
Of course, Ruffer said this is a bet and they could be wrong.
“As we move through the process of normalisation, regulation, and institutionalisation, the compression of this premium can have a dramatic effect on the price. If we are wrong, bitcoin will return to the shadows and we will lose money – this explains why we have kept the position size small but meaningful.”
#CryptoPH
If you are a crypto company or project in the Philippines or in the Filipino diaspora, let us know your story.
What else is happening
- Bitcoin struggles to recover after biggest weekly price loss since September
- Former Canadian Prime Minister lists bitcoin as possible future reserve currency
- CoinShares is starting an exchange-traded bitcoin product
- Crypto exchange Livecoin closes after alleged hack
- Pantera Capital: This rally looks different than 2017
- #23.94 billion total value locked in DeFi
This article is published on BitPinas: Tuesday Trades: NVIDIA to Re-Enter Crypto Mining Market?
Source: https://bitpinas.com/cryptocurrency/tuesday-trades-nvidia-to-re-enter-crypto-mining-market/
