A new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that asset management giant Fidelity is seeking to create a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).

The Wise Origin Bitcoin ETF is the latest entrant in a growing race to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded product in the United States. According to the filing, a firm called FD Funds Management LLC is the sponsor of the fund, with Fidelity Service Company, Inc. serving as administrator. Per the document, FD Funds Management LLC shares the same Boston, MA address as Fidelity's headquarters.

Fidelity Digital Assets, the asset manager's crypto-focused arm, will serve as custodian. 

The ETF, if approved, will also employ Fidelity's in-house bitcoin price index, per the filing.

"The Trust’s investment objective is to seek to track the performance of bitcoin, as measured by the performance of the Fidelity Bitcoin Index PR (the “Index”), adjusted for the Trust’s expenses and other liabilities," the filing notes, explaining elsewhere:

"The Trust provides direct exposure to bitcoin, and the Shares of the Trust are valued on a daily basis using the same methodology used to calculate the Index. The Trust provides investors with the opportunity to access the market for bitcoin through a traditional brokerage account without the potential barriers to entry or risks involved with holding or transferring bitcoin directly, acquiring it from a bitcoin spot market, or mining it."

The fund's name is similar to the Wise Origin Bitcoin Index Fund I, launched in August 2020 by Fidelity. As reported at the time by Bloomberg, that passively-managed fund was Fidelity's first foray into offering a bitcoin-only fund product to qualified investors.

"The digital assets ecosystem has grown significantly in recent years, creating an even more robust marketplace for investors and accelerating demand among institutions. An increasingly wide range of investors seeking access to bitcoin has underscored the need for a more diversified set of products offering exposure to digital assets," a Fidelity spokesperson told The Block.

Fidelity's effort represents the sixth of its kind within the U.S., joining WisdomTree Investments, VanEck Associates Corp., NYDIG Asset Management, First Advisors/SkyBridge and Valkyrie Digital Assets. 

Market-watchers have speculated that recent ETF developments in Canada may spur regulators in the U.S. to action on a bitcoin ETP. 

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Former SEC chair Jay Clayton has joined the advisory council of One River Digital Asset Management, a digital asset investment firm.

Jay Clayton, who served as chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission between May 2017 to December 2020, has taken advisory roles at multiple firms.

Most recently, he has been appointed to the advisory council of One River Digital Asset Management, a prominent crypto investment firm and a subsidiary of One River Asset Management.

Clayton said about One River CEO Eric Peters: “We were impressed by Eric’s willingness to hear our varying views on the digitization of our monetary, banking, and capital markets ecosystem and One River’s commitment to transparency.”

Clayton is regarded as one of the crypto industry’s top villains because the SEC declined to approve Bitcoin ETFs under his leadership. Under Clayton, the SEC also made it harder for startups to run ICOs and most other types of initial tokens sales.

However, Clayton’s willingness to work with Bitcoin-adjacent firms should not be entirely surprising, given that he stated that Bitcoin is not a security in 2018. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin never went through an ICO or any other fundraiser.

Along with serving on One River’s advisory council, Clayton will rejoin his former law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, as a policy council advisor. He will also act as non-executive Chair of Apollo Global Management Inc. and serve as Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

Prior to the economic crisis resulting from the response to COVID-19, One River CEO Eric Peters focused his strategy based on volatility, bringing in returns of around 35% in 2020. 

The firm has made significant investments in Bitcoin. In November, it announced a $600 million Bitcoin purchase. In recent statements, Peters additionally confirmed that One River plans to increase its Bitcoin and Ethereum holdings to $1 billion in the first half of 2021.

One River has also received financial backing from the Brevan Howard Asset Management Fund and Ruffer LLP.

At the time of writing this author held Bitcoin and less than $15 of altcoins.

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KiwiSaver growth fund, a retirement growth fund with investments worth $350 million has invested 5% of its total assets in Bitcoin. The chief investment officer James Grigor also promised more KiwiSaver schemes with bitcoin exposure in the upcoming 5 years. He said,

“Our KiwiSaver is majority built up through traditional assets classes, your bonds and shares, and they will always be the asset classes that compound over time to give people the best retirement they can get.

But there’s going to be times when it’s not always going to be plain sailing. You may still have a positive view of those asset classes, but other opportunities present themselves,”

— Documenting Bitcoin 📄 (@DocumentingBTC) March 25, 2021

Bitcoin’s rising value along with popularity has made it the go-to choice for investors and now even large wealth fund managers. Only yesterday Coingape reported that a Singapore-based $306 billion wealth manager has been buying Bitcoin from miners since 2018. The rising interest of high-value sovereign wealth management funds most of them associated with the government is a clear sign of growing Bitcoin adoption beyond the limited crypto market.

The  Chief Investment Officer of KiwiSaver said that they see Bitcoin as a commodity with properties like gold.

However, many other rival wealth managers believe the decision would not be good for investors as they see BTC as a speculative asset and believe investing in it is more like gambling.

The likes of MicroStrategy and Tesla were among the early fortune 500 companies to see the potential of Bitcoin in the future of finance. However, as the bull run continues defying most of the previous records more mainstream banking giants such as Morgan Stanley, BNY Mellon, and Goldman Sachs have started to gain exposure in Bitcoin.

Now Wealth Fund Managers have also rushing to add Bitcoin to their investment schemes which is a big deal given, most of these retirement and pension funds only invest in assets with very high chances of better return.

To keep track of DeFi updates in real time, check out our DeFi news feed Here.

Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency has attracted $85 million in investment since last week. Inflows of $8 million and $2 million to Ethereum and Polkadot, respectively, were noted weekly. Binance, XRP, and Bitcoin Cash have all seen a decrease in investment activity.

We’ve seen a steady decline in investor appetite since the February price highs and increased volatility. However, there appears to be a regional divide, decreasing US appetite and continued appetite in Europe and Canada. We’ve also seen a drop in Bitcoin Investment product trading volumes, which fell to $713 million per day last week from $1.1 billion per day in 2021, according to CoinShares.

Since the beginning of 2021, the cryptocurrency market has increased by more than 100 percent. On March 20, digital assets’ total market capitalization reached an all-time high of $1.85 trillion. The market has seen a nearly $100 billion correction in the last 24 hours. Bitcoin remains the most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization; the digital asset is currently trading near $54,000 and has a market capitalization of around $1 trillion.

Ethereum, the second-largest digital currency globally, is currently trading at around $1,650. Grayscale is the world’s biggest cryptocurrency asset manager. The company recently reached a milestone of managing $45 billion in digital assets. Grayscale currently manages over 654,000 Bitcoin, 3.18 million Ethereum, and 1.47 million Litecoin.

The digital asset manager recently adopted MANA, LPT, BAT, LINK, and FIL investment trusts. More than 290,000 Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and nearly 12 million Ethereum Classic (ETC) are held by the firm (ETC).

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The cryptocurrency market added nearly $1 trillion in its market cap over the last 12 weeks. The institutional demand for crypto investment products is surging amid a jump in the price of digital assets.

According to the weekly cryptocurrency inflows report published by CoinShares, the digital asset investment products attracted a total of $99 million last week as the total cryptocurrency assets under management reached a record high of $57 billion.

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Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency attracted a total of $85 million last week. Ethereum and Polkadot reported weekly inflows of $8 million, and $2 million, respectively. Limited investment activities were reported in Binance, XRP and Bitcoin Cash.

EQIBank: A Regulated Bank Cutting Through the Crypto UncertaintyGo to article >>

“Since the February price highs and heightened volatility, we have seen a steady decline in appetite amongst investors. Although it looks to be a regional divide, with a declining appetite from the United States and a sustained appetite in Europe and Canada. We have also seen a decline in Bitcoin Investment product trading volumes to $713 million per day last week, versus $1.1 billion per day for 2021,” CoinShares mentioned in the report.

The cryptocurrency market is up by more than 100% since the start of 2021. The overall market cap of digital assets touched an all-time high of $1.85 trillion on 20 March. In the last 24 hours, the market saw a correction of nearly $100 billion. Bitcoin remained the largest cryptocurrency in terms of market cap, the digital asset is now trading near $54,000 with a market cap of around $1 trillion. Ethereum, the world’s second-largest digital currency, is trading near $1,650. Grayscale is the largest cryptocurrency asset manager in the world. The company recently crossed $45 billion in digital assets under management. Grayscale has more than 654,000 Bitcoin under management along with 3.18 million Ethereum and 1.47 million Litecoin.

The digital asset manager recently introduced MANA, LPT, BAT, LINK and FIL investment trusts. The company holds more than 290,000 Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and nearly 12 million Ethereum Classic (ETC).

Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest digital currency asset manager, has opened up new opportunities for investors on its platform. According to a recent press release , the company has released five new investment trusts adding to the eight it previously offered.

The five latest investment trusts include Grayscale Basic Attention Token Trust, Grayscale Chainlink Trust, Grayscale Decentraland Trust, Grayscale Filecoin Trust, and Grayscale Livepeer Trust. 

Institutions and both individuals accredited investors who are interested in the new investment products can start making both private and periodic statements like the previous investment products on Grayscale as the company announced that the products are already available.

Disclosing the reason behind the new investment products launched, Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein said,

“Digital currencies have reached an inflection point. Investor demand has never been higher, and every day we’re seeing new entrants to what has surely become a bona fide asset class.”

Before launching the new products, the asset management company offered other single-asset investment products that focus on Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Horizen (ZEN), Litecoin (LTC), Stellar Lumens (XLM), and Zcash (ZEC).

As other products on the company’s platform have a digital currency it is focused on, the latest releases all have a pivot digital currency, they include Basic Attention Token (BAT), Chainlink (LINK), Decentraland (MANA), Filecoin (FIL), and Livepeer (LPT).

To top up all of Grayscale’s products to 14, the diversified investment product, Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund, which opens opportunities to the top digital currencies by market capitalization, is added to the list.

The Large Cap Fund previously offered XRP alongside other currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum but recently, like other cryptocurrency platforms, Grayscale delisted the token. 

This step was taken due to the court case between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the San Francisco-based startup, Ripple, for conducting unregistered securities sales involving XRP.

Concerning the future plans the company has in store, Sonnenshein commented,

“Grayscale has long been the leader in creating novel pathways for investors to access the opportunities that digital currencies may offer, and this announcement carries on that tradition. We look forward to working with our global investor base, our growing team, and regulators to continue to move this industry forward.”

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In January SEC filings, investment firm BlackRock indicated it could add Bitcoin futures to its funds down the road.

Turns it, it already has. In new SEC filings from today, the BlackRock Global Allocation Fund indicated that it held 37 futures contracts from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange worth nearly $360,458. The amount represented 0.0014% of the fund's total assets. The contracts expired on March 26.

With nearly $9 trillion in assets under management, BlackRock is the biggest investment management company in the world, ahead of Vanguard, UBS, Fidelity, JPMorgan Chase, and BNY Mellon.

Fidelity last week filed paperwork for a Bitcoin ETF , BNY Mellon commented in February that it would add Bitcoin custody services, and JPMorgan Chase is creating a cryptocurrency basket so investors can buy shares in companies exposed to Bitcoin.

BlackRock is the biggest domino to fall. As recently as 2018, CEO Larry Fink believed the firm's clients weren't interested in crypto exposure. “Right now I can tell you, worldwide, I have not from one client who said ‘I need to be in this,’” he told Bloomberg.

Bitcoin isn't the same thing as a futures contract. The latter is just a bet on the price of the former without the need to actually purchase. In fact, CME futures contracts are settled in cash, not tokens. But, with the company also announcing in December that it was searching for a VP of Blockchain with experience in valuation of digital assets, actual Bitcoin purchases could be in store for BlackRock.

Goldman Sachs is close to offering its first investment vehicles for bitcoin and other digital assets to clients of its private wealth management group, CNBC has learned exclusively.

The bank aims to begin offering investments in the emerging asset class in the second quarter, according to Mary Rich, who was recently named global head of digital assets for Goldman's private wealth management division. Her promotion was scheduled to be announced Wednesday in an internal company memo seen by CNBC.

"We are working closely with teams across the firm to explore ways to offer thoughtful and appropriate access to the ecosystem for private wealth clients, and that is something we expect to offer in the near term," Rich said in an interview this week.

Goldman is looking at ultimately offering a "full spectrum" of investments in bitcoin and digital assets, "whether that's through the physical bitcoin, derivatives or traditional investment vehicles," she said.

The move means that soon, clients of two of the world's preeminent investment banks – Goldman and Morgan Stanley – will have access to a nascent asset class that has intrigued billionaires and digital currency believers alike. Earlier this month, Morgan Stanley told its financial advisors that they could place clients into bitcoin funds starting in April, CNBC was first to report.

It is the latest sign of the staying power of blockchain-related assets including bitcoin, a new kind of money that emerged out of the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis and whose exact origins are still unknown. Until now, big U.S. banks have mostly shunned bitcoin, deeming it too speculative and volatile for clients.

But the industry capitulated after the latest boom in bitcoin's price. The surge has drawn in institutional investors, corporations and fintech players, and the infrastructure to hold digital assets is continuing to mature.

In the end, it was client demand that won out, according to Rich. Goldman's private wealth management business mostly targets individuals, families and endowments with at least $25 million to invest.

"There's a contingent of clients who are looking to this asset as a hedge against inflation, and the macro backdrop over the past year has certainly played into that," Rich said. "There are also a large contingent of clients who feel like we're sitting at the dawn of a new Internet in some ways and are looking for ways to participate in this space."

The bank may offer bitcoin investment funds, similar to those that Morgan Stanley will have, as well as other ways to invest that are "more akin to the underlying asset class which trades 24-7 globally," Rich said. Some cryptofunds, such as the Galaxy Bitcoin Fund, can only be sold or bought once per quarter, while Galaxy's institutional bitcoin fund can be liquidated on a weekly basis.

Goldman is in the process of securing approvals from regulators including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Department of Financial Services, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

"We're still in the very nascent stages of this ecosystem; no one knows exactly how it will evolve or what shape it will be," Rich said. "But I think it's fairly safe to expect it will be part of our future."

Goldman's move happened despite skepticism throughout the traditional banking industry. That includes at the New York-based bank itself: Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, chief investment officer for Goldman's wealth management business, has repeatedly said that bitcoin isn't appropriate for investors.

Until roughly a year ago, bitcoin's market capitalization and trading volumes weren't large enough for big financial institutions to bother getting involved, Mike Novogratz, CEO-founder of crypto firm Galaxy Digital, said Wednesday in a CNBC interview.

"Adoption's happening faster than I predicted," Novogratz said. "It's shocking to me how fast people are moving into the system."

With reporting from CNBC's Jesse Pound

As the blockchain industry evolves and crypto achieves more mainstream adoption, crypto-native enterprises are becoming increasingly more common. The advent of smart contract platforms such as Ethereum, and more noticeably, Polkadot, has driven home the potential of blockchain technology for enterprise applications.

Functioning as cutting-edge custody service, Unido is designed for crypto-native companies as well as asset managers on the blockchain. Unido is underpinned by patent-pending private key obfuscation algorithms that offers seamless integrations with applications on other popular blockchain networks and provides the ultimate in security and governance for the user. The service allows users to manage and invest their crypto assets while benefiting from a safe and interoperable digital environment. 

Enterprises using Unido’s custody service can make use of two main features through a central dashboard. Here they can manage their assets as well as invest them. The dashboard is the entry point to a business banking portal and a decentralized finance (DeFi) vault.

The business banking portal provides crypto-native management tools that rely on smart contracts to perform payments and other management tasks. On the other hand, Unido’s DeFi Vault is a multi-signature enterprise wallet that provides a simple yet powerful tool for enterprises to invest their crypto assets into a range of popular yield-generating DeFi protocols.

Unido makes use of Polkadot’s specialized parachain technology for better scalability and overall convenience. This is how it is able to provide a better solution to alternative options for key enterprise operations such as cost management, payments, and taxes. This is all achieved in an end-to-end platform that comes with enterprise-grade security and governance structures.

A simple platform like Unido is exactly the tool that many traditional companies and asset managers might need to delve deeper into the burgeoning blockchain and cryptocurrency space. It provides the security and all-in-one features that are lacking in most currently available custody solutions.

The asset management industry today is highly fragmented across disparate enterprise systems, resulting in siloed data around different asset classes, increased back office costs for asset managers, and ultimately heightened systemic risk that affects institutions and individual users alike. With the rapid wave of innovation in decentralized finance (DeFi) and increased institutional adoption of blockchain technology, smart contract based processes have emerged as the logical next step for the industry.

In his recent presentation at Fidelity Investments, Chainlink Co-founder Sergey Nazarov explored the state of modern asset management and explained the industry-wide implications of smart contracts, which are already bringing increased automation to traditional business workflows. This blog post is an excerpt of Sergey Nazarov’s talk that highlights how blockchains powered by Chainlink oracles can create single sources of truth for the asset management industry to reduce systemic risk, lower costs, and create new highly transparent asset classes.        

In the current asset management industry, you see a lot of fragmentation around certain categories of assets—large categories with billions, sometimes trillions, dollars worth of assets—as well as around how those categories function. There is huge fragmentation across silos of data that belong to the individual institutions participating in asset transactions.

Then you have middlemen technology companies that seek to impose standards because they eventually want to extract monopoly rent. They want to make a messaging standard or an API standard of some kind, and if they’re not member-owned, they seek to eventually arrive at a for-profit extraction of monopoly rents. This increases both the complexity for the internal risk assessment and the management of assets, ultimately increasing the costs, which are then passed on to users.

But even beyond all that, we have a world right now where every company has its own database. Middlemen often sit between asset managers, the issuers of the assets, and other parties, and these middlemen are hugely inefficient. This creates systemic financial risk, and it creates huge amounts of costs for asset managers.

The fascinating thing is that the asset manager has massive purchasing power. They can impose certain structural changes on the market by virtue of purchasing power alone. This is a key point: an asset manager wants to impose certain structural changes to their own benefit instead of benefitting an asset issuer or a middleman. Since many of these assets are held by asset managers in holding companies, asset managers are in a unique position and are probably one of the largest beneficiaries of the shift to a single source of truth enabled by blockchain technology.

A single source of truth is the value proposition and the outcome that blockchain and smart contracts seek to deliver. Suppose you don’t have a single record that all the parties trust and everybody keeps their own record. In that case, our records might contain different information, or our records are formatted differently, and we cannot easily transfer the records between systems. Now you don’t have the information.

However, if we all have a single source of truth that we all trust, we can all append it with additional useful information. This appending of additional useful information into a single shared source of truth is often called the golden source of truth, which is what blockchain technology seeks to achieve. A blockchain seeks to achieve this in a way that doesn’t extract monopoly rent. So, a blockchain is not a technology provider putting you on their for-profit private system to extract monopoly rents in the long term—it’s an open-source network anyone can use. Blockchains will evolve into a public good because a single source of truth for the financial markets, or insurance, is a pivotal technological development for these industries

The closest analogy to what you have in the financial markets is member-owned computational and data storage resources, which have already expressed that they will be moving to a blockchain-based model. In every significant geography with real financial asset volume, you see more and more people going towards the single source of truth model. Blockchains and smart contracts are of extreme importance because they create a structural change in how people relate to assets, which will have a fundamental effect on both risk and returns.

To put this problem into perspective, we can look at the 2008 financial crisis as an example. Obviously, this crisis has layers upon layers of unique complexities depending on which institution you investigate. But at a very fundamental level, from a data and the recordkeeping point of view, you really have the same systems then that you have now. You had people going into one institution, generating a record about their credit worthiness, and gaining a loan. Then that record partially made its way to another institution, like an investment banker, or somewhere where the individual loans became packaged up. Then eventually, those packaged loans, with even less information now, made their way to asset managers.

In addition to incentives, this was, in my opinion, one of the largest factors that created this crisis. It's basically because the people that had the relevant data didn't transfer it—even if they wanted to transfer more data, they would have learned they weren't able to. This lack of data transferability created a huge gap in the understanding of both credit risk assessment agencies and asset managers. By not having a single source of truth, this created a huge systemic financial risk and losses for asset managers and retail users. This is one of the flaws of the current system—its inability to properly assess risk since information is not reliably transferred, because there isn't a container in which to transfer it. Each institution has their own container, and they take a little piece out and they send it to the next person. But there's a bunch of information left in their container. They just don't have a way to transfer the information  so a person can trust and utilize it.

If we look at what would have happened if we had blockchains and smart contracts during the 2008 financial crisis, we would have people conversing in a single source of truth model using smart contracts. So, the loan originator would have had people come in, and they would have generated individual smart contracts for each loan holder. They then could have appended additional data like their FICO score to that contract, which could have been automatically updated on an annual basis to each individual record. Those individual records can then, at a much greater efficiency and therefore at a lower cost, be packaged up by investment banks who securitize and create the asset-backed securities. Very importantly, the final assets that make their way to the asset manager in the larger market are transparent. This reduces problems created by opaque baskets of hundreds of thousands of assets.

Ratings aside, asset managers and financial institutions would be able to dig into this incrementally detailed view of every single loan holder within a container. The container moves from institution to institution with each additional important insight appended to it. Then, when it finally reaches the market, you have a huge breadth and depth of data on each individual asset and its value. These underlying dynamics and the interaction with detailed data not only mitigate risk, but also allow asset managers to interact with more advanced assets and products, because now the quality of the data is so clear on an asset by asset basis. It’s now proven that smart contracts and blockchains generate all kinds of new assets at a much higher rate of efficiency.

The way this would have solved the 2008 financial crisis is if each individual asset would have had their own smart contract, and that smart contract as a container would have moved from the loan originator to the investment bank and then to the asset manager. Along the way, the container would be appended by FICO and other credit scores and other data that's relevant to that specific individual contract. In my opinion, this may not have completely stopped the crisis, but it would have definitely softened the boom and bust cycle. The leverage credit cycle would have been significantly softened if the market, and specifically US asset managers, had the ability to look into the underlying asset fundamentals at a very high degree of accuracy—this is what I'm really talking about in the case of a single source of truth.

Smart contracts and blockchains not only enable greater efficiency for asset managers, but they also create entirely new assets that provide better information and much lower costs to managers and users. At the end of the day, what smart contracts act as is an extremely trustworthy digital container about an asset. It's a digital container that from our 2008 financial crisis example can move between institutions, and therefore it's actually worth it to add more data to it. Because if you add data to it, that data will underpin the value of that container, and also accentuate the value of the underlying asset. So now people have a reason to add more important information to that container, because they know it won't be lost when it goes to the next institution that happens to own the asset. The container will continue to move between institutions, and you can keep adding data to it.

In this case, I think what we're illustrating is a very exciting class of assets that we think has a very bright future in the form of insurance and securitized insurance. Since energy price markets are becoming more efficient, we can use solar panel fields as an example. You can arrive at a place where you have premium payments going into a single source of truth digital container. That digital container knows the underlying asset’s status through IoT data showing whether the solar panels are active and performing in terms of their expected capacity for generating energy. The container can also know important details about energy price markets. So, the container can have a certain sense of the underlying asset’s health, and whether a certain solar panel field is solvent based on the energy prices in that specific region. Then it can continue to acquire all of this information on a solar panel field by solar panel field basis. You now have an extremely granular level of data about the underlying asset that’s collected extremely securely and efficiently on an ongoing basis without human intervention. You get extreme data quality that's not able to be manipulated at extremely low costs, and immediate transparency for asset managers and users.

If your users want to understand exactly what their underlying assets are, then this transparency can flow all the way to your users. Your users can now have more clarity on their investments, which I personally think is going to be a huge advantage in the medium term. Then, all of the details from each of these individual assets can flow into an asset-backed security. Because you have so many high-quality individual asset smart contracts, the composition of these into an asset-backed security is done more efficiently. Packaging these containers into asset-backed securities is something that can be extremely granular, so you can have certain assets removed and other assets added. This eliminates the fees and all of the other dynamics surrounding middlemen.

But the fundamental dynamic is that asset managers will become more competitive as they compose new assets and create more efficiencies. So I think that the world’s asset managers should push this dynamic as they are huge beneficiaries of this change. They don't have any need to be middlemen to generate these assets. Asset managers don't need to make money on fees from the transactional volume of moving assets. You want to hold the assets, and you want to give them to your users at a fair price, at a high level of security, and a high level of risk mitigation. Blockchains and smart contracts powered by decentralized oracles enable this reality to the maximum degree possible.

Chainlink enables existing enterprise systems to connect to any blockchain environment. Not only does Chainlink’s oracle network provide the ability to put your data on-chain and connect to outbound payment systems, Chainlink acts as a bridge from your internal enterprise systems that you want to retain because you have built workflows on top of them. Your internal enterprise systems already control a lot of value, and creating new backend services to connect to each blockchain environment is difficult and inefficient. You want to connect all of your current systems and backend services to blockchains as an environment where you can conduct commerce. This is what Chainlink enables by connecting your enterprise systems to any blockchain.

Instead of a multinational asset manager or any other large enterprise assembling a blockchain team for every blockchain that they might want to integrate, you can easily integrate Chainlink to connect to any blockchain environment. Building your own connections to various blockchains will be unbelievably difficult because the communities are small, and integration support is limited for many exciting up-and-coming blockchains. This is true even for the blockchains that already have many assets on them as it's still a challenge to hire knowledgeable developers.

Rather than having 50 or 100 blockchain keys for you to conduct commerce, it is a risk-adjusted approach to have blockchain capability built directly into your backend through a secure blockchain middleware. This is the other big problem that Chainlink solves for enterprises when they ask, "How do I connect to every blockchain where I want to conduct commerce, own assets, trigger transactions, or understand what's going on in those blockchains?"

The world’s largest asset manager BlackRock Inc is adding bitcoin futures as an eligible investment asset class.

The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock Inc is adding bitcoin futures as an eligible investment asset class according to a recent filing by the leading asset management company in a move to bring crypto to its customers.

BlackRock, in a report credited to Reuters disclosed that it was using such asset class as bitcoin derivatives for its two funds namely; BlackRock Global Allocation Fund and BlackRock Strategic Income Opportunities.

Such funds listed above will invest only in cash-settled bitcoin futures traded on commodity exchanges registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the company said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday.

Recall some weeks ago, BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink had disclosed, the flagship crypto is on his company’s radar amid the rapid gains recorded by Bitcoin this year alone.

Speaking recently at the Council on Foreign Relations alongside Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, Fink said, “Bitcoin has caught the attention and the imagination of many people. Still untested, pretty small relative to other markets.”

Upshot

Also, the BlackRock CIO of Fixed Income buttressed his bias, on why Cryptos are here to stay, taking into account its role in payments among the world’s millennials.

“I think cryptocurrency is here to stay and I think it is durable and you’ve seen the central banks that have talked about digital currencies. I think digital currency and the receptivity, particularly millennials’ receptivity to technology and cryptocurrency is real. Digital payments systems are real, so I think Bitcoin is here to stay,” he said.

Olumide Adesina is a France-born Nigerian. He is a Certified Investment Trader, with more than 15 years of working expertise in Investment trading. Follow Olumide on Twitter @tokunboadesina or email [email protected] He is a Member of the Chartered Financial Analyst Society.

Other leading crypto assets including Ethereum, Cardano, Litcoin, Chainlink, Polkadot, and Stellar lost more than 8% in value.

The crypto market just lost about $70 billion, as significant selling pressure from crypto sellers pushed the value of cryptocurrencies lower across the market spectrum amid the rising U.S dollar and some profit-taking.

At the time of drafting this report, about $70 billion in value was virtually wiped out, taking into account the flagship crypto, Bitcoin, the dominant player in the crypto market, lost as much as $2,000, according to data retrieved from Coin360.

Crypto experts interviewed by Nairametrics are saying that a market correction was long overdue after the overextended bullish move.

The bearish trend prevailing at the bitcoin market is largely attributed to a significant amount of profit-taking in play, coupled with the strong rebound in the U.S dollar

The most powerful British monetary policymaker, is not of the bias that the current generation of digital assets has the structure needed to ensure long-term regulatory survival

The most powerful British monetary policymaker, Andrew Bailey, is not of the bias that the current generation of digital assets has the structure needed to ensure long-term regulatory survival.

Speaking during the World Economic Forum yesterday on “Resetting Digital Currencies” the Bank of England governor reacted to a question on whether crypto is here to stay for the long term with skepticism:

“Are cryptocurrencies here to stay? Digital innovation in payments – yes. Have we landed on what I would call the design, governance, and arrangements for a lasting digital currency? No, I don’t think we’re there yet […] I don’t think cryptocurrencies as originally formulated are it.”

In a report credited to This is Money, a British-based financial newspaper, Andrew Bailey said that crypto-currencies in their current state were not likely to be the final settling point, as consumers, businesses, and regulators would look for digital currencies that are stable, safe, and well-designed before fully shifting away from traditional currencies like the pound and dollar.

What you should know: At the time of drafting this report, the crypto market was valued at $955 billion, a 2.23% drop over the last day.

A list of cryptos expected to do very well in 2021 has been unveiled by a renowned crypto expert.

Widely respected crypto trader, Michaël van de Poppe recently unveiled the list of cryptos expected to do very well in 2021 amid the prevailing bullish run in the Crypto verse.

He started by mentioning Polkadot (DOT) and looking at levels where investors can buy on dips.

“We do see these retests at $15. That was one of the levels I discussed. Another one is this $13-level which is lower timeframes and then we’ve got this area around $10.50,” he said.

READ: Crypto experts reveal their favourite Cryptos 

Polkadot protocol connects private and public chains, oracles future technologies, and permission-less networks allowing such independent networks to share information and transactions through the Polkadot relay chain,

Van de Poppe expects the next leg of the bull run to catapult DOT to his targets at $25, $29, and $45.

In addition to Polkadot, the analyst says he’s also bullish on smart contract platform Cardano (ADA), blockchain for enterprise solutions Zilliqa (ZIL), hybrid blockchain platform ICON (ICX), high throughput blockchain Elrond (EGLD), and interoperable blockchain network Cosmos (ATOM).

READ: DeFi crypto market value gains over 1000% from June

Cardano is a type of blockchain that permits people to receive and send funds.

Elrond is a type of blockchain architecture, created to facilitate a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in the execution of speed.

Its architecture combines a secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm facilitating unlimited scalability.

Zilliqa is a type of cryptocurrency that focuses on making blockchains more scalable and much faster; It uses sharding technology to simplify the consensus process so that blockchains like Ethereum can provide fast transaction processing successfully.

READ: Ethereum miners earning more than their Bitcoin rivals

Another solid crypto on the crypto expert’s radar is Celer Network (CELR). He says the layer-two scaling platform can potentially rise to $0.035, representing a potential return of 400% from its present value of $0.007.

Last but not least is chainlink on the bias it has more room for upsides as its still upcoming crypto and has a solid fundamental;

“Chainlink itself has a very big market share of the oracle niche. Other oracles are just starting up their first,” Poppe said.

READ: ChainLink, now most valuable DeFi Crypto by market value

Chainlink is a blockchain that is designed to bridge the space between blockchain technology-based smart contracts (created by ETH), and other user programs.

Tim Bond, a portfolio manager at Odey Asset Management, has warned that bitcoin is pointless, calling the cryptocurrency “a particularly vile asset class.” He claims that bitcoin has no real social utility other than as a tool for speculation and a means to launder the proceeds of crime.

Tim Bond, a partner and portfolio manager at Odey Asset Management, warned about bitcoin in a recent interview with Marketwatch. Established in 1991 by billionaire Crispin Odey, the firm currently has over $3 billion in funds under management.

Before joining Odey Asset Management in 2010, Bond spent 12 years at Barclays Capital as managing director and head of global asset allocation. He previously worked at Moore Capital as a portfolio strategist and spent 10 years as a strategist and trader for Tokai Bank Europe.

As the price of bitcoin hit all-time highs several times this month, Bond was quoted as saying:

To my mind, bitcoin is a particularly vile asset class. If bitcoin starts to displace fiat currencies, governments’ ability to tax, spend and redistribute will be severely impaired.

Disclosing that neither he nor his company has any holding in bitcoin, the fund manager began by warning that “bitcoin has no real social utility other than as a tool for speculation and a means to launder the proceeds of crime,” the publication conveyed.

He then claimed that bitcoin could prevent society from functioning in an efficient and ethical manner, asserting that the cryptocurrency is an “extreme form of libertarian anarchism.”

The Odey fund manager proceeded to talk about bitcoin mining, claiming that the activity “added CO2 emissions equivalent to the annual output of a medium-sized advanced economy.” In addition, Bond further opined that “as the bitcoin price rallies, so the mining activity will intensify, producing even higher levels of CO2 emissions,” elaborating:

It is difficult to think of any other human activity that is simultaneously quite so pointless and quite so damaging to the planet.

Bitcoiners immediately took to Twitter to point out many flaws in Bond’s arguments, urging him to do more research before commenting on bitcoin.

One Twitter user wrote: “This guy is just now catching up and freaking out. Every argument he makes was debunked 5 years ago.” Another chimed in: “Worst understanding and highest ignorance reward on bitcoin today goes to Tim Bond from Odey Asset Management. Do some more research please before making a fool of yourself.”

What do you think about Tim Bond’s views on bitcoin? Let us know in the comments section below.

Grayscale previously reported that as of October 30, the total assets under management stood at $7.6 billion. In less than a month it has hit a new milestone. Leading digital currency investment firm Grayscale Investments LLC has reported that its total assets under management (AUM) have surpassed the $10 billion level as of November 17. According to an official update on its page, the net assets under management stand at $10.4 billion. Whereby Grayscale Trust leads with $8.851 billion. Ethereum follows with $1.221 billion. Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin have $46.3 million and $58 million respectively. Notably, Grayscale previously reported that as of October 30, the total assets under management stood at $7.6 billion. Besides being one of the largest crypto investment firms, the company recently reported that it has 500K Bitcoins in its trust fund. Although most digital assets under grayscale’s management led by Bitcoin have experienced upward volatility in the past few weeks, the company’s Managing Director Michael Sonnenshein tweeted Friday that it received $262.3 million. Apparently, according to Grayscale’s recent market report, digital assets are still only a tiny fraction of the size of other markets. Whereby with the crypto market capitalization at $502,468,600,520 at the time of reporting according to CoinMarketCap, the global debt stands approximately at $255,000 billion. Notably, the value of the FAANG stocks is around $5.42 trillion. During the pandemic, global crypto adoption has seen a sharp spike as more people find alternative payments free from devaluation. Analysts predict that as digital assets gain more market utility, their value is poised to skyrocket in the near future. This makes digital assets a good store of value and also as instruments of global trade. Having proved to withstand market uncertainty during the height of the coronavirus crisis, if a new coronavirus infection wave hits globally then the digital assets market will rally as predicted. However, the digital assets come with their own risks, with scams leading the list. Grayscale investment managers urge investors to diversify their funds into different opportunities. Moreover, many digital assets appear to be imperfectly correlated to one another. Therefore, there stands a lot of benefits to holding multiple digital assets within a portfolio. Grayscale supports up to nine single asset investment trusts including , , , , XRP, ZCash, Steller, Horizen and Ethereum Classic. At the time of writing, was trading around $18,005.74 having jumped approximately 7.7% in the past 24 hours. Notably, most digital assets experienced different volatility in the past 24 hours thus showing the independence of the upcoming rally. Altcoin News, Bitcoin News, Blockchain News, Cryptocurrency news, News A financial analyst who sees positive income in both directions of the market (bulls & bears). Bitcoin is my crypto safe haven, free from government conspiracies. Mythology is my mystery! “You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself. That values itself. That understands itself.” Thank you! You have successfully joined our subscriber list. Source link

Grayscale one of the leading digital asset management firms informed that their assets under management reached $9.8 billion. This leaves the company just $200 million away from their $10 billion mark. The company is allowing traditional investors to gain exposure to a wide range of virtual currencies.  Grayscale’s assets under management continue expanding as more investors want to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Institutional investors didn’t have the opportunity to get access to Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and other digital assets. However, with Grayscale’s solutions, it is now possible to do so.  The company is not only offering BTC, ETH and LTC but also XRP, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Stellar (XLM), Horizon (ZEN), Zcash (ZEC) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). This shows they are offering a wide range of virtual currencies to investors. The main difference with other companies is that they are a regulated and compliant firm handling digital assets.  The largest Grayscale’s products include Grayscale Bitcoin Trust with $8.23 billion in assets under management and the Grayscale Ethereum Trust with $1.2 billion in assets under management.   During the last quarter, investors placed a total of $1.05 billion worth of investments into cryptocurrencies. It is worth mentioning that Bitcoin has been growing in recent months. The largest cryptocurrency surpassed $16,000 and the entire crypto community is expecting it to surpass $20,000 its all-time high registered in December 2017.  The company wrote on its quarterly report: “Grayscale’s assets under management reached all-time highs during 3Q20, a broad reflection of investment interest in the digital currency asset class. YTD, Grayscale’s AUM increased from $2.0 billion to $5.9 billion, a rise of approximately 195%.” It is worth taking into consideration that large companies are also interested in acquiring Bitcoin. Square and MicroStrategy have purchased large amounts of BTC so as to gain exposure to the market. These two firms are not planning to sell their assets but to hold them for the long term.  Traditional investors never had the possibility to trade virtual currencies or gain exposure to them. The market has been built around retail investors. This is why large and traditional investors didn’t have the opportunity to get access to the market. Nowadays, Grayscale and other firms are offering clients with a large selection of solutions to invest in virtual currencies.

Today was an interesting day for Bitcoin enthusiasts as CIO of world’s largest asset manager BlackRock in an interview to CNBC said he adores Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are here to stay. Recently, Bitcoin managed to move above the $18,000 mark again after seeing a $1000 flash crash yesterday making its contention to be a true store-of-value asset. Be it SoftBank or the CitiBank or JP Morgan all believe Bitcoin is currently undervalued and has the potential to become the digital gold. As per wikipedia, BlackRock is world’s largest asset management firm with $7.3 Trillion assets under management. Rick Rieder, BlackRock’s CIO for Fixed Income on Friday during an interview with CNBC suggested that the momentum is moving away from golf and towards bitcoin. He explained that Bitcoin is more flexible and useful as a store-of-value and has the potential to outclass gold as a true store-of-value asset. He said, At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, bitcoin’s price fell along with the traditional stock market, while gold touched new ATH furthering its claim to be a hedge against financially troubled times. However, since then gold has seen a continuous slump in its price while BTC managed to set a three-year high price record only yesterday. The growing number of institutional interests along with mainstream financial firms openly endorsing bitcoin is a clear sign that the world is ready for bitcoin and unlike 2017 the price rise won’t be speculative. Advertisement To keep track of DeFi updates in real time, check out our DeFi news feed Here.