Good morning. It’s the end of the work week. What are you going to do this weekend? If you are wondering why there are celestial bodies being alluded in the post title, read on.
Welcome to Friday Focus, 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 15, 2021:
Bitcoin closed January 14, 2021, at $39,233 per BTC. We’re down 0.6% in the last 7 days and up 35% since the year began. This is 6.45% below the previous all-time high of $41,940, which was hit on Jan. 8, 2021.
Bitcoin’s market capitalization stands today at $730,651,308,099 which is 67.65% of the entire cryptocurrency market. The entire crypto market, by the way, now has a market cap of $1,077,570,167,161.
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.
Institutions buy while Bitcoin dipped this weekend
(By Colin Harper, Coindesk) Not headlines grabbing, but Colin Harper detailed out some of the improvements to the Bitcoin Network in his latest article.
First, Taproot, which will allow for more complex smart contracts, is now fully live on Bitcoin’s signet, a sandbox for testing before they get pushed to the mainnet.
Users can also now set manual fees denominated in satoshis. “Before, Bitcoin Core relied on a fee estimator for transactions, and these fees were set by specifying a bitcoin amount (say, 0.00001 BTC) instead of satoshis (1000 sats),” Harper explained.
Other changes or improvements include:
Read more here.
The planets can predict the price of Bitcoin according to this astrologer
Should we trade Bitcoin? When is the right time? According to astrologer Maren Altman, who has millions of followers on Tiktok, we should trade when Saturn crosses Mercury. I am not kidding. Altman predicted a price correction on January 11. It happened. Mercury, apparently, represents Bitcoin’s price while Saturn is the restricting indicator.
Altman does say she’s not a financial adviser so we should not misconstrue her celestial predictions as investment advice. But here’s what astrology said the future of Bitcoin will be.
“I see some favourable indicators at the end of the month and especially February and early March. However, getting into mid-March, I see a big correction. Mid-April is also really less optimistic. May is bullish,” Altman said. (Anna Irrera and Tom Wilson, Reuters)
Do give the article a read. It’s actually good. As always, price predictions are non-investment adcvise so always do your research.
Exchanges are running out of ETH
— Alex Saunders 🇦🇺👨🔬 (@AlexSaundersAU) January 14, 2021
(By Samuel Haig, Cointelegraph) Data from Glassnode indicates that Ether reserves on centralized exchanges have not been this low since July 2018. As of this writing, only 7% of Ether’s circulating supply is held on exchanges.
Saunders interprets the data as suggesting an explosive bull-run into new all-time highs is imminent for Ether, stating “We all know what happened when demand outstripped supply of $BTC. It quadrupled in 90 days.”
Winklevoss Twins considering to take Gemini Exchange public
(By Olga Kharif, Bloomberg) “We are definitely considering it and making sure that we have that option,” Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder and president of the New York-based digital-asset firm, said in an interview. “We are watching the market and we are also having internal discussions on whether it makes sense for us at this point in time. We are certainly open to it.”
8 public companies with the biggest Bitcoin portfolios
(By Daniel Phillips, Decrypt)
Publicly traded companies
This article is published on BitPinas: Friday Focus: When Saturn Crosses Mercury
Source: bold>mercury/
Breaking: Right-Wing Activists Received Large Bitcoin (BTC) Donations Before U.S. Capitol Riots
TA: Bitcoin Revisits $40K, What Are Chances of BTC Hitting New ATH
Bank Of Singapore: Bitcoin Could Succeed As A Store Of Value
Former Goldman Sachs exec: Bitcoin ‘could work,’ but will attract more regulation
Other than Bitcoin, Coinbase notes institutional demand for Ethereum as well
Analyst: Ethereum Likely to Tag $2,000 in Near-Term as Rally Turns Parabolic
Rothschild Investment Corporation raises stakes in Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust GBTC
$45B DeFi market cap and soaring TVL suggest the best is yet to come
The Singaporean private banking arm of OCBC Bank has dismissed the chances of cryptocurrencies eventually replacing fiat currencies as a medium of exchange. However, the large institution believes that BTC and other altcoins can replace gold in terms of serving as a store of value.
Ever since the introduction of Bitcoin in the late 2000s, people have wondered if the cryptocurrency could indeed live up to the potential of operating as an electronic peer-to-peer cash system, as intended by the anonymous creator – Satoshi Nakamoto.
Doubters have breached the infamous volatility as a significant obstacle in BTC’s path. It seems that the Bank of Singapore agrees with this narrative, according to recent coverage.
Chief economist Mansoor Mohi-uddin used the movements from the past year, where BTC went from a low of $4,000 during the mid-March liquidity crisis to a new all-time high above $40,000 months later, to exemplify it and dismiss this narrative.
However, bitcoin and other altcoins can have a role as a digital store of value if they manage to address several potential issues. Apart from the aforementioned price fluctuations, those include high liquidity and safe custodians.
“First, investors need trustworthy institutions to be able to hold digital currencies securely. Second, liquidity needs to improve significantly to reduce volatility to manageable levels.” – explained the economist.
Additionally, the crypto ecosystem requires more regulations from world watchdogs to reduce their alleged involvement in criminal activities. However, Mohi-uddin warned that if governments felt threatened by the existence of particular digital assets, they could fight back, which is the case with the growing trend of central bank digital currencies.
The bank’s economist explained that the growing appetite from institutional investors had supported the belief that bitcoin should be used as a store of value instead of a medium of exchange. Furthermore, some of them even outlined the idea that BTC could replace gold or it’s better than the precious metal in a way.
SkyBridge Capital co-founder Anthony Scaramucci recently asserted that the largest cryptocurrency is easier to store, harder to steal, more portable, and ultimately, better than gold.
CIO at the Wall Street behemoth BlackRock, Rick Rieder, predicted that BTC could take some of the market share of the yellow metal and eventually even replace it.
Similarly, JPMorgan’s analysis concluded that the cryptocurrency has started to garner some of gold’s market share, which could harm the bullion’s price in the long-run.
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Source: store-of-value/
The speculations about whether Bitcoin is heading toward mainstream adoption does not seem to die down. After corporations such as Grayscale and MicroStrategy raked up more of the asset, recently, every analyst seems to have an opinion about the debate. Bitcoin even seems to be popular among Wall Street legends, such as Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller and Bill Miller. According to the f ormer senior chairman of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, Bitcoin is far from global adoption.
For every currency to be successful, it must possess certain properties such as storage of value and medium of exchange, which according to Blankfein, Bitcoin does not possess.
At the same time, the exec shared his views on how regulations could get in Bitcoin’s way. He thinks that in the event that Bitcoin gets regulated, perhaps investors could grow accustomed to new rules, but it would cost them their privacy, a key property that attracts investors to Bitcoin, in the first place. He further said:
Like a lot of things, this could be workable, but it will undermine the freedom of liberty, and kind of lack transparency that people like about it in the first place.
Additionally, Blankfein believed that Bitcoin would only attract more regulators, as it grows in popularity and said:
If I were a regulator I would be kind of hyperventilating at the success of it at the moment, and I’d be arming myself to deal with it.
Source: -will-attract-more-regulation
Coinbase ‘Year in Review’ 2020 report stated that there was a growing institutional demand for Ether, amid increasing corporate investments in Bitcoin. According to researchers at Coinbase Institutional, while the exchange’s clients predominantly bought Bitcoin last year, a growing number also took positions in Ethereum.
Most institutional clients at Coinbase think of Ethereum as a “decentralized computing network” that shares some of Bitcoin’s key properties. With regard to owning Ether, these clients see “a combination of” the asset’s potential as a store of value and it being a digital commodity that is essential to power transactions on Ethereum.
Many think that a growing interest in DeFi is a primary reason behind the surge in Ether’s price. At the same time, David Grider at Fundstrat, predicted that a booming DeFi economy could propel ETH to a sevenfold increase.
Last year, Ethereum developer and investment activity in DeFi grew, as did Ethereum-based stablecoins, according to Coinbase’s review. However, the exchange noted issues with applications currently using Ethereum, including scaling friction, high gas fees, when the network becomes congested, and “complex smart contracts,” which can “grow to hold large stockpiles of crypto assets and thus attract bad actors.”
Coinbase clients believed that Ethereum may become the primary settlement network underpinning this new financial system. According to the review:
In 2020 DeFi protocols built on Ethereum began to demonstrate clearly that the use cases for “programmable money” extend far beyond ICOs.
Additionally, Coinbase is “closely” observing CBDCs development and noted the “obvious” benefits to digital currencies. It also hoped that governments developing CBDC “will work to preserve individual liberties and privacy.” The exchange encouraged the crypto community “who understand these systems” to advocate that a government develop e-currency on “top of open, public blockchain networks.”
Source: demand-for-ethereum-as-well