Elon Musk tweeted on Feb 20, 2021, “Money is just data that allows us to avoid the inconvenience of barter. That data, like all data, is subject to latency & error. The system will evolve to that which minimizes both. That said, BTC & ETH do seem high lol”.

While a myriad of factors likely play into the drop in BTC and other cryptocurrencies’ prices, Elon Musk’s impact on BTC can not be ignored. On the one hand, he believes in bitcoin’s future. Tesla did buy $1.5 billion dollars worth of bitcoin. On the other hand, short-term volatility on cryptocurrencies happens constantly, creating market inefficiencies.

BTC dropped 19% in 16 hours today from $58,414 to $47,393. Part of this drop can be attributed to Elon Musk. Another factor is the forced liquidations on many exchanges, according to tracker Bybt.com. About $3.52 billion of cryptocurrency were liquidated in the past 12 hours. 

Traders sometimes overleverage their...

The $50,000 record pushes BTC up to 69% gains for the year. This comes on the heels of more institutional investing by big corporations such as BNY Mellon, Mastercard, Twitter, and Apple that we already discussed.

Another corporation, MicroStrategy, is planning on purchasing more bitcoin. The business intelligence company has 71,079 bitcoin currently, valued around $3.5 billion. The company wants to add another $690 million worth of bitcoin. To raise that capital, they will be using senior convertible notes that would be able to be converted to cash or shares.

A leading technology and financial services firm dedicated to Bitcoin, NYDIG* is hoping to add a bitcoin ETF to the New York Stock Exchange. It is yet another company seeking SEC approval. The full Form S-1 filing can be found here.

*NYDIG is the Bitcoin subsidiary of Stone Ridge, a $10 billion alternative asset manager. 

Morgan Stanley’s head of emerging markets and chief global strategist, Ruchir Sharma, published a report on "Why Crypto Is Coming Out of the Shadows". In the report, he mentions how cryptocurrency is becoming more established and for those who don't adapt, to "risk being left behind". The report cites that 20% of all U.S. dollars in circulation were printed in 2020 and how that inflationary risk is fueling the rush to cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is up 200% in the year, compared to the S&P 500 Index* that only rose 16%. 

Moreover, U.S. debt to other countries surpassed 50% of its GDP in 2019. In 2020, given COVID-19, that debt rose to 67% of GDP, a big warning sign that the U.S. dollar may lose dominance as its liabilities rise. 

As Bitcoin gains market share, the volatility has gone down from an annual average of over 400% to 69%, compared to "27 percent for silver, 13 percent for gold, and around 20 percent for stocks." According to a recent survey mentioned...

Roman Regelman, CEO of asset servicing and head of digital at BNY Mellon--the oldest bank in the U.S. announced on February 11th that "BNY Mellon is proud to be the first global bank to announce plans to provide an integrated service for digital assets."

On February 10th, Mastercard also announced it would begin to support cryptocurrencies this year. 

Even Twitter is considering offering cryptocurrencies as payment to employees. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who also owns the digital processing company Square, has invested heavily in Bitcoin. Square has about $50 billion in BTC as of October. 

Today, Bitcoin payment service provider Bitpay is also on Apple Wallet and Apple Pay allowing users to spend Bitcoin. BitPay plans to add support for Google Pay and Samsung Pay by March's end. 

Honestly, do you really need more convincing that Bitcoin is going to change the world? 

Image Credits to CoinGenius

Bitcoin sits at $47,000 thanks to Tesla. The newly published 10-K filing reveals that in January 2021, the company bought $1.5 billion dollars worth of bitcoin. Honestly, it was inevitable after Elon Musk tagged #bitcoin in his Twitter Bio on January 29. Moreover, Tesla may soon accept crypto payments with a likelihood of holding even more Bitcoin rather than cashing out once payment is received. 

Bitcoin is here to stay. Like Alexander Lorenzo always says, “Get with it or get left behind”. 

Picture source from Rohail Saleem

Visa has just launched its Visa Crypto APIs pilot program. This program will allow banks to trade cryptocurrencies. Digital bank First Boulevard is the first bank involved in the pilot with many others on the waitlist. Visa is partnering with Anchorage, the first national “digital asset bank” in the U.S., to offer this crypto capability. So far, Visa has issued bank cards with 35 different crypto firms, but this will be "the first time the company has offered crypto services to banks."

On Wednesday, Paypal had a very profitable Q4 earnings (triple from last year), thanks in part to the crypto services that were made available to U.S. users on November 12, 2020. CEO of PayPal, Dan Schulman, also announced plans to give 29 million merchants worldwide the ability to accept crypto payments. 

These two institutions are going to help drive adoption of crypto more and more. Stay tuned. 

One of the most popular centralized exchanges for crypto, Coinbase, has decided to do a direct listing on the Nasdaq rather than the New York Stock Exchange according to The Block. 

In the Nasdaq Private Market on January 25, Pre-IPO Coinbase shares sold for $200 which would value the firm at around $50.8 billion ($200*254 million shares outstanding). Online database and research agency, Messari had calculated that the firm was valued at $28 billion back in December when Coinbase first filed with the SEC. Futures contracts have Coinbase shares trading at $277 on FTX. All this to say, Coinbase stock is going to be hot. Stay tuned. 

A new class action lawsuit has been added to XRP's growing legal troubles. On January 25, Tyler Toomey, a Florida investor filed suit against Ripple Labs and its CEO Brad Garlinghouse. Tyler and others in the class action accused Ripple of tricking investors and selling millions of dollars worth of unregistered XRP coins. 

This is similar to the lawsuit on December 22, 2020 where the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs and personally named CEOs Christian Larsen and Bradly Garlinghouse in the suit. The plaintiff, SEC, charges the defendants of obtaining over $1.38 billion using digital asset security, XRP, without following proper regulatory guidelines. 

Europe's largest digital asset manager with nearly $3 billion in assets under management (AUM) just launched its bitcoin ETP* on January 19, 2021. Each unit of the ETP will be backed by 0.001 Bitcoin. The firm, CoinShares, will list it on Switzerland's main stock exchange with the ticker: BITC. This is a huge step forward in rivaling the US-headquartered Grayscale Investments that has over $20 billion in digital assets. The fund will initially have $200 million with a base fee of 0.98% as compared to Grayscale® Bitcoin Trust 2% fee.

*ETPs are exchange traded products that are similar to mutual funds but can be traded like stocks with prices constantly fluctuating. Mutual funds, on the other hand, only trade once a day after the market closes. Moreover, all ETFs are considered ETPs but not vice-versa as ETPs do not have to be as diversified as ETFs.

BITC Factsheet here.

Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association officially whitelists the Enjin Coin in Japan. Whitelisting is the official practice of allowing identified entities access to a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. This is pretty big news for Enjin, as the coin in itself acts as a store of value when it gets locked into non-fungible tokens within the Enjin ecosystem. In addition, this isn’t just possible within Enjin’s ecosystem alone, but there's a huge amount of potential where cross ecosystem integration can be built through in-app economies. 

Japan seems to be a really good use case for Enjin, as Japan contains one of the biggest gaming ecosystems in the world. Even within their corporate structure, we have the likes of Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Bandai Namco, Konami, Square Enix, etc. In addition, they are the first gaming cryptocurrency that was approved by the JVCEA under the Fund Settlement Law. 

For this next bull cycle,...