[One week in review] Bitcoin hits $14,000 again

Cryptocurrency

In the past week, the price of Bitcoin has risen steadily, from US$13,000 to US$13,500 to US$13,800, steadily reaching a high near US$14,000 in the middle of last year. Whether it is the fundamentals of the Bitcoin network or the macroeconomic situation, it is currently beneficial to Bitcoin.

Data from Glassnode shows that as the price of bitcoin has risen, the number of giant whale addresses holding a large amount of bitcoin has risen to a four-year high. Market research company Nautilus Research said that Bitcoin’s current price trend is similar to that before the sharp price increase in 2012 and 2017, which means that a new bull market may be coming. Nautilus Research said on Twitter that the price of Bitcoin will rise further and the price may exceed $100,000.

Digital asset management company Grayscale said in a latest report that the protracted new crown epidemic has made Bitcoin more attractive to US investors. According to the report, the number of American investors interested in Bitcoin continues to increase, and the new crown epidemic highlights the advantages of Bitcoin and makes it more attractive to investors.

Brian Estes, founder of investment company Off The Chain Capital, this week, “I think that by 2029-2030, when 90% of American households use cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, I think it will become a stable part of the economy, not only It’s the U.S. economy, and so is the world economy.”

application

One and a half years after the first announcement, JPM Coin’s internal digital currency JPM Coin has now been used by a large multinational technology company for cross-border payments. According to CNBC reports, JPMorgan Chase has now created a new business unit dedicated to digital currency and blockchain business. The new business unit is called “Onyx” and has more than 100 employees. The CEO is Umar Farooq.

The IT department of the famous car manufacturer Toyota Motor is working with cryptocurrency exchanges to develop digital tokens. Its IT subsidiary Toyota Systems is working with Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DeCurret to develop a digital currency used internally by Toyota. Seven Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi and NTT Data, are also forming a joint venture with the aim of using blockchain to implement online transactions.

The British crypto banking service platform Cashaa announced that it will cooperate with India’s United Multinational Credit Cooperative to establish a crypto-friendly financial institution called UNICAS in India. The institution will open 34 “physical branches and businesses” in India.

According to a public statement this week, US telecommunications giant Verizon launched “a blockchain-based open source news editorial department product.” The platform, called “Fully Transparent”, aims to record the company’s own news on the public blockchain.

In the third quarter of 2020, Ripple paid $9.3 million in XRP rewards to money transfer company MoneyGram. MoneyGram disclosed this figure in its earnings report released on Thursday. The Nasdaq-listed company said that Ripple paid US$9.3 million, of which US$400,000 was offset by related transaction costs, and net income was US$8.9 million.

DeFi

On Monday, Beijing time, some Twitter netizens discovered that a hacker had cashed out a huge amount of money from Harvest Finance through flash loans, and then Harvest Finance officially released a Twitter stating that the economic attack initiated by the hacker was carried out through the Curve Y pool. In order to protect users, it has deposited the Y pool and BTC Curve strategy funds in the Vault, all stablecoins and BTC funds are in the Vault (not deployed in the strategy), and other pools are not affected.

According to a report by the third-party security agency CER, 14 out of 25 decentralized exchanges (DEX) scored low on cybersecurity. CER’s standards include several factors, such as whether the DEX has undergone security audits, the availability of bug bounties, and whether they have appropriate SSL/TLS certificates. CER believes that any score below 6 is considered a “low score” and therefore “unsafe.” Only two of these decentralized exchanges have received a “high score”: Uniswap and Synteyx.

Supervision

The digital asset guidelines issued by the Securities Commission, the Malaysian regulator, came into effect on Wednesday, including regulations on initial exchange offerings (IEO) and digital asset custody. The committee stated that these rules are designed to promote “responsible innovation in the digital asset sector while managing emerging risks and safeguarding the interests of issuers and investors.”

Iran’s new encryption law requires crypto miners to directly sell their mined bitcoins to the central bank. According to a report by the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Iran’s official news agency, Iran has amended the country’s cryptocurrency regulations to require licensed Bitcoin miners to sell their Bitcoin directly to the Iranian Central Bank for import funds.

A wholly-owned subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprobank has received regulatory approval to launch institutional cryptocurrency services in Switzerland. According to the official announcement, with the authorization of the Swiss Financial Market Supervision Authority (FINMA), Gazprobank will be able to provide its corporate and institutional clients with cryptocurrency custody services and transactions between crypto and legal currencies.

Exchange

The major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced that its US customers can now join the shortlist to purchase the Coinbase card, a Visa debit card that allows its customers to use cryptocurrency online wherever Visa cards are accepted Or pay offline.

Forbes published an article on Thursday saying that a leaked document details the efforts of cryptocurrency exchange Binance to avoid being scrutinized by US regulators. Forbes pointed out that Binance “conceived a well-designed corporate structure designed to deliberately deceive regulators and secretly profit from U.S. cryptocurrency investors.” The source is a 2018 document called the “Tai Chi Document”, which has not yet been made public. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao responded on Twitter that this is an untrue report and the alleged leaked documents were not produced by former or current Binance employees.

According to Skew’s data, Binance Futures currently has the most liquid Bitcoin perpetual swap contract, surpassing BitMEX, which was investigated by US regulators in early October. Binance Futures is a futures trading platform owned by the major cryptocurrency exchange Binance. It was launched in September 2019. It has become one of the most important Bitcoin futures exchanges. Based on the cumulative daily trading volume, Binance Futures is already the largest Bitcoin futures exchange. According to Skew’s data, it processes $6.2 billion in transactions per day, higher than Huobi and OKEx.

Digital asset exchange INX announced that it will acquire Chicago-based Openfinance Securities. The specific transaction amount was not disclosed. INX said that, subject to regulatory approval and other premises, it will also acquire Openfinance’s brokerage trading and alternative trading system (ATS) business, including its system, digital asset list, customer base and licenses. It will also apply for its digital securities (INX tokens) to be listed on the Canadian Stock Exchange (CSE). If approved, CSE will become the first exchange in the world to list INX tokens.

Digital currency

On Wednesday, Cambodia officially launched Bakong, its digital currency backed by the Central Bank. According to Reuters, the digital currency Bakong supports transactions in the U.S. dollar and the Cambodian currency riel, and is expected to help Cambodians use smartphones to make payments and transfer money between individuals. The digital currency can be used through a mobile application installed on a smartphone. Although the number of Cambodians with traditional bank accounts is limited, smartphones have spread to every corner of this Southeast Asian country.

In an interview with Reuters, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said that the Bank of Canada is working with G7 partners on digital currency plans. He also said that a “global coordination” approach is needed to prevent accidents and prevent criminals from using such tools. Macklem told Reuters that the central bank is working to transform the concept of digital currency from a proof to a more comprehensive and executable plan, but he also emphasized that there is no urgent need for digital currency “at present”.

investment

Crypto management company Bitwise Asset Management announced that its assets under management (AUM) has exceeded $100 million, setting a new high. Bitwise said that part of the achievement of this milestone was due to its recent demand for the Bitwise 10 crypto index fund, which tracks the 10 largest cryptocurrencies. The company also stated that 2020 is a year when institutional investors are more involved in crypto.

Fidelity Digital Assets, the crypto asset management subsidiary of Fidelity Investments, is expanding its customers in Asia. According to Bloomberg News, Fidelity Digital Assets has partnered with Singapore-based Stack Funds to promote the growing interest of Asian investors in cryptocurrencies.

Image source: pixabay

Author Xiu Mu