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China’s BSN to Launch Global CBDC Payment System Beta in 2021

China’s lead in the race for developing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is unassailable at this point. The country is making further progress, with the government’s blockchain service network looking to release a CBDC network beta this year.

Safe, Low-Cost CBDC Payments

China’s Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) has announced plans to launch a public beta for a global CBDC network, per a blog post. 

The BSN is a blockchain network that enables digital token and decentralized app (dApp) development. 

In the post, the state-sponsored network explained that it would invest a considerable amount in research and development this year. The network plans to focus on digital payments primarily as it is working towards launching a Universal Digital Payment Network (UDPN).

Speaking on digital payments, the BSN pointed out that stablecoins and CBDCs have become more prominent across the world as countries look to embrace e-payments fully. The network plans to launch a payment network based on all developed CBDCs in the next five years.

“This digital payment network will completely change the current payment and circulation method, enabling a standardized digital currency transfer method and payment procedure for any information system,” the BSN explained, adding that a convenient, cost-effective beta will be available in the second half of this year.

With the payment network, the BSN is looking to provide a standard digital currency transfer procedure. It aims to combine systems like insurance, banking, enterprise resource allocation, and mobile apps through dedicated application program interfaces (APIs) to make global payments safe and cheaper.

The payment network is one of BSN’s four objectives for the year. The other three include expanding its network, promoting its new private platform, and expanding its ecosystem. In addition, the BSN reiterated its commitment to enhancing blockchain capabilities to companies and governments worldwide.

China Forges On With Digital Yuan

So far, digital yuan has been one of China’s most ambitious economic and financial projects. Officially launched in late 2019, the project has gone through extensive tests last year and looks to be entering advanced testing phases.

Last year saw several firms and government agencies partner on testing the CBDC in several real-world situations, mainly through giveaways and retail spending. The developers haven’t relented in their efforts this year as they look to strengthen their research and testing base.

Last week, local news sources confirmed that the Agricultural Bank of China, one of the country’s largest state-owned banks, had launched ATMs for the digital yuan. As the reports explained, the machines were installed at specific branches within Shenzhen. Customers at these branches have been able to spend and convert the digital yuan tokens they got as a part of the government’s “red envelope” lottery – a project that saw the government hand out $3 million worth of the asset to 100,000 citizens.

The machines reportedly allow digital yuan deposits and withdrawals via a smartphone app. Users can also convert their savings and cash to the CBDC.

China’s BSN to Launch Global CBDC Payment System Beta in 2021

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Mike Novogratz Sees More Institutions Flocking into Bitcoin in 2021

Bitcoin’s recent rally has been mostly due to the influx of institutional investors into the market. However, there have been questions about how long this could continue. For crypto entrepreneur and investor Mike Novogratz, things appear to just be getting started.

Institutions Will Hop on Price Dips

Novogratz runs crypto merchant bank Galaxy Digital. He sat down for an interview with Yahoo! Finance, where he discussed the state of the crypto market.

The crypto investor said he expects the arrival of more institutions in 2021.

In the interview, Novogratz gave a quick overview of the market so far, heralded by Bitcoin and its volatile performance last week. The investor pointed out that there should be even further dips soon, although he wasn’t overly concerned because he expects an influx of institutional investors.

As explained earlier, 2020 was the year of institutions rushing into crypto. Fearing the weakening dollar’s effects, companies like MicroStrategy, Square, Ruffer Investments, and MassMutual made Bitcoin plays worth tens and hundreds of millions. However, as Novogratz explained, the trend should continue, with more investors seeing Bitcoin’s long-term value.

“The institutions who are coming into this space now that weren’t in the space six months ago, [a] year ago, don’t have their fill yet. Not even close. We’re in the first inning of a 9-inning game with insurance companies, asset managers,” Novogratz said in part.

The billionaire investor added that Bitcoin would have more dips soon, and there will be institutions waiting to pounce at the opportunity. So, the market remains strong, thanks in part to projected increases in demand.

The Coming Liquidity Shortage

Novogratz also explained that the influx of institutions represents a significant shift in the market’s structure. Most institutions appear to be long-term holders who don’t have much use for Bitcoins other than as a store of value.

Considering that these large companies tend to make hung plays at once, their reluctance to plow back any of the Bitcoins they own could lead to a liquidity crunch.

Trading platforms are already complaining about a possible liquidity problem. eToro told customers that massive demand for Bitcoin could cause it to place limitations on buy orders over the weekend. Coinbase’s daily volume also reached $9.5 billion on January 12 – surpassing its previous all-time high of $6.5 billion.

On the same day, volumes on Binance hit $30 billion for the first time. With institutions like Grayscale Investments and MicroStrategy snapping up Bitcoins every chance they get, it seems more likely that there will be less and less for retail traders to play with.

Mike Novogratz Sees More Institutions Flocking into Bitcoin in 2021

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CardFlight Announces Small Business Pay Solution Expansion With SwipeSimple Register Product Line Addition

CardFlight, a U.S.-based SaaS payment technology company, announced on Wednesday the addition of the SwipeSimple Register product line to its hardware offerings. According to CardFlight, the product will feature the following models:

  • SwipeSimple Register 8: has an expanded 8-inch touchscreen that delivers full POS/cash register capabilities. Its easy swivel mount conveniently shows customer prompts for tips and digital receipts, to provide a speedy check-out experience without adding clutter to counter space
  • SwipeSimple Register 6: designed for less complex sales environments. It features a convenient 6-inch touchscreen and swivel base station with a built-in receipt printer, packing a complete point of sale into an elegant device
  • SwipeSimple Register 15: target merchants requiring specialized features, including more advanced retail and food & beverage establishments, and quick-serve restaurants. It features an extra-large 15-inch touchscreen to quickly ring up complex sales, even from a large catalog

CardFlight explained that with these new payment solutions, small business owners will gain access to sophisticated countertop devices that run the powerful yet easy-to-use SwipeSimple software.

“SwipeSimple Register offers merchants sleek countertop devices integrating a physical check-out experience with modern point-of-sale and payment acceptance technology.”

while sharing more details about the product and features,  Derek Webster, CEO and Founder of CardFlight, stated:

“The addition of SwipeSimple Register to the SwipeSimple suite of products furthers our mission to serve the full range of small businesses across industries. No two small businesses are the same, and neither are their needs—SwipeSimple Register product line will offer storefront merchants a range of countertop options, to meet the needs of their business.”

CardFlight went on to add that SwipeSimple Register’s Initial launch will begin in late Q1 2021 full line to release throughout the year.

Founded in 2013, CardFlight states it is committed to making payment acceptance easy for business owners.

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Wall Street Veteran Howard Marks Reconsiders Bitcoin Stance Amid Bullish Run

Despite a few setbacks, it’s safe to say that Bitcoin is continuing its forward trajectory. At the same time, several skeptics are starting to change their tone concerning the leading cryptocurrency.

The latest skeptic-turned-enthusiast is Howard Marks, the co-founder, and co-chairman of asset management giant Oaktree Capital Management.

Son Convinces Daddy

Oaktree is the largest investor of distressed securities in the world. Based in Los Angeles, the company holds about $140 billion in asset management. 

In an investor memo shared earlier this week, Marks explained that he was beginning to change his skeptical views on Bitcoin, with the asset showing considerable maturity over the past few years.

Marks was a staunch critic of Bitcoin in the 2017 bull run. 

At the time, the investment guru warned that Bitcoin was no more than a fad, and that investors would eventually lose a fortune when its bubble popped. In his memo, Marks explained that Bitcoin was essentially a pyramid scheme, with enthusiasts ascribing it a value based on peoples’ willingness to pay for it.

The value investor turned out to be right as Bitcoin plunged after reaching almost $20,000 per token. 

However, with Bitcoin now leaving its previous all-time high in the dust, even Marks has alluded that he could have been wrong.

In his recent memo, the investor explained that he had been talking with his son, Andrew Marks, about cryptocurrencies. He added that Andrew was a strong Bitcoin enthusiast and had “thankfully” bought up a few on behalf of the family. Apparently, Andrew had been able to convince him.

As Marks explained, he had not been fully pro-Bitcoin. However, he acknowledged that he would need to at least examine the asset and its potential.

“When innovations work, it’s only later that what first seemed crazy becomes consensus. Without attaining real knowledge of what’s going on and attempting to fully understand the positive case, it’s impossible to have a sufficiently informed view to warrant the dismissiveness that many of us exhibit in the face of innovation,” the value investor said.

Wall Street Loves Crypto

Marks is just the latest Wall Street giant who appears to be warming up to crypto. 

Last month, Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates, explained in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session that gold and Bitcoin provided the best alternative investment for people looking to divest from stocks and cash.

The billionaire hedge fund manager has previously criticized Bitcoin for its volatility and other failures as a currency.

With Wall Street stalwarts interested in crypto, there is hope that they will back some of that interest with investments. Institutional investment helped the crypto space grow last year, and with retail looking strong again, a push from top firms could take the leading cryptocurrency to unprecedented heights.

Wall Street Veteran Howard Marks Reconsiders Bitcoin Stance Amid Bullish Run

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Bullish crypto events of 2020 that will drive historic adoption

The year gone by had many ups and even more downs, mainly due to the global outbreak of a devastating virus that has crippled nations and killed millions. But for those in the crypto and blockchain community, 2020 finally showcased the true potential of the technology. 

There were, arguably, more developments last year that will have long-lasting positive effects on the industry than during the entire history of distributed ledger technology and Bitcoin (BTC). So, here are the top five developments of last year in the decentralized tech sector that will leave a lasting memory and a strong legacy for years to come.

BTC price breaks $20,000

Bitcoin price did a lot more than just break the $20,000 price mark that was originally set during the 2017–2018 bull run. First, the $20,000 mark fell. Soon after, so did $30,000. And now, even the $35,000 mark has been taken over.

Those seemingly wild predictions of a $45,000 Bitcoin price by the end of 2021 may not be so distant after all. What’s more is that the infamous stock-to-flow model developed by crypto trader PlanB, which predicts a $100,000 price for Bitcoin, is playing out as suggested.

So, yes, prices go up, but they can also go down. This has happened before and may happen again, right? In theory, however, many things have changed, not least the general perception of Bitcoin. This has been evidenced by the shift in demand from retail investors to institutional ones.

Bitcoin welcomed numerous high-profile companies that joined the industry for their own various needs, from firms choosing to hold BTC as a reserve, like Microstrategy, to the rise of crypto investment funds like Bitwise and Grayscale — and who knows which individuals are investing through those. All that is known is that they are willing to put billions into crypto. And then in late October, the real big news arrived…

PayPal launches crypto option

PayPal, a company that was originally founded with similar fundamental beliefs to Bitcoin itself, not only announced its foray into but actually entered the crypto space in 2020, at least in the United States. Additionally, it has been reported that PayPal is now one of the biggest buyers of Bitcoin as the company builds up reserves to satisfy customer demand.

The single word that sums up this development is “adoption.” Some 28 million merchants and over 361 million users all around the world will now be exposed to the “baby” version of owning and using crypto. According to the company, it is the custodian and is essentially just selling shares in its BTC holding. In doing so, it’s not following the traditional way of how people own crypto, and that’s fine.

To the average user, crypto is way too difficult to comprehend — all the cold and hot wallets, the passcodes, the 12-word recovery phrases, etc. PayPal is offering an easy-to-use way to get into the ecosystem, and once that happens, some may actually go the full way to discover more about how this technology should be utilized.

The halving

The Bitcoin halving was touted to be the big make-or-break moment for the crypto industry. It took place, yet not much actually happened. Various commentators expected BTC’s price to pump then crash, while others foresaw a drop-off in the network hash rate. Although those things did happen to a certain extent, it was nowhere near as dramatic as expected, and that was a very good thing.

The Bitcoin mining reward halving is an event that happens roughly every four years and cuts in half the amount of BTC that miners earn for discovering a block. This is a hard rule coded into the blockchain that limits the supply to just 21 million BTC and, in doing so, mimics gold’s finite supply.

Ultimately, the fact that Bitcoin’s price and fundamentals remained almost unaffected has led some to believe that the industry has reached a certain level of maturity. Perhaps this resilience was what ultimately led some of the biggest corporations, economists and investors to reconsider their stance on cryptocurrencies in general. The fact that the supply of Bitcoin is running out became even more apparent as the year went on.

Coinbase IPO

It’s now in fashion for companies to go public, so it’s great to see that some crypto-native companies such as Coinbase are also joining in on the fun. It was half expected that such a move would come soon due to the overall regulation-open approach employed by the company, which was clearly set to appease U.S. regulators when the time was right.

What the move means, in essence, is that traditional investors will be able to sink millions into Coinbase equity — as much as $28 billion, in fact, according to Messari. The draft of the listing was also carefully timed with the jump in the price of top cryptocurrencies, and this will hopefully play into the exchange’s hands as it will no doubt face intense scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ultimately, Coinbase can shine light into a dark alleyway leading up to mass adoption by investors and users alike. Other so-called “unicorns” may follow its example in 2021, so in a way, Coinbase is sticking its neck out. But it may pay off if they are granted the initial public offering and become the first truly major crypto company to do so.

Ethereum and DeFi

Bitcoin has investors, and Ethereum has its users, and the latter certainly stepped up in 2020 to make the decentralized finance boom a reality, finding use cases for all those decentralized applications that had been touted to change the game for some time.

All was calm before the month of July when it was announced that a highly anticipated project by the name of Compound launched its own token, COMP. It proved to be an instant hit, securing numerous listings on high-profile exchanges and establishing a new trend in DeFi.

The basic methodology behind Compound is simple: The platform acts as a decentralized lending protocol that pays interest to users that add their crypto to the pool. However, once funds are added to the pool, the platform issues an equivalent amount of cTokens that can be used as collateral on a loan, meaning that one token of any kind can be used twice.

As COMP’s price started to pump, it wasn’t long before other projects caught on to this new trend and began to unveil competing protocols or projects that supported the ecosystem. Just over one month later, Yearn.finance was launched and took the yield farming phenomenon to a whole new level.

Then came the decentralized exchange Uniswap, which also joined in on the action by opening up its own pools, and with its open listing policy, countless DeFi projects flocked in to list their tokens on the exchange. However, it also made an impact through its use of automated market makers, an idea developed in 2017 by Bancor. 2020 was really the year that AMAs took off through driving users to make transactions in tokens that are built upon the Ethereum blockchain. This ultimately brought thousands of active users onto the Ethereum network.

What’s more is that the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade was finally initiated after several lengthy delays. The combination of Eth2, the recently renewed interest in altcoins and the DeFi boom has certainly brought back interest in Ethereum and the Ether (ETH) token itself, propelling it to well over $1,200, a level not seen in almost two years, and close to its all-time high of around $1,450. Now, just seven days into the new year, some are certain that $2,000 will be coming fairly soon.

Bullish crypto events of 2020 that will drive historic adoption

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