Biz Builder Mike

You can't sail Today's boat on Yesterdays wind - Michael Noel

waves

3X as many crypto figures make it onto Forbes 2021 billionaires list as last year

Forbes released their annual billionaires list on April 6, with Amazon overlord Jeff Bezos and his $177 billion topping the list for a fourth consecutive year.

The “digital gold rush” has seen nine new crypto billionaires join the Forbes list, pushing the total up to 12 (depending on whether you count the Winklevoss twins as one or two entries.) That’s up from just four in last year’s Forbes World’s Billionaires list

Sam Bankman-Fried – Newcomer

Sam Bankman-Fried is the wealthiest crypto-billionaire, with a net worth of $8.7 billion. Bankman-Fried founded trading firm Alameda Research and popular derivatives exchange FTX. The 29-year old has made waves in the crypto space, with FTX recently winning the naming rights to Miami Heat’s home stadium for 19 years. Cointelegraph recently ranked Bankman-Fried as the third most influential figure in crypto for 2020.

The Winklevoss Twins – Newcomers

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have a net worth of $3 billion each and started investing in Bitcoin in 2012. The brothers famously sued Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for IP theft in 2004 and won a $65 million settlement which they used to invest in Bitcoin. They started the crypto exchange Gemini in 2014, and they purchased Nifty Gateway in November 2019.

Chris Larsen – Returnee

Larsen, the co-founder of Ripple Labs saw his net worth grow from $2.6 billion to $3.4 billion over the past year.

Larson and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse have been fighting an ongoing dispute with the SEC in relation to XRP and unregistered securities offerings. However, the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple hasn’t appeared to affect its token too badly, with XRP increasing by 387% in the last 12 months.

Jed McCaleb – Newcomer

McCaleb is another co-founder of Ripple, and reportedly holds 3.4 billion XRP and 1 billion Stellar Lumens — the cryptocurrency he founded after leaving Ripple — with his holdings adding up to a net worth of $2 billion. Cointelegraph reported that McCaleb sold off $400 million worth of his XRP holdings in 2020 alone.

Michael Saylor – Newcomer

Saylor is the CEO of listed company MicroStrategy and co-founded the software giant in 1989, and now has a net worth of $2.3 billion. Saylor has become the leading advocate for corporations holding Bitcoin on balance sheets. Since its first purchase of Bitcoin in August 2020, Microstrategy has invested $2.226 billion, taking its tally up to 91,579 Bitcoins at an average cost of $24,311 per Bitcoin.

Brain Armstrong – Returnee

Armstrong is the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase and his net worth has gone from $1 billion to $6.5 billion within 12 months. Coinbase also had a successful year, generating $1 billion in revenue, and it’s set for a direct listing in a week. That will value Armstrong’s shares somewhere north of $14B, meaning he may well top the crypto billionaires’ list next year.

Fred Ersham – Newcomer

Ersham co-founded Coinbase with Brian Armstrong in 2012 and left the firm in 2017. He is now a board member of the company, and his 6% stake has an estimated worth of $1.9 billion.

Changpeng Zhao

Zhao is the founder of the largest crypto exchange Binance and owns an estimated 30% stake in the company. Zhao’s net worth is $1.9 billion, and the digital gold rush has been good to the Binance founder, with Binance Coin becoming the second-largest altcoin by market cap. Zhao revealed earlier this week that he holds close to 100% of his portfolio in crypto.

Matthew Roszak – Newcomer

Roszak is the Chairman and co-founder of blockchain technology firm Bloq and is a leading crypto and blockchain investor. Roszak is also a founding member of Tally Capital a crypto-focused private investment firm and has a net worth of $1.5 billion.

Tim Draper – Newcomer

Draper is a crypto evangelist with a net worth of $1.5 billion. He bought $18.7 million worth of Bitcoin in 2014 after it was confiscated from the Silk Road black market. Draper was also one of the primary investors in the Tezos project and co-founded Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading investment firm in early-stage tech startups.

Barry Silbert – Newcomer

Silbert founded the crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group in 2015 and has a net worth of $1.6 billion. The DCG owns asset management firm Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which currently has $46 billion worth of assets under management.

3X as many crypto figures make it onto Forbes 2021 billionaires list as last year

Source

$56.3K Bitcoin price and $1T market cap signal BTC is here to stay

As Bitcoin (BTC) price pushed above $55,300 in the morning trading session, its market cap surpassed $1 trillion for the first time on Feb. 19. The breakout continued throughout the day and within the past hour BTC price hit another all-time high at $56,368. 

Now that Bitcoin has cemented its status as a trillion-dollar asset among the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google, legacy banks are showing increasing interest in offering cryptocurrency custody services for their customers.

BTC/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

According to Treyce Dahlem, an analyst at TheTIE, social media conversations including ‘Bitcoin’ as a keyword have increased by 38% since Feb. 18. More than 102,000 tweets have been sent out in the past 24-hours, and this is only “30,000 tweets shy of setting a new record high.”

Dahlem said:

“The number of Twitter users talking about Bitcoin on a daily basis has reached a new all-time high of 38,500, up 325% from a year ago.

Altcoins rise as DeFi and CeFi begin to merge

Daily cryptocurrency market performance. Source: Coin360

Multiple altcoins joined BTC and Ether (ETH) in establishing new all-time highs as both centralized and decentralized exchange tokens experienced strong breakouts.

Binance Coin (BNB) continued to benefit from the growing influence of the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) as surging volume lifted the token to a new high of $348.72.

This parabolic rally secured BNB’s spot as the third-ranked project by market capitalization behind Bitcoin and Ether.

DeFi-related projects like PancakeSwap (CAKE) and Venus (VXS) are two of the top attractions on the BSC and both hit new highs at $20.62 and $101.50 respectively. REN also made waves after its recent integration with BSC helped lift the token to a record high at $1.69.

Traditional markets close the week mixed

Following a week of new highs for the major indices, traditional markets closed the week mixed on Friday as the U.S. economy faces continued fallout from the pandemic and rising unemployment.

The NASDAQ finished the day up 0.07% while the Dow was flat. The S&P 500 declined by 0.19%.

Bullish momentum may extend through the weekend

As traditional markets close up for the week, the bullish momentum propelling Bitcoin and altcoins high is showing no signs of slowing down. Recent historical data shows that Bitcoin’s rallies in 2021 have a tendency to occur on the weeked and many analysts believe the top-ranked digital asset could attack the $60,000 level over the weekend.

The round the clock nature of the crypto sector means that markets are always active somewhere on the planet. As the current bull market attracts wider attention from retail and institutional investors, the trend of trading volume decreasing on weekends seems to no longer be in effect.

While Ether (ETH) price has remained pinned below $2,000, it still managed to rally to a new all-time high at $1,974.

There are increasing bullish murmurs that institutional investors are deeply interested in the returns being offered through staking on Eth2 as well as participating in the growing DeFi sector, both of which are the driving force behind the growing demand for Ether.

Total cryptocurrency market capitalization. Source: CoinMarketCap

Recent price breakouts from top tokens like Bitcoin and Binance Coin and DeFi superstars like REN and CAKE have also helped lift the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency sector to a new record $1.705 trillion. Bitcoin’s dominance currently stands at 61.1%

$56.3K Bitcoin price and $1T market cap signal BTC is here to stay

Source

Will Apple Be the Next Big Corporation to Get into Bitcoin?

The big story today is that Elon Musk’s Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) has purchased $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. The information was disclosed in a 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While the exact timing of the purchase was not disclosed, Tesla is most certainly in the black on the purchase as the news has driven Bitcoin to new all-time highs.

Tesla is not the first publicly traded company to purchase Bitcoin. Fintechs like Square and PayPal made waves when they did the same. Other traded firms have also made announcements they have purchased Bitcoin either as a hedge against inflation or simply as diversifying into a new asset class. Bitcoin is frequently described as digital gold – limited in supply and somewhat immune to being deflated. As Crowdfund Insider reported earlier today, some crypto industry insiders believe that Tesla’s move will compel other firms to buy Bitcoin and perhaps other digital assets.

So could Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) be the next big corporation to buy into the world’s most popular cryptocurrency? Perhaps. Or maybe it will provide a crypto service for its hundreds of millions of users.

Apple, the largest company in the world, is already moving in the direction of adding more financial services to its portfolio. In fact, it is part of a lobbying group that advocates on behalf of Big Tech in Fintech. It already powers its Apple Pay platform, digital wallet, and popular Apple Card (in partnership with Goldman Sachs). As reported by Bloomberg, one securities analyst at RBC Capital Markets, Mitch Steves, believes that Apple should follow Tesla and move into crypto but not by buying BTC but by launching a crypto exchange.

And while regulatory questions are always a concern, Apple could outsource the operation of any crypto offerings to one of a number of institutionally focused firms providing back-end services to financial services firms adding crypto to their platforms. Just like it does with its Apple Card.

Speaking on CNBC, Steves said a crypto exchange is a multi-billion opportunity for Apple and a relatively simple task. Steves has an outperform target on Apple with a $171 price target so he is already bullish on shares in the company. Of course, if Apple made an announcement like this, shares in Apple would definitely move higher as would Bitcoin.

Is this completely outside the realm of possibility? No, in fact, some time ago in 2019 an Apple executive said they were watching cryptocurrency.

“We think it’s interesting. We think it has interesting long-term potential.”

But this contrasts with a separate report where Apple CEO Tim Cook said they had no interest in cryptocurrency – more specifically in regards to pursuing something akin to Facebook’s attempt to create a global non-sovereign digital currency. But that is a bit different than allowing its users to move money from dollars (or another fiat currency) into BTC. While I would not hold my breath you have to expect that Apple, at a minimum, has discussed the pros and cons of Bitcoin and enabling crypto in its digital wallet internally.

Source

Algorithmic stablecoin project Neutrino launches staking for its governance token

The Neutrino Protocol, a project building algorithmic cross-platform stablecoins, announced Tuesday the launch of staking rewards for its governance and utility token, NSBT.

Neutrino uses an innovative mix of collateral backing and algorithmic supply changes to create a wide range of fiat-pegged stablecoins. The flagship stablecoin, USDN, and NSBT are available on Ethereum (ETH) as ERC-20 tokens.

The USDN generation mechanism relies on WAVES, the native token of the Waves platform. Generating the stablecoin is as simple as using its smart contract to exchange WAVES for USDN. Oracles will read the price of the asset and create an amount of USDN based on WAVES’ current price.

The assets thus form a pool of collateral that backs the USDN stablecoin. The reverse process can be performed at any time, redeeming USDN back for WAVES according to its current market price.

However, this mechanism is only valid until the price of WAVES is growing or remaining stable. If it were to fall, the stablecoin’s reserves would eventually be less than the amount of tokens circulating. This is where the mechanism relying on NSBT, or the Neutrino System Base Token, comes in.

To recapitalize the system, smart contracts will auction new NSBT off in exchange for WAVES, in a similar manner to the “flop” auction used by MakerDAO after Black Thursday.

Once the price of WAVES recovers, or the system is otherwise recapitalized, the NSBT will be redeemable for USDN at a rate defined by the stablecoin’s reserves ratio. For example, if there are $130 million WAVES tokens for $100 million USDN, the price of NSBT will be approximately 1.3 USDN. The formula is exponential, and it is set in such a way that the smart contract-based price of NSBT will begin rising rapidly once the reserve factor grows above a certain over-collateralization threshold. The smart contract’s mechanism only establishes lower and upper limits to the price through arbitrage mechanisms, while the market price is free to float between those values.

Both the NSBT and USDN tokens can be staked right now. The former entitles holders to 2% of smart contract operation fees, but it can only be staked directly on the Waves platform. The latter draws rewards from the Waves treasury, and can be staked on Ethereum as well by simply holding it in a wallet. Staking through exchanges is also possible.

Sasha Ivanov, founder of Waves, said that Ethereum “is just the beginning.” The Neutrino protocol is set to expand to Solana, IOST, Ontology and others, using its oracle-based Gravity bridge protocol. The team is also pushing for proposals to integrate the token into existing DeFi protocols like Compound and Aave.

Algorithmic stablecoin project Neutrino launches staking for its governance token

Source

‘It will send BTC’ — On-chain analyst says Bitcoin hodlers are only getting stronger

According to on-chain analyst Willy Woo, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) could achieve a “conservative” target of $200,000 in 2021. The prediction revolves around the fact that long-time investors seem more confident in the recent rally.

There are two key data points that suggest Bitcoin’s ongoing rally could explode higher. First, “HODLers,” or long-time BTC holders, aren’t moving their funds for longer than in previous rallies. Second, BTC held on exchanges continues to decrease, which reduces selling pressure.

A bullish Bitcoin re-accumulation phase is happening

The re-accumulation of Bitcoin has remained a consistently bullish trend throughout 2020. It has continuously decreased the selling pressure on BTC, allowing a more stable rally without major 30%-40% corrections as frequently seen in 2017.

Woo noted that he is bullish for 2021 because Bitcoin’s re-accumulation phase means the amount of BTC that could be sold is much lower compared to the previous bull cycle. He said:

“I’ve never been so bullish for 2021. This re-accumulation phase coincides with spot market inventory depletion roughly 2x longer and deeper than the last cycle. It will send BTC.”

Atop the declining Bitcoin reserve on exchanges, Woo found that HODLers are “holding stronger.” In 2017, the amount of gain per the amount of capital invested in Bitcoin hovered at around $0.25. This figure increased to $0.35 in 2020, which means more investors expect event bigger profits in the future.

Bitcoin market cap gain per dollar invested. Source: Woobull.com

Based on the combination of the two optimistic on-chain trends, Woo said that Bitcoin could achieve a  “conservative price” of $200,000 by the end of 2021. He explained:

“My Top Model suggesting $200k per BTC by end of 2021 looks conservative, $300k not out of the question. The current market on average paid $7456 for their coins. You all are geniuses.”

Bitcoin HODL waves. Source: Glassnode, Unchained Capital

As reported in May, Bitcoin HODL wave data also supports the argument the HODLers from the 2017-2018 bull cycle aren’t selling at these relatively high prices, including high-net worth individuals or “whales.”

However, this data also suggests that some earlier HODLers from three to seven years ago are taking profit after a prolonged BTC rally, heightening the chances of a correction in the short term.

Woo called a massive BTC rally in March 2020

As Cointelegraph previously reported, Woo has been calling for an extended Bitcoin bull run since March 2020.

On Mar. 4, Woo told Max Keiser, the host of RT’s Keiser Report, that Bitcoin could hit $135,000 in the bull run. He said at the time:

“You go could 35 times the cumulative average of the price — and that’s actually picked every single top in the ten-year history of Bitcoin — right now that’s sitting above $50,000, but it keeps climbing the longer it runs for.”

Although the price of Bitcoin fell to sub-$4,000 on Mar. 12 in a “Black Thursday” crash that shocked the market, it has swiftly recovered since.

The bull trend that was bound to happen in March before the crash appears to be in full swing now following BTC’s strong nine-month recovery.

But in the near term, analysts believe that the likelihood of the recovery in the U.S. dollar could cause Bitcoin to see a minor pullback. Following the biggest three-week liquidation in the gold market, analysts also see the precious metal rebounding, which could stall BTC’s momentum in the short term.

\’It will send BTC\’ — On-chain analyst says Bitcoin hodlers are only getting stronger

Source