Blockchain Insights Today — April 26th
Happy Monday everyone! We’re a few short days away from closing out the month of April and are showing no signs of slowing down. Today kicks off a week I expect to be a significant driver for the rest of the quarter. Grab an extra-large cup of coffee and let’s dive in, it's a long read today.
We closed out last week with industry moving news from PayPal who rolled out a crypto purchasing function to Venmo and placing buying power of digital currencies into the hands of its 77 million users! Not to be outshined, Deutsche Telekom, one of the largest telecom providers in Europe, shared its investment in payments platform Celo, staking a flag in their support for DeFi.
Additionally, I noticed a few additional key signals from last week that all should be paying attention to as we close this week and head into May. These will be continued themes over the next ~30 days.
The first signal being digital currencies across the board trending downward 📉 including Bitcoin (BTC) felling below $50k after a previous week of all-time highs. As the markets begin to show some sign of recovery, Tether (USDT) surpasses a market cap of $50 billion after crossing $18 billion at the beginning of the year. In short, things are expanding and adoption growing.
Our next signal, ETFs or exchange-traded funds. While the markets went wild, the ETF space continued to stay active with Purpose Investments launching the world’s first Ethereum ETF. Shortly after, 3iQ and CoinShares followed pace and launched their ether (ETH) ETF on Toronto’s Stock Exchange (TSX), making it the fourth ETF to list in Canada. For those keeping score at home, we’re still waiting for one here in the U.S.
The next key signal, global banks. Last week we had Norway’s Central Bank begin technical testing of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) while Signature Bank who manages ~$85 billion in assets began offering bitcoin-backed cash loans to its customers. We also witnessed the last-minute & lackluster announcement from Morgan Stanley and their new bitcoin fund that raised $29.4 million in only two weeks. While it does sound exciting, it turns out with the limited client set and average investment of about ~$91k, it could have been better. Not to be outdone, however, JP Morgan today shared its offering of an actively managed bitcoin fund to private wealth management clients would be available as soon as this summer (2021).
Next, insurance. Kicking things off, digital asset custody firm BitGo expanded its cold storage insurance program, raising its insurance capacity from $100 million to a total of $700 million. Nexus Mutual announced today that their new Protocol Cover program would begin covering problems on other popular smart contract networks. The first group of projects includes Polkadot, Cosmos, and Binance Smart Chain. Users will be covered for smart contract bugs, oracle attacks, governance failings, and hacks. In January, they added protection against exchange risks on Coinbase and Binance (lost funds or prolonged withdrawal halts).
Then you have what I’m calling “now accepting.” This signal is the expansive list of large brands & companies accepting digital currencies as payments. Last week WeWork revealed that are working with BitPay to process accepting rent payments made with Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, and Paxos. Also, Beatport, the largest online store for DJs in the world, will start accepting Bitcoin this June. Newegg celebrated April 20th’s DogeDay by adding support for accepting Dogecoin through BitPay. Today, we had Camping World, the largest RV dealer in the U.S. & the New York wine seller Acker, Merrall & Condit (Acker established in 1820), begin accepting Bitcoin, Ethereum, and several other cryptocurrencies after partnering with crypto payment processor BitPay.
The last signal to call out, getting paid in digital currencies. We’re hearing more about this on a broader scale as companies add Bitcoin and Ethereum to their balance sheets. However, this month it seems to be heating up towards a full-blown trend taking place. Today Trevor Lawrence, the presumptive number-one pick in the upcoming National Football League (NFL) draft, has signed an endorsement deal with crypto portfolio-tracking platform Blockfolio. Additionally, NFL, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Sean Culkin is reportedly the first NFL player to receive full salary payments in crypto. According to a report by Newsweek, Culkin will receive his full $920,000 base pay in biweekly installments from the Chiefs via the wallet platform Zap. As a reminder, NFL star Russell Okung choose to convert half his $13 million salary to Bitcoin also utilizes Zap’s Strike platform. Related, JD.com has been using China’s Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) system to pay the salaries of some employees since January 2021. This is playing out the company’s greater adoption journey with the DCEP, apart from paying staff salaries, JD has also utilized the DCEP in business-to-business payments to partner firms as well as cross-bank settlements.
More Around The Industry:
📖 Reef Finance, cross-chain DeFi operating system allowing traders to access liquidity from centralized and decentralized exchanges through its smart liquidity aggregator and yield machine has announced that its Substrate-based mainnet will see the light of day in May 2021. Called Reef Chain, it promises to “make DeFi easy” by enabling developers to use a highly scalable and fully EVM-compatible network that’s integrated into the Polkadot ecosystem. Read more.
📖 IBM is partnering with blockchain patent firm IPwe a platform for the world’s IP ecosystem, to begin representing corporate patents as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The tokenized intellectual property will be made “commercially available” in Q4 2021. Read more.
📖 RIT Capital Partners, a British investment trust managed by J. Rothschild Capital Management Limited, has acquired a stake in the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. As a side note, RIT Capital participated in Paxos’s $142 million fundraise last year. Read more.
📖 Baillie Gifford, a 110-year-old asset management firm known for its early bets on firms like Tesla, has invested $100 million in major cryptocurrency wallet service Blockchain.com becoming the largest single investment in the company so far and marks one of their first investments in a crypto company. Read more.
📖 Video game publisher Ubisoft has joined the Tezos ecosystem as a corporate validator. As part of the Tezos ecosystem, Ubisoft plans to continue its experiments with the liquid proof-of-stake technology and research how it could affect “the future of gaming.” Read more.
📖 Weezer announced today that it will join the recent barrage of musicians releasing digital collectibles as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with a set of NFT collectibles on the WAX blockchain starting April 29. Read more.
Congratulations on recent fundraising for YeildGuild ($1.325m), Hashstacs/STACS ($3.6m), security & authentication company HYPR ($35m), enterprise blockchain firm Digital Asset Holdings ($120m), decentralized storage, Filebase ($2m), derivatives exchange Injective Protocol ($10m), Decentralized exchange startup DexGuru ($1m), blockchain compliance company Securrency ($30m, Series B).
