Category: Crypto News

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Bitcoin Crypto News

Top Public Companies Holding Bitcoin as a Reserve Asset

Bitcoin Outperformed Global Assets in February Despite Facing a 26% Drop

It’s no longer news that the demand for the largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC), has significantly increased among institutions and corporate investors. This was predicted by many industry experts after MicroStrategy, a publicly-listed business intelligence company, announced its first BTC acquisition. Many other public companies have joined the bandwagon, with the recent being Tesla, which added $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin to its balance sheet.

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19 Public Companies are Holding Bitcoin

According to information from CoinGecko, there are presently 19 known public companies holding Bitcoin in their balance sheet. Judging by the total number of BTC held by these companies, MicroStrategy lead the pace with a total of 71,079 BTC, which will be worth US$3.2 billion following Bitcoin’s price of US$45,250 on February 10. However, the company bought the cryptocurrencies at a total cost of US$1.14 billion, per Coingecko.

Tesla joins the list as the second-largest public company. The electric-car manufacturer is expected to be holding at least 42,500, which is worth $1.9 billion at the time of writing. Note that the company’s entry price was US$1.5 billion. So, Tesla’s BTC holding is already up by over US$400 million, as Bitcoin spiked after the announcement.

Other public firms with at least 1,000 BTC include Galaxy Digital (16,402 BTC), Marathon (4,813 BTC), Square (4,709 BTC), Hut 8 Mining (2,851 BTC), Voyager (1,239), and Riot Blockchain (1,175 BTC). About 11 others on the list don’t have up to 600 BTC.

The Herds are Coming

As many experts have opined, Tesla’s move to BTC is very significant to raising more corporate Bitcoin investors. As an S&P 500-traded company, industry players like Mike Novogratz, the CEO of Galaxy Digital, believes that many other popular companies, CEOs, and CFOs, will join Tesla in holding Bitcoin. Based on this, Novogratz predicted that BTC is likely to surpass US$100,000 this year. 

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Bitcoin Crypto News

Twitter is Considering Adding Bitcoin to its Balance Sheet

Twitter is Considering Adding Bitcoin to its Balance Sheet

Following the news on Tesla’s US$1.5 billion Bitcoin buy, many industry players like Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz forecasted that several CEOs and CFOs would consider adding the cryptocurrency to their reserve. Well, it’s already happening! Popular social media platform, Twitter, is considering adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet, according to the chief financial officer or CFO, Ned Segal. This should be another catalyst for the cryptocurrency to increase in market value, owing to Twitter’s popularity.

Twitter Considers Buying Bitcoin

As Segal told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday, they are contemplating whether to add Bitcoin to Twitter’s balance sheet. The CFO also noted that they have been thinking about how the social media vendors and workers can be paid with the cryptocurrency, should they request such payment. So, Twitter is more likely to purchase BTC as part of its treasury reserve as soon as the employees and vendors ask for it.

Segal’s precisely stated: 

“We’ve done a lot of the upfront thinking to consider how we might pay employees should they ask to be paid in bitcoin, how we might pay a vendor if they asked to be paid in bitcoin, and whether we need to have bitcoin on our balance sheet should that happen. It’s something we continue to study and look at. We want to be thoughtful about it over time, but we haven’t made any changes yet.” 

Twitter CEO is Already a Big Supporter

Noteworthily, Twitter has one of the biggest Bitcoin supporters, Jack Dorsey, as the CEO, and so adding Bitcoin shouldn’t be a difficult decision to make for the social media platform. Already, Jack Dorsey’s Square Inc. is among the largest corporate Bitcoin investors. Square invested US$50 million in Bitcoin, which is currently worth over US$200 million. 

Last week, Dorsey also revealed he’s running his own Bitcoin node.

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Binance Coin Crypto News Market Analysis Trading

Binance Coin pumps +148% Parabolic High, amid New E-wallet Payment Options in Southeast Asia

Binance Coin (BNB), the in-house token of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, saw its price hit a new all-time high at $191.62 AUD this week, passing Bitcoin Cash by market capitalization.

BNB took a parabolic Breakout with +148% gains in a week. Let’s take a quick look at BNB, price analysis, and possible reasons for the recent breakout.

What is Binance Coin?

Binance Coin (BNB) is the cryptocurrency of the Binance trading platform exclusively for cryptocurrencies. The name “Binance” is a combination of binary and finance. The BNB token is used for reducing trading fees on the platform.

BNB Quick Stats

SYMBOL:BNB
Global rank:7
Market cap:$25,496,690,411 AUD
Current price:$168.02 AUD
All-time high price:$191.62 AUD
1 day:+29.26%
7 day:+148.70%
1 year:+409.74%

BNB Price Analysis

At the time of writing, BNB is ranked 7th cryptocurrency globally and the current price is $168.02 AUD. This is a +148.70% increase from the last 7 days (4th February 2021). Have a look at the chart below for price analysis.

Source: TradingView

After looking at the above 2-hour candle chart, we can clearly see that BNB was trading inside the rising wedge pattern on the BNB/USDT pair. The first resistance was on the $112 AUD price levels which BNB broke with a strong bullish trend buying volume and is now heading towards the all-time high price. Seeing that many altcoins are waking up bullish this week, BNB is likely to continue to increase in the uptrend.

“The Rising Wedge is a bearish pattern that begins wide at the bottom and contracts as prices move higher and the trading range narrows. In contrast to symmetrical triangles, which have no definitive slope and no bullish or bearish bias, rising wedges definitely slope up and have a bearish bias.”

Source: TradingView

What do the Technical indicators say?

The Binance Coin TradingView indicators (on the 1 day) mainly indicate BNB as a buy, except the Oscillators which indicate BNB as a sell.

So Why did BNB Breakout?

Performance appeared buoyed by record volume on Binance itself as trading gathered pace as part of a long-awaited return of “alt season.”

The action was led by Dogecoin surging thanks to tweets by Elon Musk, which Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao used to promote trading on the platform. 

“All-time high on system traffic again. In fact, 3 ATHs in the last 15 minutes,” he revealed on Thursday.

Another reason for this sudden pump in price could be the whales secretly buying BNB for the next Altcoins rally & it could also be contributed to some of the recent news of New E-wallet Payment Options in Southeast Asia at Binance.

Recent BNB News & Events:

Where to Buy or Trade BNB?

Binance Coin has the highest liquidity on Binance Exchange so that would be the best place to buy and for trading BNB/BTC, BNB/USDT, BNB/AUD pairs.

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Blockchain Crypto News DeFi

Decentralized ICOs (DAICOs) Could Enable Blockchain Startups To Raise Funding Securely Through DeFi

A new technology called DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is trying to solve the participant risk problem in startup investing, which was a fatal flaw in ICOs. Hopefully we can now use technology to protect early investors.

You may have heard of ICOs during the 2017 crypto boom. Thousands of ICOs we’re started and abandoned as early investors lost their money.

Decentralized projects such as PAID Network and Polkadot are trying to innovate solutions that can allow people to participate in crowdfunding early technology startups with lower risk by introducing:

  • Decentralized escrow
  • Smart contracts to release funds at specific dates
  • Community voting to determine project milestones and audits
  • Return of funds to investors upon dispute resolutions

What is a DAICO?

DAICO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Initial Coin Offering. DAICOS may offer a most robust solution to protect investors and lower risk through community voting, reputation scoring and dispute resolutions.

Startup Crowdfunding Using Smart Contract Mediation

The PAID Token whitepaper mentions use cases for DAICOS to enable blockchain startups to launch crowdfunding on the PAID Network DAICO Platform, where the funds are locked in escrow smart contracts and released on set dates.

Community Voting To Access Funds

The PAID community investors can vote to release funds to the startup or raise issues, which the startup would need to rectify or the funds would get redistributed back to the token sale participants.

Ignition Platform

PAID’s Ignition platform will allow token holders the opportunity to participate in public token auctions. Blockchain-based token projects to offer their private and public auctions to participants, leveraging both PAID Network and Polkadot technology.

Mockup of the Ignition Platform – Similar to Polkastarter

Ignition will initially support Ethereum based projects and then offer multi-chain through Polkadot. The project recently raised $150,000 in January 2021.

Polkastarter

Polkastarter is a protocol built for cross-chain token pools and auctions, enabling projects to raise capital on a decentralized, permissionless and interoperable environment based on Polkadot.

Polkastarter Investment Pools – powered by Polkadot

Conclusions

DeFi could revolutionize how we do global finance, but is an early technology that has not been fully tested and regulated. We have seen hackers take millions recently from DeFi platforms.

As always, be diligent when participating in early investment opportunities, do your own research and seek expert financial advice.

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Bitcoin Crypto News

Institutional Investors Currently Hold 30% of Bitcoin Supply

Institutional Investors Currently Holds 30% of Bitcoin Supply

Since the last quarter of 2020, deep-pocketed Bitcoin investors have been increasingly adding more BTC to their portfolio. Following the current trends in the market, it doesn’t seem this buying momentum amongst institutions will calm down soon, according to Coinmetrics, a crypto-assets market data provider. 

In the latest “State of the Network” report on Tuesday, Coinmetrics noted an increasing rate of accumulation with institutional BTC addresses holding between 1,000 to 10,000 Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Whale are Still Buying

Bitcoin supply held by these addresses increased significantly since last year. At present, these addresses account for about 30 percent of BTC supply in circulation.

Meanwhile, BTC addresses holding between 10 BTC to 1,000 BTC lost more supply within the same period, while addresses with lower Bitcoin (0 and 10 BTC) saw an uptick in supply share. Coinmetrics mentioned an “increase in BTC accumulation” as a possible reason behind this change in BTC supply distribution.

Per Coinmetrics, this change indicates that retail-sized investors are also accumulating more Bitcoin along with institutions, as new investors also enter the market. Bitinfocharts’ Bitcoin rich list shows that there are currently 2,403 addresses holding at least 1K to 10K Bitcoin. A total of 148,928 addresses are holding between 10 to 1K Bitcoin, while 680,804 holds at least 1 to 100 BTC.

ETH Shows Similar Growth with BTC

Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency seeing an increasing rate of accumulation. According to Coinmetrics, Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency, sees a similar growth in the number of addresses holding more than 10,000 ETH, when compared to the increase in 1K BTC addresses.

Also, the network activity on Ethereum has been on the increase since the start of the year. This is evident as the number of active ETH addresses has remained relatively high, averaging between about 550K and 600K a day, despite the high transaction fees.

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Bitcoin Crypto News

Uniswap wBTC Trading Volume Hits ATH Amid Tesla Bitcoin News

Uniswap wBTC Trading Hits ATH Amid Tesla Bitcoin News

The cryptocurrency market has been literally set on fire, following the news that Elon Musk’s Tesla has added a sizable amount of Bitcoin in its reserve. The development sparked an increase in trading volume across several major exchanges, including Uniswap. According to Glassnode, the leading decentralized exchange users traded a significant volume of wBTC, the tokenized version of BTC, a few hours after Tesla’s new.

Uniswap Hits ATH in wBTC Trading Volume

wBTC or Wrapped Bitcoin is basically an Ethereum-compatible cryptocurrency (ERC-20 token) backed 1:1 with Bitcoin. The token was developed to enable DeFi traders to gain exposure or access to the leading cryptocurrency. Thus, following the development today, more users on Uniswap were seen trading the tokenized BTC to a great extent. According to a market report from Grayscale, Uniswap recorded more than US$46 million in wBTC trading volume within an hour, making an all-time high for the exchange.

This confirms that Tesla sparked a massive inflow of capital into the leading cryptocurrency, and of course, the development pushed Bitcoin to a new record level in value. Bitcoin reached a new price ATH above US$44,000, and many people are still bullish that the price may increase to US$50,000 later today. Meanwhile, Uniswap isn’t the only exchange seeing massive traffic. Other exchanges like Binance gained massive trading volume, which again required the exchange to scale up.

Elon Musk Finally Buys Bitcoin, not Dogecoin

The CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, had shilled Bitcoin and mostly Dogecoin as his favorite cryptocurrencies. From his tweets, many industry players could tell that the billionaire would buy Bitcoin. However, the date wasn’t certain.

In addition to buying Bitcoin, Tesla also intends to accept Bitcoin as a payment option for electric cars.

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Australia Bitcoin Crypto News

Bitcoin Mayhem: Lag, Massive Traffic, and Shutdowns —What Will Exchanges Do When Other Giants Embrace BTC?

It looks like Bitcoin’s new All-Time High has outage several exchanges including Kraken and Binance. For its part, Kraken has suspended sign-ups due to immense demand from traders and massive traffic on its platform.

As stated on the Kraken platform, sign-ups are temporarily suspended, and —not surprisingly— other exchanges are struggling to keep up with massive traffic. The new bull run driven by Tesla’s $1.5B investment has injected Fear Of Missing Out —FOMO— among other traders who are now desperate to jump in on the recent action.

Sign-ups are temporarily disabled due to extremely high demand. Our engineers are still working to resolve the issue and we will share any updates as soon as they become available.

Binance also experienced the setbacks that the new BTC ATH brought, like massive traffic, lag, and auto-scaling.

Bitcoin to the Moon?

Much has been said about the future of Bitcoin and what price can it reach in 2021. January was a month full of extreme volatility, reaching $42K, and then dropping and surging more than 15-20% from both sides every week. But as more institutions jump in, JP Morgan’s prediction of $145K for BTC isn’t that far away.

JP Morgan, a top investment bank in the United States, referred to Bitcoin as the “Digital gold for Millenials” that could reach more than $100,000. But Australian analyst Mark Rodda believes that BTC still has a long road to reach $100K.

More Challenges for Exchanges

It has become usual that exchanges struggle to keep up with the fast and heated pace that comes amid a new bull run on major cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin. But now, Bitcoin could reach higher ATH at the end of this year.

Bill Miller, an American investor and fund manager has taunted the crypto-community with a new filing from the Securities and Exchange Commission —SEC—. Accordingly, the hedge fund manager is seeking indirect exposure through Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust.

BTC/USD chart: Tradingview

The demand for Bitcoin could spike an even greater outrage and Foul Plays calls from the crypto-community if exchanges are not prepared to meet the increasing demand.

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Crypto News Initial Coin Offering Market Analysis Trading

LIT Pumps +146% Amid listing on Binance Launchpad – Litentry Breakout Analysis

After the launch of Litentry on Binance Launchpad today, LIT took a strong Breakout with +146% gains in a single day. Let’s take a quick look at LIT, price analysis, and possible reasons for the recent breakout.

What is Litentry?

Decentralized identity authentication and user activity data management Infrastructure. Build on Substrate, Ready for Polkadot. Litentry is helping support change that is in favor of a user-centric network with the blockchain. Litentry includes an identity-based network and related tools, features an identity matching and identity staking mechanism, as a whole it consists of decentralized identity and user activity data management infrastructure.

Litentry Quick Stats

SYMBOL:LIT
Global rank:240
Market cap:$168,710,752 AUD
Current price:$11.41 AUD
All-time high price:$12.25 AUD
1 day:+146.26%
7 day:+160.70%
1 year:+160.74%

Litentry Price Analysis

At the time of writing, LIT is ranked 240th cryptocurrency globally and the current price is $11.41 AUD. This is a +160% increase since the launch of its ICO at Binance Launchpad on (4th February 2021). Have a look at the chart below for price analysis.

Source: TradingView

After the launch of Litentry on Binance Launchpad, It pumped up to $12.41 AUD having +394% gains in just a few minutes and the initial opening price of LIT was $2.85 AUD at Binance Exchange with many different trading pairs like LIT/BTC, LITL/USDT, and LIT/BUSD.

Currently, LIT is trading at $11.50 AUD price levels after breaking out the squeeze resistance in its sideways trend & now heading towards its all-time high price.

What do the technical indicators say?

The Litentry TradingView indicators (on the 1 day) mainly indicate LIT as a strong buy, except the Oscillators which indicate LIT as a neutral.

So Why did Litentry Breakout?

After the opening at Binance Launchpad, mostly ICO’s pumps after going live on exchange for trade and, the recent rise in Bitcoin over +300% since the halving in May and then the suggested start of the Altcoin season could have contributed to the recent breakout. It could also be contributed to some recent news of Exchange Listings.

Where to Buy or Trade Litentry?

Litentry has the highest liquidity on Binance Exchange so that would help for trading LIT/BTC or LIT/USDT pairs. However, you can also buy LIT from different exchanges listed on Coinmarketcap.

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Bitcoin Crypto News

Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey is now Running a Bitcoin Node

Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat To Bitcoin (Yet), Expert Explains

The technology billionaire and CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has stepped up his support for the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC). In a tweet on Friday, Dorsey revealed he was setting up a Bitcoin node, which is essential in securing the cryptocurrency network, as well as validating BTC transactions. 

It’s worth noting that Dorsey has been a Bitcoin support and has preached Bitcoin adoption on several occasions.

Jack Dorsey run Bitcoin Node on M1 Macbook Chip

Dorsey shared the screenshot of the computer synchronizing with the Bitcoin blockchain, with the message, “Running Bitcoin.” At press time, the Bitcoin Blockchain is about 325GB in size. As a new node operator, Dorsey has to download the entire history of the Bitcoin Blockchain to stay up-to-date with the network. As at the time the screenshot was taken, Dorsey already synchronized two percent of the network history.

The download may be completed in a matter of weeks, depending on the capacity of the computer system in use, including the internet speed. Meanwhile, the Twitter CEO is running his own Bitcoin node from the new M1 chip from Apple. “Starting from a scratch build on M1 first,” Dorsey precisely said while responding to a tweet that asked whether he was running the node from a dedicated Raspberry Pi. 

128 Bitcoin Nodes are Available in Australia

Following the development today, the Twitter CEO just became a prominent figure running a Bitcoin node. As of February 5, there were 7918 reachable nodes on the cryptocurrency blockchain. About 21.94 percent of these nodes are located in Germany, while 21.70 percent are in the United States. Other leading countries are as follows: France (7.72 percent), Netherlands (5.33 percent), Canada (4.18 percent), and so on. About 128 of these nodes are located in Australia.crypto

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Australia Crypto News

RBA Governor Says Cryptos Won’t Break Down the Financial System

RBA Governor Says Cryptos Won't Break Down the Financial System

The governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), Philip Lowe, has addressed the fuss with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, saying they cannot bring down the financial system. However, financial regulators would need to pay closer attention to digital currencies like the Facebook-planned Diem (formerly Libra) stablecoin.

Besides the governor’s statement, one of the RBA executives added that they will still need to combat money laundering and terrorism financing issues with Bitcoin and other digital currencies.

Cryptos are not a risk to financial systems

As reported by the Canberra Times on Friday, the RBA governor Philip Lowe told parliament’s economics committee that digital currencies don’t pose risks to the financial system. “It’s not a financial stability risk,” Lowe said. However, any investor dealing with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin should be wary of the volatility.

Rather than undermining the financial system, the volatility of digital currencies can be “a risk to investors,” Lowe told the committee.

“There’s a lot of fuss over Bitcoin – it’s not a payment instrument, and it’s not really money,” said Michele Bullock, the assistant governor at the Reserve Bank of Australia. “The issue that gets much more airplay recently is stable coins.” Following the case with the Facebook-planned stablecoin, Ms. Bullock added that regulators would need to pay more attention to them.

“With those sorts of ‘coins,’ as they’re so-called at the moment, nothing will happen until the regulators are happy,” Ms. Bullock said.

The Main Concern with Crypto

Although the Australian central bank doesn’t see cryptocurrency as being risky to the financial system, Ms. Bullock did mention that they would still need to address certain concerns with cryptocurrencies. These include privacy, consumer protections, and illicit activities with cryptocurrencies like money laundering.

Owning to the inherent privacy property with digital currencies, criminals are switching to using cryptocurrency to launder ill-gotten profits.