THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO

MARKET MOVERS

  • Binance is taking a $200 million stake in Forbes. Binance will replace half of the $400 million in commitments from institutional investors making it one of the top two biggest owners of Forbes after its listing.  The crypto company will also get two directors out of nine total board seats. The move shows the increasing real-world influence of the crypto sector.

  • Tesla’s Bitcoin holdings nears $2 billion. The company said it was holding $1.99 billion worth bitcoin at the end 2021. They purchased a total of $1.5 billion in bitcoin in 2021. Tesla added that it realized gains of $128 million after selling a portion of its holdings last March. Tesla has not disclosed any change to its bitcoin holdings since.

  • KPMG's adoption of BTC & ETH suggests institutions are continuing to adopt crypto, says BowTied Bull. KPMG is an interesting one to make a move. Perhaps the angle is to steal all the market share for the inevitable tax headaches that everyone will go through in 2021 and beyond. The more important item here is that you’re still seeing institutional adoption.

  • Feds seize $3.6 billion in bitcoin stolen from Bitfinex hack. The Justice Department announced Tuesday morning it seized more than $3.6 billion in allegedly stolen bitcoin linked to the 2016 hack of Bitfinex. Officials said they arrested Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan. The pair are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Source(2:28)

  • Russia will be treating crypto as currencies. The Russian government and the central bank reached an agreement on digital assets and they will not be banning them. Main takeaway is that Russia’s going to increase the adoption within the country by creating frameworks and rules that everyone understands. As adoption rises, the reliance on the US dollar as a reserve currency declines. Read more here.

WHAT TO WATCH

  • Voyager to let users buy stocks with Crypto. Voyager Digital Ltd. is planning to launch a feature later this year that will allow customers to buy traditional stocks using the stablecoin USDC. Voyager’s new offering is a result of a joint venture with Market Rebellion to operate a regulated broker-dealer, which will handle equity trades on behalf of Voyager’s customers.

  • Salesforce is working on NFT cloud service. The company wants to offer a service for artists to create content and release it on a marketplace like OpenSea, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Salesforce could also potentially integrate the tool into its own ecosystem, where transactions could be managed, the people said. A Salesforce-owned marketplace could mean there wouldn’t be a need to use OpenSea. Read more here.

  • JPMorgan says NFTs are set to dominate digital assets. JPMorgan’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou said that NFTs will likely grow exponentially over time as more assets get digitized and thus NFTs will likely dominate the size of the digital asset universe in the future. In the future, we are likely to see a multitude of blockchains tailored to specific applications.

  • Bitcoin could drop to $10,000 in 2023, says Barry Bannister, chief equity strategist at Stifel. He says that the bear case scenario is entirely plausible as the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy. A major reason for that outlook is Bitcoin’s close correlation to Federal Reserve monetary policy, bond yields, and gold—all connected in different ways. Read more here.

  • CFTC Chair asks Congress for authority to regulate some Cryptocurrencies. Chairman Rostin Behnam echoed the skepticism expressed by his fellow Biden administration regulators about the potential that cryptocurrencies offer. Mr. Behnam suggested Congress pass a law that would allow the CFTC to regulate cash markets for certain types of cryptocurrencies. Read more here.
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