The Bitbuy Brief: US Tech Giant To Sell Cryptocurrency

Weekly Market Movement

Weekly Summary: Cryptocurrency across the board is down slightly over a 7-day period, although coins are modestly up in the past 24 hours. Overall, it was a week of low volatility for most assets, and therefore lower overall volume.

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Big News Of The Week in Cryptocurrency

This Week, Several News Sources Reported That Paypal and Venmo Would Be Releasing Integrations For Purchases And Sales Of Crypto Within Months - The Episode Again Highlights Gradual Infrastructure Developments Addressing Previously Identified Criticisms With Cryptocurrency

  • The quoted source noted, 'My understanding is that they are going to allow buys and sells of crypto directly from PayPal and Venmo.' The article references Bitstamp and an existing relationship with Coinbase as likely partners in the endeavour. The offering is said to also include a wallet. Paypal/Venmo have been known to be hiring in the space, starting a 'Blockchain Research Group' this year. Paypal's Chief Technology has said, 'We are a strong believer in the potential of blockchain. The digitization of currency is a question of when not if.' The move is about a year behind that of another well-established USD payment processor Square. Square has typically reported in the range of 100M USD equivalent notional of BTC traded per quarter.

Takeaway: Assuming these reports are accurate we feel as though the most significant potential for this news is payment processing of crypto. While the platform appears to be first enabling buying and selling, it only seems to be a matter of time before Paypal/Venmo would move into processing online payments for merchants. This has the potential to open channels on established e-commerce venues such as Amazon, and Shopify. Furthermore, an oft-heard criticism of crypto is that there are limited avenues for spending, making the currencies purely speculative. This is another reminder that the space remains just over a decade old and infrastructure development continues to solve previously labelled issues.Other Weekly Headlines

  • Private investment platform Republic based in New York, will issue a profit-sharing token on the Algorand blockchain July 16, writes Bloomberg. The token gives customers access to profit from deals done on the platform. According to CEO Kendrick Nguyen the ‘dividend, profit-sharing token will be widely available to non-accredited as well as accredited investors.’Full Story on Bloomberg
  • Centre, the entity behind the USDC stablecoin, has announced plans to launch the asset across multiple blockchains, starting with the Algorand network. USDC is currently deployed exclusively on Ethereum.Full Story on Centre Blog
  • Warren Davidson, a member of the US House of Representatives from Ohio, tweeted ‘[sound money] is required to [defend freedom,] along with an illustration of bitcoin. Davidson, a member of the Republican party, has emerged as a supporter of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in recent years.Link to Tweet
  • Compound protocol has become the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform with the most capital - $606M - locked in its smart contracts, according to DeFi Pulse. Overall money deployed in DeFi venues has also seen record highs with $1.5B. The move to number one comes as Compound has released its COMP governance token on June 15.Link to DeFi Pulse
  • Ethereum miners have agreed to increase the network's gas limit from 10,000,000 to 12,500,000 as a result of its heightened use. Users on the network pay gas in order for miners to process their transfers. According to some estimates this will allow Ethereum to process more transactions.Full Story On The Block Crypto
  • Miners Are Sending Bitcoins To Exchanges Again - And That May Be Bearish. Bitcoin outflows from miner wallets have spiked, with the majority of coins finding their way onto cryptocurrency exchanges.Full Story On Coindesk

LONG-READ OF THE WEEK

Market Update: COMP Special, Matthieu Jobbe Duval, Medium, June 22, 2020

  • Coinlist's Matthieu Jobbe Duval gives an in-depth, well understood and easy to follow run-down of the Compound Finance platform and COMP token.

 

Disclaimer: The opinions and analysis expressed in this newsletter are those of the writer, and not of Bitbuy. Nothing in this note should be considered investment advice.

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