APRIL 2021

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BIGGEST TRADING NEWS & MORE

Historic NASDAQ Listing. Leading and now publicly traded crypto exchange, Coinbase, went public on April 14th through a direct listing on Nasdaq. With the reference price set at $250, $COIN opened at $381, peaked to $429 and closed at $328, bringing the company’s valuation to $85 billion. Not only that, Coinbase set a new record as the largest direct listing ever but also rivaled the largest IPOs by technology companies in history!

A Mega-bank Bitcoin Fund. It was Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J. P. Morgan, who during 2017 threatened to “fire in a second” any trader who touched Bitcoin. “If you’re stupid enough to buy it, you’ll pay the price for it one day,” he said at the time. Well, guess rules are meant to be broken as J.P. Morgan prepares to offer its private wealth clients an actively managed Bitcoin fund in the coming quarter. This announcement comes on the heels of its filing for a debt instrument linked to Bitcoin proxy stocks.

$3T Bank Backed Crypto Exchange. State Street, one of the oldest American banks, is lending its trading infrastructure and technology to a digital assets firm. Puremarket’s new institutional-grade crypto OTC trading platform will merge legacy systems and digital assets, allowing institutional investors to use bilateral credit and multiple bank custody solutions. That’s not all. State Street and U.S. Bank were the more prominent names in the list of investors who took part of Secrurrency’s $30 million funding round. 

Tesla Sells while Musk HODLs. Tesla’s $1.5 billion Bitcoin holding, which was revealed in February, is now worth about $2.5 billion (at time of writing). In the guise of testing the liquidity of the digital asset, the EV automaker sold 10% of its holding, earning the company a whopping $101 million in profit! The company intends to increase its BTC holdings through accepting the currency as payment for its products.

Musk was quick to defend Tesla’s move over pump-n-dump accusations, while also revealing his personal crypto holdings.

Making Crypto Social. ‘Buy, Hold, Sell Crypto’ has been activated on Venmo, PayPal’s social payments service platform! While PayPal’s crypto offering is geared towards the 30 million merchants it supports, Venmo’s crypto offering will empower its 70 million users to use cryptocurrencies for peer-to-peer social transactions. Beyond bringing utility to cryptocurrencies, the platforms are bringing much needed education to over 450 million users (combined) on a highly trusted platform.

Corporate Treasuries to Insurance. Europe’s second-largest insurance firm, AXA, is now accepting Bitcoin payments for insurance premium bill payments for any non-life insurance products from its private customers.

TIMEs are Changing. 98 year old magazine publisher is changing with the times! TIME magazine is accepting crypto payments for digital subscription packages and soon will be holding bitcoin on its balance sheet. Moreover, the magazine included the Digital Currency Group, parent company of Grayscale, and Nasdaq-listed crypto exchange, Coinbase, in its annual ‘Top 100 Most Influential Companies’ list.

Crypto Volumes on par with NYSE Volumes. Ok… on par is not exactly the most accurate term but crypto trading volumes are booming! As a share of volumes by NYSE-owned venues, which make up about 25% of US equity exchange volumes, crypto exchange volumes soared from 8% in September 2020 to a high of 49% in February 2021. As of May 1, 2021, cryptocurrencies have a market cap. of $2.2 trillion.

Tokenization. Just a hype or the future? Although not the first, but the largest crypto exchange, Binance, will now support tokenized stock trading on its platform, starting with Tesla. Additionally, the #1 ranked crypto exchange, is also working on creating a NFT (non-fungible token) marketplace within the exchange. This move by Binance comes after massive inflows into the NFT space. According to NonFungible, in the month of April, there were over 121,000 NFT sales completed with $245 million trading volume on the Ethereum blockchain alone!

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