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The Monthly Drop
 
 
Covering A to Z with Algoz
 
 
 
 

THE BIGGEST WAVES HITTING THE CRYPTO SHORE

OCTOBER 2020

 

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HIGHLIGHTS
  • Imagine how different our lives would be if F.R.I.E.N.D.S didn't get the green light after its PILOT episode. Now imagine how different our lives will be once CBDCs are past pilot testing... 👀
  • PayPal has entered the chat ... PING 💥❗
  • Digital will become traditional before we even know it ⏳
 
 

30 DAYS IN 1

BIGGEST TRADING NEWS & MORE

 

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CBDC (China’s Bank issued Digital Currency). Headed by the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the central bank digital currency (CBDC) of China has entered pilot testing mode. Thus far, 113,000 & 8,800 personal and corporate wallets have been opened, respectively, with over 3.13 million transactions processed, amounting to + $162 million. Unlike ‘traditional’ digital currencies, all CBDC transactions will be verified by the country’s central bank, taking the industry defining ‘no-middle men’ concept of digital assets, like Bitcoin, out of the business and financial model. In other Chinese news, Huawei, has announced the release of a new smartphone, the Mate40, which has a built-in hardware wallet for the CBDC. The device will come with both a hot & cold wallet, allowing users to perform both online and offline transactions.

 

 Image taken from CoinTelegraph

 

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Tokenized Equity Trading Is Now a Reality. Frequenting in the top-20 of Coin Market Cap’s Spot Exchange list, FTX exchange now offers access to top traditional equities (i.e. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, & Tesla) and popular Index, S&P 500! Like cryptocurrencies (and unlike the underlying asset), traders are able to have fractional ownership over the tokenized securities. Will this be the future of traditional exchanges. Well, depends who you are asking… as SEC chairman, Jay Clayton, believes, “it may be very well the case that all [stocks] become tokenized."

 

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Paypal. Crypto’s New Pal 🤗. PayPal doesn’t just talk the talk… no no no… it walks the walk too! There had been some buzz about PayPal offering crypto to its users over the last few months, but no confirmation. As of this month’s announcement, PayPal’s U.S. users will be able to buy, sell, and hold crypto (limited to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash) in their PayPal accounts! In early 2021, PayPal will activate crypto transacting with its 26 million merchants and will also bring this feature to Venmo, a PayPal subsidiary. The operation model of its crypto feature is… ‘interesting’. Users will have no access to their private key(s) and will not be able to transfer their crypto holding OUT of their PayPal wallet, even if it is a different PayPal wallet. Whether users will be happy with this or not, we will find out in the near future. However, PayPal’s business move is timed appropriately. A survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) revealed that every 1/10 central bank will be issuing a CBDC in the next 3 years, bringing centralized digital currencies to a 5th of the world’s population.

 

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MicroStrategy’s Micro Decision causing Macro Impact. Two market players have followed suit. Following MicroStrategy’s adoption of Bitcoin as its treasury reserve asset, $10 Billion asset manager and payment product innovator have incorporated Bitcoin in their company’s asset profile. Incentivized by similar reasons as MicroStrategy, Stone Ridge has acquired +10,000 Bitcoins to represent the group’s primary treasury reserve asset. Square’s purchase of 4,709 Bitcoins now represents 1% of the company’s total assets.

For company’s wanting to adopt a similar asset profile or business model, Square has generously provided a detailed whitepaper explaining the thought process and methodology for purchasing over $50 million worth of Bitcoin.

This is not a solicitation, but it is remarkable to see the power and impact of MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin purchase on its P&L statement.

 

 

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Bitcoin. Oh Beautiful Bitcoin. The month of October was good to the hodlers community. Bitcoin took on a bull rally, breaking a 2-year price barrier of $14K! Anybody selling?!

 

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What’s ‘Traditional’? What’s ‘Alternative’? We don’t know anymore. West Coast Aquaculture Group (WCA) is set to conduct its IPO! Prior to listing on the Sydney Stock Exchange (SSX), WCA is offering 10-14 million shares at $0.50 each on capital raising platform, Stax. What is unique is that WCA will be accepting both Australian Dollar and Tether ($USDT) in exchange for equity! In other news, we see traditional merging with digital even more as the Chief Regulatory Officer of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Anthony Albanese, will be transitioning his regulatory focus from traditional assets to crypto assets at his new role at leading VC, Andreessen Horowitz!

 

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Q3. Queue Winners. Grayscale has been making quite the appearance in The Monthly Drop in 2020. Zooming out of Q3 for a second, between 2013-2019, investment into Grayscale’s products amounted to $1.2 B. In the last 10 months alone, Grayscale has experienced an inflow of $2.4 B., out of which, $1.05 B. was raised in Q32020! In a survey conducted by Grayscale with 1000 U.S. retail investors, 83% of respondents made their 1st Bitcoin investments in the last year, of which, 38% entered bitcoin investments in the last 4 months. When asked whether Covid-19 had an impact on their decision making, 63% responded yes. We wonder whether institutional investors share the same sentiment.

While Grayscale has institutional flocking to our industry, Binance has done an exceptional job amassing retail investors. Q3 marked a milestone in Binance’s spot exchange history, hitting an all-time ‘exchange volume’ high! Binance spot volumes for Q3 totaled to $303.6 B!

 

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Too Good to Be True. The just lifting of the crypto ban in India, earlier this year, might not see the light of day soon! Just when the ball began rolling and India became recognized as one of the fastest growing user-group in the world, word on the street is that a council of ministers have been discussing a new bill which would effectively boycott crypto trading in the country.

 

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Cardholder Name. Card Number. Expiry Date. CVV. Effective in 30 countries in Europe, Coinbase Visa, a Visa debit card which can be used both online and offline to make payments and purchases (and ATM withdrawals), will become available to its U.S. customers in the coming month! Coinbase Visa’s U.S. users will be eligible to receive 4% back in Stellar or 1% back in Bitcoin from their purchases made with cryptocurrencies.

 

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A Bank a Day Brings Institutionals My Way. Last year, JPMorgan led the way for initiating wide-scale adoption of crypto with the bank announcing its intention to create their own cryptocurrency. The megabank’s in-house stable coin, JPM Coin, is now active and being used by an unnamed tech-firm for cross-border payments. The JPM Coin is a targeted solution to aid and improve the bank’s wholesale banking business. Available to a larger client-base, Singapore’s largest bank, DBS, will be launching a digital exchange which will support digital currency, – Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic, Ripple – fiat currency, – Singapore Dollar, Hong Kong Dollar, United States Dollar, and Japanese Yen – and asset-backed security token trading.

 

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Alert! Whale On-Shore! 88,857 BTC were moved out of a Bitcoin wallet. Making this the largest crypto transaction by fiat value, to-date, approximately $1.15 Billion worth of Bitcoin was transacted for a minuet fee of only 0.00027847 BTC ($3.58)!

 

THE ALGOZ-CAL

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