It’s Tuesday, humpday’s humpday. The market is still trading well within the $370 - $400 Billion range, but Bitcoin was rejected at the 8.6k level and is now trading around 8.2k, leading me to believe we’re revisiting 8k soon. The news cycle is slowing down a bit post-consensus. Fret not, we still have plenty of interesting news to share with you.
4 things you need to know:
One: Apps in Korea are obsessed with crypto. Actually, everyone and everything in South Korea is infatuated with the blockchain. South Koreans, who have a long relationship with online gaming and digital currencies, are embracing all things crypto.
Industry Giants: Recently, messaging app LINE and ICON started a joint blockchain venture called “Unchain”. This is massive news as LINE is South Korea’s most popular messaging app with over two hundred million monthly average users.
Reverse ICO: Many Korean companies are holding “Reverse ICOs” which are when existing companies use an ICO to tokenize some form of digital asset. Apps with in-game currencies can use a reverse ICO to move over their centralized digital currencies to the blockchain.
“Startup companies are also part of the growing blockchain revolution in South Korea. CLC Foundation recently launched Calorie Coin, a fitness-themed cryptocurrency project. Participants mine Calorie Coins by participating in fitness activities.”
Two: Argentina’s Banco Masventas using Bitcoin for cross-border transactions. Banco Masventas has partnered with Latin American exchange Bitex to use Bitcoin for international payments. The goal is to reduce overhead fees for the bank and reduce the cost of international payments for customers.
Adoption: Blockchain will have matured once everyone is using it and they don’t even know it. “The customers will ask the bank to do an international payment, and the bank uses Bitex as a provider. For the customer, it's transparent, they don't touch, they don't see the bitcoin. We are a provider for them, and they are not touching bitcoin.”
Three: TrueUSD is now listed on Bittrex, Binance, and Upbit. TrueUSD is a new stable coin backed by, and redeemable for U.S. dollars. TrueUSD is the first step of the TrustToken’s plan to tokenize many assets such real estate, precious metals, small businesses, patents, etc.
My thoughts: I don’t care what anyone says, Tether is sketchy. Until an independent firm publishes a full audit of Tether, we cannot be sure that they have the assets to back up the circulating Tether supply. I’m glad teams like TrustToken are providing dollar linked tokens and putting emphasis on being transparent and trustworthy.
Additional thoughts: I am very excited by the prospect of tokenizing real estate. Real estate isn’t a very liquid market, and often the best opportunities are restricted to those who already have a lot of money to invest. Allowing people to buy a fraction of a multi-million dollar project and trade it on an exchange is revolutionary. Real estate developers could even use ICOs to crowd source projects.
Four: Bank of England issues a working paper on digital currencies. Specifically, they are looking at the implementation of central bank digital currencies, and how they could play a role in the financial system.
My thoughts: Blockchain technology offers a better way to transact and settle payments, so it’s only natural that we would consider moving our financial system over to take advantage of that. It’s always great to see large institutions take the technology seriously.
Be smart: This wouldn’t be a cryptocurrency, just a different underlying way of moving around the pound.
What I’m reading today:
Bored With Banking, This Former Citi Trader Went Full Crypto
“We missed out on the peak of finance. Instead we got the decline. There’s not as much money. ... It’s boring. Bitcoin reminds us of what it must have been like trading an asset class in the late ’80s and ’90s”
This is a great article profiling Arthur Hayes, CEO and Co-Founder of BitMEX, and why he started BitMEX. For the uninitiated, BitMEX is an exchange that deals strictly in cryptoderivatives. They have the largest volume of any cryptocurrency exchange and offer up to 100x leveraged trades. After being laid off from Citi Bank, Hayes began arbitrage trading between Bitfinex and Chinese exchanges.
Due to Chinese law, Hayes had to ride the bus everyday from Hong Kong to mainland China in order to withdraw $3100 in yuan, the maximum daily limit, to cash out his profits. Quickly he realized that crypto assets were in desperate need of a robust cryptoderivatives trading platform. I don’t want to spoil too much, go ahead and give it a read. I’ll leave you with one more quote, one that I’m know all of us at Ledger Capital relate to, and I’m sure many of our readers too.
“I just loved the fact that with Bitcoin, there wasn’t much out there at that time. …That’s what excited me. It was an opportunity to do something on my own, to take some risk, rather than going to some structured, monolithic corporation.”
HODL Waves. Tracking Bitcoin UTXO Age Over the Years.
The transparency of Bitcoin’s blockchain allows for some really interesting data analysis to be done. This article covers the “age” of Bitcoins transactions and how they correlate with changes in price, thus identifying “HODL Waves”.
The article points out leading up to a price maximum, there are many transactions made on the Bitcoin blockchain. After the price crashes, there are long periods of “HODL waves” where very few transactions are made. It’s an interesting read for those who like to dive into the rationale of crypto holders.
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