In recent months bitcoin has had a phenomenal rally, and for good reason. Big payment giants and listed companies are adopting it and not just in the US. One month after Elon Musk announced that Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, the Chinese tech company Meitu announced that it made its entry into crypto, buying $40 million worth for bitcoin and Ethereum. On the other hand, the US government is printing money like it’s going out of style. A few days ago, the Senate voted for the new $1.9 trillion stimulus package. With the last one in April, lots…
Another week, another high. Bitcoin’s price is surging and hit its all time high, as the year comes to a close. Looking at all of 2020, it’s been surging all year long. The largest digital currency is up 160% since January 2020, and up 190% since March 15, after a nose dive in the second week of March, when the price dropped 25%. As I write this post, bitcoin’s price is hovering around $18.5k and it’s market cap is at $343 billion. Thirteen hundred bucks… not that far from its all-time-high of around $19,800 at the end of December 2017.
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Bitcoin is based on a simple idea, that we can be our own bank. That idea might seem revolutionary and crazy, probably as crazy as the things we do now on Internet, that were science fiction before the Internet made them possible. (“hers’s to the crazy one’s…” link)
Because Bitcoin can be hacked, we’ve seen people build physical vaults in the Swiss Alps, like old-fashioned Wild West banks to store digital assets. Physical vaults to store digital assets… this hardly sounds like progress. In the digital era you need digital storage, not a bunker. …
After months of criticism, the Libra cryptocurrency project is pivoting. To appease skeptical regulators, Libra is shifting gears from a new global financial system to a more traditional payment network very similar to PayPal and with digital coins backed by individual fiat currencies. When the Libra Association announced the cryptocurrency last June, it intended to create a single global digital currency that would be pegged by a basket of fiat currencies from different countries. Politicians, regulators and central bankers everywhere were rattled and feared that Libra would undermine their power, control and threaten monetary sovereignty.
Facebook shook the world last…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is building a new financial system. The DeFi movement is picking up steam. DeFi has been successful in remittances, loans, stable coins, and other core elements of the fiat world. With a little over a year under its belt, DeFi hit a major milestone a couple of months ago, with more than $1 billion in value locked in the DeFi markets. Bitcoin (BTC) dominates the cryptocurrency market, its 8x bigger than the Ethereum, the second cryptocurrency by market cap, but Bitcoin doesn’t have Ethereum’s sophisticated on-chain lending, derivatives, trading capabilities . While there are already several centralized…
By Ilias Louis Hatzis on The Capital
In 1994, Bill Gates said: “We need banking, but we don’t need banks anymore.” So why hasn’t Bill Gates opened a bank? Well, because technology giants don’t really want to be banks. Banking has a lot of the audit and compliance overhead, that tech giants don’t need or want. Big tech companies, Microsoft and GAFAs (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), want data and want to figure out how to turn it into insights to sell products. Some call it “Surveillance Capitalism.” Yet, banks are sitting on a data gem that tech giants want.
Big banks know they need to change with…
By Ilias Louis Hatzis on The Capital
Back in 2011, Marc Andreessen famously wrote: “Why Software is Eating the World.” Today the idea that every company needs to become a software company has seeped into every aspect of our lives, changing the way we live, eat, interact, and commute. We shop on Amazon, we ride Uber to get around, we order food with efood, we find places to stay with Airbnb, and we search on Google when we have a question. Few of us could have imagined the impact software would have on our day-to-day lives. Along with this innovation, we’ve seen some side effects. Some of…
By Ilias Louis Hatzis on The Capital
Bitcoin was the first and every other cryptocurrency came from it. Will Bitcoin survive? Will altcoins survive? This has been a heated debate with one side predicting the demise of the other. Bitcoin maximalists claim that we are heading to Bitcoin dominance and that altcoins are dying, urging the people to sell their positions in other crypto assets to put it all in Bitcoin. In a tweet last year, Charlie Lee wrote: “Some self-proclaimed Bitcoin Maximalists, are actually Bitcoin Extremists. They think all other coins are scams and will go to zero. Maximalists think Bitcoin is and will remain the…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has literally exploded this year. 2020 is set to be even bigger. DeFi offers a unique way to earn interest on digital assets without a middleman taking a cut. Decentralized finance is evolving and Ethereum based DeFi is at the forefront. While several other smart contract platforms have been taking pot shots at Ethereum’s lead, none of Ethereum’s would be killers have been able to gain significant traction this year.
When we look at the Ethereum ecosystem, 2019 was a year of continued growth and innovation. Looking at the numbers:
Tokenization has the power to impact the entire VC industry, from the way venture capital is raised, to the way it is invested in startups and projects. In an interview by David Sacks, the former PayPal COO, said: “I think Limited Partner interests are likely to be tokenized, along with most other illiquid assets. Eventually, illiquidity will be a competitive disadvantage in fundraising that only the top firms will be able to justify.” …
Ilias Louis Hatzis
Entrepreneur • CEO at @KryptonioWallet
