The Cryptospace never disappoints and these last couple weeks have been no exception.
BTC ticked it’s old all time highs and Ethereum 2.0’s beacon chain...well It’s Alive!!
Facebooks Libra project is back in the News and you will never guess who’s the next
in line to get on the crypto train.
All of this bullishness and more in this week’s Exodus Crypto news.
Welcome back everyone it’s the first Friday in December and so much has happened
in the last two weeks we had to work really hard to trim our weekly news round up down
to a digestible entree.
If it’s your first time here please smash that like..
Button and remember to subscribe to the channel.
There is no surprise the Bitcoin breakout has been getting a lot of attention from the
mass media.
Everybody from CNBC to Reuters is covering the Bitcoin bull run and making the claim
that Bitcoin has actually broken the previous all time high.
According to the media, once you average the ATH price of Bitcoin from different exchanges
in 2017 what you actually get is something like a peak price of $19,800, which we’ve
now obviously surpassed.
Be that as it may…
We’re willing to bet that what everyone in the crypto community is actually waiting
for is the big round number of $20,000!
Even if the “true” ATH was somewhere around $19,800, most Bitcoin hodlers are saving their
champagne and fireworks for $20k.
We haven’t hit it yet but based on current price action it seems like it could happen
almost any day now.
For example, the BTC price dipped down to $16,300 over the Thanksgiving holiday but
within days it was all the way back up to $19,500.
There’s obviously some serious buying pressure here and it wouldn’t take much to push Bitcoin
into the twenty thousands.
How are you going to celebrate?
Let us know where the party is and we can talk about whether it’s a good time to sell
or if you’re hodling for 100K Bitcoin is not the only shining star this
week.
After years of development the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain has finally launched!
For those who haven’t been keeping track of this, the beacon chain is the Phase 0
for the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism for Ethereum.
Ethereum investors have been talking about staking for years and so it’s super exciting
to see that it’s finally been happening.
The reason it took so long to build is that this is actually brand new technology that
literally didn't exist until now.
As awesome as this launch is though, it’s only the first stage of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade.
As of right now the beacon chain is fully functional but it doesn’t actually do anything…
All of the people staking are just approving empty blocks and the staking mechanism won’t
actually replace proof of work on Ethereum until sometime in...wait for it…..
Still waiting….2022.
If you want to get in on the cutting edge, running your own validator will cost you 32
ETH and you’ll need the appropriate hardware.
However, exchanges like Binance and Coinbase have already announced that they’ll enable
staking for their users.
So whether you want to stake yourself or stake via an exchange, there’s now a way to do it.
And if you’re curious about the ETH 2.0 roadmap, click the banner art the top
to see our in depth explainer.
If you’ve heard about the S&P before it’s probably the S&P 500.
That’s just one part of what the S&P does though.
S&P stands for Standard and Poors, a financial services company that provides all sorts of
services and data.
The big news for this week is that the S&P has announced that they’ll be providing
crypto indices starting in 2021.
What does that mean?
Basically a crypto index is like price feed data for institutions.
Here’s why that’s important.
Let’s say you want to create a Bitcoin ETF.
That’s awesome everybody's been waiting for it, but where will you get the price feed for Bitcoin’s price?
Will it come from Coinbase?
Binance?
Gemini?
Some average of various exchanges?
Instead of figuring out the price feed problem, institutions will be able to use the “official”
data from the S&P crypto index.
Having an official price feed will make it a lot easier for institutions to get involved
in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, whether it’s an ETF or derivatives product or anything
else that needs a good price feed.
In the Smart contact world, this is what’s known as an oracle, now you know...
So this announcement is another big step toward the institutional adoption of Bitcoin and
other cryptocurrencies.
Fingers crossed, this may also be one of the things that finally convinces the SEC to grant
a Bitcoin ETF!
When the Libra association first announced their intention to release the Libra cryptocurrency
the backlash was so extreme that the project was quickly forced to abandon all hope of
ever going live.
That was more than a year ago and we haven’t heard much about Libra since then.
Well, Libra is back now but it’s returned from the dead with a new name: Diem.
Why the name change?
It seems like the project is attempting to distance itself from Facebook.
One of the things that became clear about the Libra project is that while regulators
and politicians objected to a private company creating a stablecoin backed by a basket of
currencies, the real problem was that it was Facebook doing it.
So even though Libra claimed to be independent of Facebook, regulators were obviously concerned
that it wasn’t distant enough.
Renaming the new currency to Diem is a further attempt to distance the coin from Facebook.
It’s not just the name that’s changing either, the entire function of the coin is
changing as well.
Instead of being backed by a basket of currencies, the new coin will essentially just be a dollar
backed stablecoin similar to USDC.
In this context the Diem coin really isn’t that revolutionary.
Tether, problematic as it may be, has been around forever and we’ve had access to the
more reliable and trustworthy USDC for years.
The one big advantage that Diem could have is access to Facebook’s user base.
Diem will be supported by the Novi wallet which is integrated with Facebook, so that
could get tens of millions of people using crypto who might not have chosen to use a
coin like USDC.
What effect this will have on the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem, and how Diem will
trade on exchanges, remains to be seen.
We’ll definitely keep an eye on this though and let you know more as the story develops.
2021 is shaping up to be an epic year for crypto.
Here are three things that we’re looking forward to.
More articles on the Exodus blog….
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An now back to our regularly scheduled programing….
1 - Alt Season
2 - Big BTC Prices
3 - The killer dapp
Thanks for watching everyone, make sure to say hi to the team in the comments and we’ll
see you back next week with the curated hits from the crypto world.
Until next time, HODL on!