The BTC bull is as strong as ever but what’s especially exciting this week is that the first
spring blossoms of alt season are starting to bloom. Ethereum has broken through $500
for the first time since dinosaurs ruled the earth.
In other news, Travala is selling gift cards that can be bought with crypto and
Matic is teaming up with Chainlink to bring better oracle services to the
world. Stick around for the details on this week’s Exodus Crypto News.
In case you’ve been living under a rock this last month, the Bitcoin price has been
going on an incredible run. We’ve seen a few minor drawbacks but the dips have
been overshadowed by multiple days where the price has gone up by $1,000 or more in just
24 hours. All of this is reminiscent of the big bull run in December of 2017,
and we all know how that ended… Are things different this time? We think they are.
For one thing, the Google search trends for “Bitcoin” and “Buy Bitcoin” are not showing
any kind of spike. This rally seems to be getting ignored by a lot of retail
investors, basically all of the people who drove the last bull market.
Instead, what we’re seeing is a lot of institutional buying.
There’s the stuff we know about, MicroStrategy and Square, and then there’s all of the buying
we don’t know about. What’s cool is that even if we can’t identify
who is doing it, what we can see are the record outflows from exchanges.
Basically what this means is that people who doing the buying are buying Bitcoin on exchanges and
then withdrawing it to their wallets. What this suggests is that whoever is doing the buying,
they’re not planning on selling their coins anytime soon. They’re
buying the BTC to put it in long term storage.
Given the macro narrative this type of behavior makes a lot of sense. Right now the narrative can
pretty much be summed up in one word: inflation. Government spending has gotten so out of hand that
central banks around the world are being forced to monetize the debt. For quote on quote “strong”
currencies like the dollar and euro, this will mean depreciation. However,
for some of the weakest currencies it could mean hyperinflation or outright collapse.
Global uncertainty about fiat currencies is at a record high and BTC is the safe,
non-state controlled store of value. Investors want to hold it for the long term which is,
again, why we’re seeing so much outflow from exchanges. This
is definitely bullish for Bitcoin and super bullish for the long term price.
Before we move on, it would be prudent to share a Tweet from the noted Bitcoin analyst
Plan B, where he talks about why the buying happening at $18k right now is
different from the buying that happened at these same price levels in 2017.
“$18K. Big difference with 2017 is that most BTC sold today will never see the daylight again,
they disappear into deep cold storage. Buyers today are professionals with
long term vision and staying power.”
Who doesn’t;t like a little privacy coin news?
Zcash is a Proof of Work cryptocurrency with a predetermined inflation schedule.
Just like Bitcoin, that inflation schedule decreases on a regular basis and Zcash has
just undergone their first halvening. The block reward went from 6.25 ZEC per
block to just 3.25 ZEC per block. As of today that’s equal to about $200.
If you’re not familiar with Matic, it can be a bit hard to wrap your head around.
It’s an Ethereum sidechain, using Plasma technology, but Matic also has its own
Proof of Stake consensus mechanism that secures transactions on the sidechain. The Matic team
claims that they can help Ethereum scale to, get this, tens of thousands of transactions
per second, or 10 thousand TPS, but one of the limiting factors so far has been
a lack of a good price oracle, and that’s all about to change.
Chainlink has announced that they’re integrating with Matic, in order to
provide decentralized price data to the Matic sidechain. The integration will start off with
five price feeds, including, MATIC/USD, USDC/USD ETH/USD, USDT/USD, DAI/USD
That’s just the beginning though, Matic has stated even more price feeds will be available in the
future. More than anyone else, Matic believes that these price feeds will be useful for DeFi
protocols on the platform. It would be really great if some parts of DeFi can move to Matic,
as it would reduce congestion on the Ethereum base chain so that every time there is some new
yield farming craze, the rest of us don’t have to pay $3 just to send a simple transaction.
Anyways, we’re happy to see that Matic continues to expand their protocol and it
will be interesting to see which projects decide to build on a Matic sidechain going forward.
The travel website Travala.com has started offering gift cards that can
be bought with crypto. There’s a pretty good reason to pay with blockchain too,
since anything you buy with crypto comes with a 10% discount.
Travala has been a leader in the crypto game for a while. Initially they built their platform on top
of the NEO blockchain, before moving to Binance chain in the fall of 2019. Travala is also famous,
at least in the crypto community, for accepting a bunch of different cryptocurrencies as
payment. Buy your airline tickets with Bitcoin! Or Ethereum Or litecoin or Tron, but why would
you? Anyways, back to the gift cards, these are not your run of the mill cards that hang out next
to the cash register at Wal-Mart. The Travala gift cards can be loaded with a balance of up to
$20,000 and you can use an awesome 30 different cryptocurrencies to fund the card with.
Although the cards are available for sale through Travala, a lot of the backend tech
is being supplied by the crypto service provider BitPay. In addition to Travala,
BitPay works with all sorts of other merchants like Shopify and WooCommerce.
One thought is that buying a Travala gift card could be an
easy way to lock in some profits. Assuming Bitcoin breaks past its old all time high,
there are probably going to be some long term hodlers who would like to
cash out some of their holdings. Rather than going into cash they could buy a travel gift
card. What are your thoughts? Bad idea or good idea? Let us know in the comments!
It’s been a big week of daily $1,000 Bitcoin price moves. Despite the huge november bull
run the crazy thing is that we’re still hanging out solidly above $18,500. The Bitcoin price
seems to be holding strong and we think this is really bullish for the long term price action.
IBut then again, we’ll have to wait to find out.
Until next time, HODL on!