If you had a crystal ball, what would it tell you about which big institution will follow Tesla’s example and put Bitcoin on their balance sheet? Apple? Samsung or Twitter? We may have our answer from an unlikely source, the bank of banks BNY Mellon. Mastercard and the City of Miami Florida are also getting into the crypto game. Unless you’ve been living under a rock in rural North Korea, you’ve the price of Bitcoin skyrocket and this week made the front page of most major media outlets.
If you’re a retail investor you probably don’t think too much about custody. Lots of traders keep their coins on Coinbase and call it a day. If you’re more sophisticated you can buy a hardware wallet like a Ledger or a Trezor. For large institutions it’s not that simple. When Tesla buys $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin it’s not like Elon Musk is keeping all of that crypto on a Ledger in his desk drawer. Big companies are only going to work with certified custodians and when it comes to being a custodian, the more prestigious the name the better.
The oldest bank on America, founded by none other than Alexander Hamilton himself, BNY Mellon Corp has announced that they’re going to support digital assets. Why is this a big deal? BNY Mellon is known as the Bank of Banks, and they currently hold over 41 trillion dollars in custody or administration. The fact that they’re getting into crypto is going to force a lot of otherwise skeptical investors to rethink their digital assets strategy.
The proof is in the pudding and Bitcoin rallied to a new all time high within hours of the announcement. The Twitter CFO has come out and said that they’re considering keeping some Bitcoin on their balance sheet in case that they have vendors or employees who asked to be paid in crypto.
Twitter’s stock rallied 15% on the announcement. And shortly afterward, Twitter’s CEO Jack Doresy posted a message that he and Jay_Z will be giving away 500 BTC to a blind trust to help Bitcoin Development teams in Africa and India. Looking back to earlier this week, All this movement can be summed up in three words b y Elon Musk “It Was Inevitable”
A few months ago we reported payment processor Mastercard opening up a vendor Sandbox to “Test the waters” for Digital currency payments and with a recent blog post it looks like those tests we’re successful. “Mastercard will start supporting select cryptocurrencies, the way this is going to work, Mastercard will handle the backend and convert cryptocurrencies into US dollars so that merchants don’t have to hold volatile crypto assets themselves. Despite the broad announcement, Mastercard is quick to point out that they won’t be supporting all digital assets and it sounds like they’re mostly going to focus on stablecoins.
For years there’s been a debate about which blockchain is going to be the Ethereum killer. Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos, Tezos, Algorand… There’s a lot of networks that are trying to be the next big smart contract platform. One blockchain that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention until recently is BSC, the Binance Smart Chain. Network activity has been rising rapidly on BSC and in January of this year BSC cleared $15 billion in transaction volume. That much volume was a marked improvement over the volume transacted in previous months. If the transaction volume keeps growing on BCS, it could become the most used blockchain in February or March of this year.
Ethereum’s high transaction fees are one of the main reasons that users are looking at other smart contract platforms. Sending a basic transaction on Ethereum can cost anywhere from $5 to $100 or more. These high costs are definitely not helping Ethereum’s popularity with average, non-institutional users. The costs are especially bad given that DeFi is supposed to be a solution for people who come from poorer countries and don’t have access to traditional financial services. There’s no way DeFi can replace the banking system if executing a trade on Uniswap costs $50.
The good news is that everyone is aware of the problem and new scaling solutions should be coming online throughout 2021. Will the Binance BSC chain is prove to be a good alternative to ETH or will other platforms like Cardano or Tezos take a bite out of Ethereum’s Dominance. Let us and others know what you think in the comments.
Well there’s definitely a good reason why BTC rallied so hard on the news that BNY Mellon would start accepting crypto deposits. This news, combined with Tesla and Twitter, and everything else that’s happening in crypto land is more than enough to justify a higher Bitcoin valuation. Still not bullish? Try this on for size.
Miami has become the first municipality in the United States to go all in on Bitcoin. A So there you go. Governments are going to ban it? Governments are going to adopt it!
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