Ep13: Weekly Cryptocurrency News 10/31/18

Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education

Consensus Network Weekly Crypto News October 31, 2018

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper!

Wednesday October 30th, 2018

Cryptocurrency Market Capitalization: $203 billion

Bitcoin Price: $6308 on Coinbase

JP Morgan Chase to Tokenize Gold Bars: Yes. You heard that right. Chase, who’s CEO called bitcoin a fraud and said he would fire any of his employees who traded it, seems to have capitulated to the reality that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are actually real and can be very useful. Specifically, JP Morgan will use their enterprise blockchain network Quorum, which is ethereum based, to tokenize gold bars. They also see the tokenization of many other commodities as a reality. Jamie Dimon—what a f’ng hypocrite!

Coinbase raises another $300 Million to Fix Bitcoin’s Problems: Coinbase raised another $300 million in funding with institutional investors giving it a value of $8 billion. According to coinable officials, they are going to use that funding to “accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies and digital assets.”

Plans include:

1. Global expansion to increase the number of cryptocurrency users.
2. Expanding the number of coins in offers.
3. Creating applications for bitcoin and crytocurrencies.
4. Bringing established financial institutions into the digital asset space.

Coinbase says it will continue to build infrastructure between fiat and crypto in regulated markets around the world and will add features and crypto assets to it’s custody offering.

Bitcoin Becomes Less Volatile than Amazon! According to data released by Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE), the current volatility of bitcoin is as low as that of Apple stocks and more stable than Amazon and Netflix. Of course I believe that’s just because of lower trading volume right now. We actually did see a bit of a sell-off yesterday. But let me take this opportunity to talk about volatility. Bitcoin’s market capitalization is literally 1/10th of Amazon and Apple. Therefore, we expect it to be more volatile. When bitcoin has a market capitalization of $1 trillion or more, I fully expect it to have a far less volatile profile over-all. That’s what the critics of bitcoin as a store of value are missing. They say it’s too volatile to be a store of value. I agree with that… right now. But when it grows by 10X or 100X, you won’t see the same issues. It’s math.

A Bitcoin Wrapped in an Ethereum Smart Contract? Last week we talked about how Goldman Sachs made a huge investment into crypto custodian BitGo. BitGo recently announced that it, along with partners, are launching a fully ERC20 bitcoin token called WBTC.

My first response to hearing this was…why? Is it like the Crunchwrap Supreme at Taco Bell where they put a soft tortilla around a crunchy taco to make it taste that much better?

In all seriousness, there is value to this WBTC thing. First, it will allow BTC trades on decentralized exchanges and also facilitate various transactions on the ethereum network. Ethereum has an extensive smart contract developer ecosystem which bitcoin does not (it’s digital money not a contract).

Launch will be in 2019. Let’s see if it takes off.

That’s it for this week on Consensus Network’s Weekly Crypto News!

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