Daily Links and Adoption 04/02/18
By: Vladislav Ginzburg
Tags: South Korea, Japan, Cryptocurrency, Russia, Bitcoin

No, I meant consumer adoption. But this is nice too.

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I wake up. I check my e-mail and messenger apps. I check crypto twitter. Everyone and everything is on about prices. The correction. It’s bleeding. When will it end…is this THE end?? Time is a flat circle.

I’ve taken a small writing hiatus to deal with some stuff but also to not deal with discussion over crypto prices. Yes, it sucks. Yes, I feel for those who lost money (only if you sold!), are still holding their shitcoin bags (maybe sell?), or are down on their BTC/ETH or solid coins (good for you for believing!). But, the constant discussion about it is boring (the memes aren’t — keep ’em coming Bitcoin Bella 💎), so as I settle back into a writing flow I’ll take a quick look at price action but I’m mostly interested in the fact that this correction has had virtually nothing to do with the pace of adoption. We’ve lost the ability to advertise about ICO’s, which is whatever, and I think Reddit has scrapped the pay with BTC option, but good news coming down the pike from Mastercard, Russia, South Korea, etc. has me feeling bullish on the space and it’s spring now so I get to be full of hope. Let’s get the first story out of the way:

There’s really not much of substance in this story other than that crypto is having itself a good day, and as the headline proclaims, BTC is back up over $7,000 (just barely, as of this writing). Also a bit of news about VeChain and it’s listing on South Korean exchange Bithumb. That’s cool! I like VeChain to begin with; supply chain management is a terrific use case for blockchain, though I’m still not 100% sold on the need to tokenize it. But hey, Bithumb is a high volume exchange and coins do well when listed there. Actually, I think the more interesting bit is that Bithumb is alive and well, adding tokens, and South Koreans continue to be engaged on Cryptocurrency. That’s a key market, and it’s important to stay energized there despite the weird regulatory FUD that’s come out of there in recent memory. Speaking of…

Cryptocurrency adoption is looking good in South Korea! And Japan! A major E-Commerce platform in South Korea has added payment options for 12 major cryptocurrencies on their site, and popular exchanges are installing Kiosks in shopping malls and restaurants. In Japan, Peach Airlines are accepting BTC payments, as are several retailers and hotels. This is really the key, much more interesting than the price action of the day, seeing Bitcoin breaking its way into real world places of business and products/services is how all the cement that’s been metaphorically poured into crypto dries and becomes a solid foothold. If Peach Airlines is able to increase revenues because they’ve opened themselves up to a wider audience, larger airlines would be wise to follow. I would be interested to learn more about how Peach plans to accept payments and deal with volatility. To that end, here’s their press release on the matter. It looks like they will be using a local payments platform to handle the transactions, and thus the airline itself will ultimately receive Fiat after a processor converts it for them. While that’s a half step in the right direction, adoption is adoption…

Speaking of adoption, here’s news from Russia (no, not Magnitsky related, go elsewhere for politics. Shoo!). Arguably the most important financial institution in Russia (along with Sberbank), Gazprombank is set to trial crypto-transactions. This comes at the request of their high net worth clientele asking for a more seamless way to integrate their crypto-assets into their banking structures. No, this is not crypto for the people, not yet. But the grassroots thing really hasn’t been how business gets done in Russia since the 1990’s. Frankly, it’s not how business gets done in America nowadays either. We are constantly waiting for the approval of big institutions as signal bearers of when crypto can finally be legitimized. While that may not be in the spirit of crypto (whatever that means), I’ll take a win where I can get one. And by the way, it doesn’t hurt that this news comes at the request of important clients, which indicates that they are holding crypto.

MasterCard exec says the company would be very interested in hosting cryptocurrencies if countries start creating national cryptos. Cool? That isn’t as exciting as MasterCard building in API’s for smart contracts and instant payments, to say nothing of the pilots it’s running in Asia to exchange BTC into fiat directly on to their accounts. Those are cool projects. As I write above, I guess the status quo at the moment is waiting on major institutions to signal to us that they are ready to move forward with Crypto. For now…