Crypto’s Last Week
By: Dfg Official
Tags: Blockchain, Regulation, Investment, Institutional, Newsletter

This edition of “Crypto’s Last Week” accounts for some of the most notable, and crypto-related — institutional, investment, or regulatory — news published between Saturday, December 05, 2020, and Friday, December 11, 2020

The first half of December 2020 has brought an inspiring surge in crypto prices, pushing market leaders to near all-time highs, while in the background the attention has been brewing from institutional investors and corporate giants on how to enter the market, acquire digital assets and, not negatively impact what is still considered a volatile market.

Besides, what has now become usual news reports, bringing to light how certain banks are planning or have begun to implement blockchain within their operations to improve efficiency, reduce costs or simply offer investment vehicles to retail and professional customers based on blockchain or digital assets. We have found recent reports that have brought the end of a baseless mentality which is “blockchain not

Bitcoin” which failed to grasp the benefits of this digital asset and how the world will most probably have a major shift in paradigms thanks to these comparative advantages.

The most recent reports have brought renowned names in the financial, insurance, and tech space to either enter or double down on their positive Bitcoin sentiment. To begin, MicroStrategy has announced the completion of a $650 million senior convertible note offering bringing the final amount raised to $250 million over the initial announcement of the offering. Which has made it some kind of torchbearer in the bitcoin advocacy realms for publicly traded companies that have diversified their reserves — $475 million and counting — as a way to hedge inflation, but are not directly related to the cryptocurrency space through their scope of work. In this case, a business intelligence service provider.

In addition, the British multinational banking and financial services company Standard Chartered with over $720 billion in assets under management, has been making noise due to its unofficial digital assets trading platform that will allegedly be a combination of leading digital asset trading companies and exchanges reaching 10 organizations including the British banking giant. The platform will apparently be powered by Ethereum native ERC-20 tokens as a way to attract crypto native institutions.

This information has come to light days after Standard Chartered CEO Bill Withers, referred to digital currencies at the Singapore FinTech Festival as an absolute inevitability when it comes to mass adoption in addition to his recent remarks referring to central bank digital currencies and how there is “absolutely a role for central bank digital currencies as well as non-central bank-sponsored digital currencies.”

On a similar announcement, Singapore’s largest bank, DBS Bank has announced the launch of a regulatory compliant crypto trading platform for late December, called DBS Digital Exchange, with exclusive services for institutional and accredited investors with four fiat currencies paired to four cryptocurrencies.

Finally, US 169-year-old insurance giant MassMutual with over 5 million clients and insurance accounts around $235 billion, has acquired through NYDIG — a cryptocurrency custody and exchange service provider — $100 million worth of Bitcoin and a $5 million stake in NYDIG, exposing this insurance behemoth to direct and indirect profits from the digital assets space and making it a first-mover within its industry to take a similar step.

All aforementioned announcements have come at a time when the digital assets space has seen a large influx of capital enter from institutional investors, with a recent report estimating $429 million entering the market during the first 7 days of December, boosting the total amount of institutional crypto assets under management to $15 billion, an all-time high for the industry.

This clearly distinguishes the intent from past years and months when legacy organizations declared a curious interest, with no clear plans to actively invest in the digital assets sector, versus a decisive set of plays made by important actors in heterogeneous sectors of the global economy. We believe this change in stance will fill the remaining gaps for millions of retail investors and thousands of institutional investors to allocate portions of their portfolios to digital assets, in turn, lifting the average market capitalization for leading assets to never seen before highs.

Thank you for joining us and reading “Crypto’s Last Week.”

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