Bitcoin Whale Numbers Hit All-Time high As New BTC ETN Launches
This week CryptoCompare data shows the price of Bitcoin (BTC) moved from around $18,700 after the weekend to a high of $19,200 before enduring a sell-off that saw it move back down to $16,500. Bitcoin’s price recovered and is now back at $18,550.
Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, managed to briefly breach the resistance it has been facing at $600 this week, but after BTC’s price plummeted it fell to sub-$500 levels, before recovering. Ether is now trading at $582.
Headlines seen in the cryptocurrency space throughout the week suggest institutional investors are still moving into the space, despite the sell-off. European ETF issuer VanEck has announced the launch of a bitcoin exchange-traded-note (ETN) on the Deutsche Böerse. The ETN will launch on the electronic trading venue of Europe’s third-largest exchange, Xetra.
The VanEck Vectors Bitcoin ETN (VBTC) has a total expense ratio of 2% and is set to be fully replicated. Through a partnership with Bank Frick, a crypto custodian regulated in Liechtenstein, the underlying BTC is held in cold storage.
The ETN is easily accessible to investors, as purchasing it is “as simple as trading in stocks or ETFs.”
Over the week data shared by on-chain market analysis firm Glassnode revealed that the number of bitcoin whales, defined as entities that hold at least 1,000 BTC in a wallet or across a cluster of wallets, has hit a new all-time high after more than four year, with nearly 2,000 whales being spotted across the blockchain.
Bitcoin’s performance and increasing adoption saw it hit the front page of the Wall Street Journal, in an article that pointed out that new BTC supporters include billionaire investors Paul Tudor Jones, who has revealed over 1% of his assets are in bitcoin, and Stanley Freeman Druckenmiller, who owns BTC as part of his investment portfolio.
The WSJ’s coverage also mentioned PayPal is letting users buy, sell, and hold bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ether, and litecoin, which could be driving up adoption.
The head of institutional coverage at San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange coinbase, Brett Tejpaul, said in an interview this week that institutional interest in cryptocurrencies has grown more than threefold since he joined the trading platform earlier this year.
According to the executive, Coinbase saw “an explosion of activity” as when he entered the firm’s institutional assets under custody were $6 billion, and are now above $20 billion.
ETH 2.0 Deposit Contract Reaches Threshold to Launch
The smart contract set to trigger the first phase of Ethereum 2.0, an upgrade that is expected to solve a number of issues on the Ethereum blockchain, including scalability. The smart contract needed 523,288 ETH staked in it to trigger phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0, and has over 852,000 ETH at press time.
Phase 0 will launch the beacon chain, a parallel proof-of-stake blockchain that will un alongside the existing Ethereum network. Its initial development will not impact Ethereum or its smart contracts and application, and will instead contribute to the launch of Ethereum 2.0. It’s the first of four phases of the migration to the upgraded network.
The primary stakeholders on the Ethereum 2.0 chain will be validators, which are essentially the equivalent to the miners on ETH’s current proof-of-stake network. Validators, just like miners, will earn rewards for processing transactions and finding new blocks.
The smart contract’s threshold being met is believed to have helped the price of ether go up this week, to the point the percentage of Ethereum addresses in a state of profit reached a 2-year high of 86.117% when the cryptocurrency was close to $600.
Despite the excitement surrounding ETH 2.0, activity on the decentralized finance space is still being haunted by hacks and exploits. A total of $103 million were liquidated this week on popular decentralized finance protocol Compound after a sudden rise in the price of the DAI stablecoin on Coinbase Pro saw some loans become under-collateralized.
Crypto AM: Market View in association with Ziglu
