Date: 01/18/2021
Weekly Headline News
1. Some Asian Traders Are Using Polkadot to Predict Bitcoin’s Future
CoinDesk
2. Grayscale’s Crypto Products Raised Over $3B Last Quarter, the Most Ever
CoinDesk
3. JPMorgan Provides $100M Financing Facility for Blockchain Mortgage Platform Figure
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4. Goldman Sachs to Enter Crypto Market ‘Soon’ With Custody Play: Source
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5. Advisers Allocating Crypto in Clients’ Portfolios Rose 49% Last Year: Survey
CoinDesk
Summary
Some Asian Traders Are Using Polkadot to Predict Bitcoin’s Future
CoinDesk
● As of press time, polkadot’s price was at $12.49, up 12.40% in the past 24 hours, according to Messari. It reached its all-time high of $13.22 during early trading hours in the U.S., just six days after bitcoin’s price reached a new all-time high.
● The market capitalization of Polkadot has surpassed XRP and LTC and is now the fourth-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to Messari’s asset tracker.
● Similar to EOS.IO, Polkadot is touted as a promising blockchain that may replace Ethereum’s dominance. It particularly caught the attention of many savvy digital asset investors when decentralized finance (DeFi) exploded in the past summer. These days, the market has mostly agreed that large institutional investors and the explosive DeFi sub sector took off in the past summer are the primary power behind the latest bull market.
● Multiple DeFi tokens have seen double-digit growth in the past few days. Brian Brooks, the outgoing acting head of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), wrote in a Financial Times op-ed about a future of “self-driving” banks backed by the DeFi sector. Thus the rapid price growth in DOT could just be a reflection of the DeFi’s continuing growth, as well as new upgrades and improvements on the project.
Grayscale’s Crypto Products Raised Over $3B Last Quarter, the Most Ever
CoinDesk
● Grayscale Investments raised $3.3 billion across its cryptocurrency investment vehicles in last year’s fourth quarter, a record for the digital asset manager and further evidence of this rally’s institutional base.
● Disclosed in Grayscale’s latest investment report, the raise more than triples the company’s previous best-ever mark set only one quarter prior, when investors piled on just over $1 billion. The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, long the company’s most popular product, once again led the pack in Q4 with an average of $217 million raised every week.
JPMorgan Provides $100M Financing Facility for Blockchain Mortgage Platform Figure
CoinDesk
● Blockchain mortgage platform Figure says it has closed a $100 million financing facility for its mortgage products from investment bank JPMorgan and its funding partners now include JPMorgan, Jefferies and a number of other Wall Street banks.
● The facility covers both conforming and jumbo mortgages — loans in excess of the traditional lending restrictions. The firm uses blockchain tech to issue mortgages and loans at greater speed and reduced cost by automating parts of the process.
Goldman Sachs to Enter Crypto Market ‘Soon’ With Custody Play: Source
CoinDesk
● U.S. banking powerhouse Goldman Sachs has issued a request for information (RFI) to explore digital asset custody, according to a source inside the bank. The Goldman source said the bank’s custody plans would be “evident soon.”
● A tectonic shift took place in the world of crypto custody this week, as San Francisco-based Anchorage attained conditional approval from the OCC to become a national digital bank and “unequivocally” meet the definition of “qualified custodian” in the process. Anchorage President Diogo Mónica said in an interview this regulatory approval will invite many large and risk-averse institutional players into crypto.
Advisers Allocating Crypto in Clients’ Portfolios Rose 49% Last Year: Survey
CoinDesk
● The number of advisers allocating to crypto in client portfolios rose from 6.3% to 9.4% in 2020. The number of financial advisers allocating crypto to client portfolios rose 49%, with client interest substantially increasing in the past year, according to a Bitwise survey.
● Almost 74% of the advisers said they thought their clients were or could be investing in crypto outside of their adviser relationship. Those advisers who reported owning crypto in their personal portfolios said they have seen growth in the past year, with 25% of them highlighting “inflation hedging” as an attractive feature of crypto investing.
