Digital assets

2021 Crypto Market Stats Show a Number of Other Coins Gained More Than Bitcoin

13/02/2021 by Idelto Editor

During the end of 2020 and into 2021, a great number of digital assets have seen significant gains and the bearish season that followed 2017 has turned its course. Bitcoin touched an all-time price high on February 11, 2021, reaching $49k per coin and three-month stats show bitcoin is up 198%. Despite the phenomenal 90-day gains, numerous alternative crypto assets have seen much larger increases. The infamous dogecoin, for instance, has spiked 2,322% during the last three months.

Crypto Asset Market Performances in 2021

Bitcoin and the crypto economy has steadily surpassed the $1 trillion valuation mark and on Friday, February 12, 2021, the crypto market capitalization of all the coins in existence is worth $1.41 trillion. The day prior, bitcoin (BTC) reached another all-time high (ATH) on Thursday touching approximately $49,000 per unit.

BTC has seen some significant gains this year, and the crypto asset has increased 149.16% since the ATH in 2017. Bitcoin has captured 198% in gains during the last 90 days and bitcoin’s dominance index is 61.1% on Friday. This means that even though BTC has jumped massively in value, alternative crypto assets have seen bigger price increases.

As mentioned above, dogecoin (DOGE) has seen incredible gains during the last three months jumping 2,322.09% in value during that time frame. DOGE is the second biggest gainer over the last 90 days, but the orion protocol token (ORN) has increased by a whopping 50,641.88% to date.

It would be difficult for any crypto assets to match ORN’s jump, but there’s a slew of other alternative assets that have seen very large 90-day gains. Below the meme-token dogecoin is telcoin (TEL), which has gained 2,281.63% in 90 days.

A number of other notable token assets climbing the ranks include sushiswap (SUSHI 1,446.24%), avalanche (AVAX 1,285.09%), and cardano (ADA 1,226.06%). The biggest losers during the last three months include coins like aced (ACED -98.85%), wavesgo (WGO -84.75%), and digitex futures (DGTX -79.86%).

As far as the changes versus the U.S. dollar from 2020 until now, bitcoin (BTC) has gained 301.46%. The biggest top ten positioned token that has seen the largest USD gains since the start of 2020 is ethereum (ETH) which has jumped 463.55% since then.

But during the course of 2020 up until now, a number of other coins have seen way bigger gains. For example, messari.io data shows since the start of 2020, game stars (GST) increased by 68,928.03%, and the token zap (ZAP) has gained 5,716.86%.

Some coins have lost over 90% of their values since 2020, as tokens like jibrel network (JNT), thore cash (TCH), educare (EKT), omnitude (ECOM), and ors group (ORS) has lost between -94.98% to -98.49% in value.

Analysts Expect ‘More Uptake as a Result of Mainstream Attention’

The crypto economy jumped in value significantly after Elon Musk’s Tesla revealed it had purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin (BTC). Additionally, Musk has been discussing the meme-based crypto-asset dogecoin (DOGE) on a regular basis.

Optimistic news that proponents are also discussing is Mastercard’s recent crypto support announcement, Jay Z, Lil Wayne, and Jack Dorsey donating 500 BTC to fund bitcoin development teams in Africa and India. Moreover, the oldest financial institution in America BNY Mellon will be offering cryptocurrency services.

“A game-changing week for cryptos’, David Mercer, CEO of LMAX Group told news.Bitcoin.com. “Musk has just ripped up the old roadmap for corporate treasurers everywhere. Financial institutions are now preparing to follow their clients. We’re starting to see institutions drive disruption, which is the start of an exciting journey. What’s undeniable is that cryptos are now becoming an accepted destination.”

Broctagon Fintech Group feels the same way, as the CEO Don Guo also discussed all the positive announcements this week.

“BNY Mellon’s and Mastercard’s introduction to the cryptocurrency space, following the recent Tesla news, signals another price boom for bitcoin,” the Broctagon Fintech Group executive wrote. “Such a big institutional endorsement will propel digital assets even further into the main stage this year, and we expect further uptake as a result of the mainstream attention.”

What do you think about the past three months of crypto-asset price changes? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Debunking Misconceptions From “The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine”

30/01/2021 by Idelto Editor

As long time Bitcoiners, we are not shocked by the ongoing confusion around the nature of the bitcoin market. The reality is that, unlike other public markets, the bitcoin market has significantly more noise. There is noise around price valuation, noise around use cases, noise around data and noise from skeptics. It is very difficult for a new person to enter into the bitcoin market and cut directly to the signal.

This confusion has been manifested once again in a misguided article circulating the web: “The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine.”

It seems that the author of the now-viral Medium article has, like many others, slipped into some pretty big newbie pitfalls around bitcoin exchange data, bitcoin’s nature as black market money and, of course, fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) around a prominent grey market dollar solution called tether. This article will examine the author’s key arguments one by one and explain these pitfalls, demonstrating why they should not be taken seriously in anyone’s consideration of tether or its relationship to bitcoin.

The root of the tether conspiracy is a fundamental assumption that the bitcoin market is not legitimate and that there is no legitimate demand for bitcoin, only FOMO that is created as a side product of “fraudulent tether printing.” In 2016 or 2017, the tether conspiracy theory was a very powerful narrative. That’s right, these very tether fears existed before 2020… this story is old.

In 2021 in a world where we know fiat is being devalued at an enormous clip, people and institutions are flooding into anything that is not fiat and big wig investors are appearing on TV, discussing their massive allocations to bitcoin. Today, the no legitimate demand story is a lot weaker. Bitcoin is the world’s hardest and scarcest asset created for this express purpose.

While on the surface, “The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine” seems to raise some very credible concerns around the bitcoin market, these concerns are effectively based on misinterpretations of data visualizations that are themselves based on fake data.

Unfortunately, “The Bit Short” is unfounded FUD.

The author is parroting several baised and discredited individuals who have clung to this tether narrative for over four years now.

We do not intend to defend Tether, iFinex, Bitfinex or any other private organization related to tether, we have not spoken to them and they can and do speak for themselves. Rather, we are here to debunk the faulty information in “The Bit Short,” as well as to provide some context so that new investors can avoid the obvious misconceptions that fuel this and many other poorly-researched FUD articles that will continue to propagate.

A Brief History Of Tether And USD-Pegged Tokens

Tether is the original “stablecoin,” which launched in 2014, close to four years before any of its competitors. It is actually tether’s massive success and obvious demand in 2017 that became the impetus for “regulated alternatives” like USDC, GUSD and Paxos to launch.

October 2014: Tether (USDT) Origin Date

December 2017: Dai Stablecoin Origin Date

September 2018: USDC Origin Date

September 2018: GUSD Origin Date

September 2018: Paxos Origin Date

Tether is the biggest stablecoin by both market cap and usage because it was the first. It literally created the stablecoin market and had significant network effects years before any other player started competing. This is not to say it does not have faults, this is just to explain why it is so much larger than its much younger competitors.

Again, this article is not here to defend what tether claims, but rather to help others better understand what tether is and the role it plays. Tether is a black box and is “sketchy” by design. The tether product is for working around the banking system. From a regulatory perspective, this is sketchy by nature. This is also why people use it. Tether users do not want to have their value in the legacy compliant system. The main use case for tether is to sell your bitcoin into a “dollar” without hitting the banking system. In practice, tether resembles future bitcoin buying demand. For many, the point of tether is to circumvent regulations while trading bitcoin.

Raising the alarm to tether’s sketchiness is akin to jumping into the ocean and raising the alarm that there are fish swimming. Of course tether is not outwardly “compliant and transparent,” that is the point of tether.

But the author of “The Bit Short” would have you believe that tether is not only “sketchy,” aka, it serves the grey dollar market, but that there is no bitcoin demand outside of the “sketchy” tether manipulation. We are not arguing that tether is not sketchy, but rather that tether fits in a very nuanced place in the greater Bitcoin ecosystem. We will show with strong evidence that tether does not resemble a fundamental issue in the Bitcoin investment thesis or the legitimacy of the bitcoin market. The author of “The Bit Short” builds their argument on the following points:

Tether accounts for more than $10 billion in daily inflows to bitcoin
Tether accounts for over 70 percent of bitcoin trading volume
Tether issuance must be fraudulent because of how it is issued
Bitcoin insiders are blind to how tether is manipulating the bitcoin market
Legitimate exchanges are not affiliated with tether
Legal authorities are the only way to fix the above issues

While the author’s case makes for a juicy read, especially for readers with little or no understanding of the bitcoin market, upon some observation it becomes pretty clear that these points are based on the misinterpretations of faulty data and general ignorance.

Debunking Point One: “Tether Accounts For More Than $10 Billion In Inflows To Bitcoin”

The number-one most important thing about his article is the first chart it displays in the section named “The Shock.”

The author took a screenshot from coinlib.io‘s 24-hour money flow (representing the money that flowed from/to bitcoin in the last 24 hours) and claimed that this chart illustrates one-way buying from tether to bitcoin.

As noted by the data source, this does not represent not one-way inflows, it represents volume. Volume is very different from one-way Inflows. It appears that the author is confused on how to read the graphic they are citing. The author claimed that the left side of the chart illustrates value inflows going into bitcoin and the right side shows values flows leaving bitcoin. This is a completely incorrect interpretation of the chart.

Here is what the author is suggesting the graphic means:

But here is actually what the chart means:

Trading volume does not equal dollar inflows into a system. This is a fact.

With this clear misrepresentation, the foundation of the author’s argument has already completely unraveled due to the fact that tether does not account for $10 billion in inflows on a daily basis. Rather, there is about $10 billion in exchange-reported trading volume of tether.

In the article, the author willingly or unwillingly misrepresented how to interpret the data from these coinlib.io graphics. We will leave it to reader to determine what they believe to be the most likely intent of the author in this misrepresentation.

Debunking Point Two: “70 Percent Of Bitcoin Volume Is Tether”

Next, the author claims that Tether makes up 70 percent of bitcoin’s trading volume.

Seventy percent is an interesting figure. How did the author come up with this “fact”? Conveniently, if a coinlib.io user scrolled down from the money flow from/to bitcoin in the last 24 hours graphic, they would find coinlib.io’s bitcoin volume charts.

Also conveniently, if one adds up the total bitcoin 24-hour volume reported on coinlib.io and divides it by the 24-hour tether volume, they would find that about 66 percent of bitcoin trading volume is tether. Here is our math from January 20, 2021, when we conducted this initial investigation:

BTC/USD volume: 1.25 billion

BTC/USDT volume: 6.88 billion

BTC/ETH volume: 1.49 billion

BTC/BUSD volume: 0.44 billion

BTC/JPY volume: 0.36 billion

Total BTC volume: About 10.42 billion

So, 6.88 billion in USDT volume divided by 10.42 billion in total BTC volume equals about 66 percent.

It could be a coincidence that our numbers match up with the “closer to 70 percent” number that the author has claimed, however, we were unable to recreate this exact sum USDT total by percentage of BTC volume from any other resource. Coinmetrics.io, coingeck.com and coinmarketcap.com are all very well-known aggregators which we used to try and recreate the author’s 70 percent stat.

Unfortunately for the author’s thesis, coinlib.io does not have the strongest reputation as a data resource and many exchanges — especially the ones noted by the author — are known to report fake trading volume in order to get free marketing on crypto data aggregators like coinlib.io. The author seems to take coinlib.io’s volume information at face value, when it is in fact almost completely fake.

Breaking Down Bitcoin’s Volume In Tether

Let’s further break down the tether volume numbers that coinlib.io highlights:

Coinlib.io shows 6.89 billion in 24-hour tether volume (on January 20, 2021), however not all of the exchanges it used to report that number are legitimate. In fact. most of them are not! We took the liberty of highlighting in orange all of the exchanges that are widely known to participate in fake trading in order to manipulate their rankings on sites like coinlib.io, coinmarketcap.com and coingecko.com.

The author seemed to think that HitBTC and Bit-Z facilitate more real bitcoin demand than Coinbase.

Bit-Z and HitBTC are not large exchanges at all and not even close to two of the biggest. HitBTC in particular has a long history of this kind of unethical behavior. Even Binance, the number-one exchange for tether volume, is known to conduct some shady practices on its exchange to pump up its volume numbers. The main point being that the massive tether volume is not real and absolutely does not represent close to 70 percent of the total bitcoin trading volume. The real trading volume is actually far less than what any of these sites are reporting.

U.S.-based Bitwise did a groundbreaking study in 2018 that showed that 95 percent of bitcoin reported volume is fake! It maintains a website that is designed to give a much better picture of legitimate bitcoin volume.

Bitcointradevolume.com paints a very different picture than those of coinlib.io or the author of “The Bit Short.”

On January 25, 2021, bitcointradevolume.com showed about $6 billion in 24-hour trading volume for bitcoin and just over $4 billion in bitcoin futures volume. It turns out that legitimate bitcoin 24 hour volume is around $10 billion, with over 75 percent of real volume coming from U.S. regulated entities.

At this point, it should be quite clear that the dramatized story that the author of “The Bit Short” has painted is far from reality. Their claims that tether is 70 percent of bitcoin’s legitimate trading volume is far from reality — at most, it represents between 25 percent to 35 percent of real bitcoin trading volume in a given 24-hour period.

Debunking Point Three: “Tether Issuance Must Be Fraudulent Because Of How It Is Issued”

Tether Limited, the organization behind the oldest stablecoin, only issues new tokens to partners. It makes sense that large OTC trading desks receive tether and use tether in large blocks. This is discussed in detail in this excellent podcast with Dan Matuszewski of CMS Holding and Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures back in 2019.

Paulo Arduino, the CTO of Tether Limited, explained the different business models used by Coinbase/Circle and Tether in issuing stablecoins in this 2019 podcast.

USDC from Coinbase has a different model than Tether Limited. Anyone can create a Coinbase account, deposit dollars and mint USDC. If you take a more zoomed out look at total stablecoin printing across the different players, there are actually huge amounts of correlation across all coins.

The author asserts that tether printing must be 100 percent fraudulent based on this operational difference between how Tether Limited issues USDT and how Coinbase/Circle issue USDC. We ask the author: Why is stablecoin market cap growth so correlated together? If you look at stablecoin market cap growth across all stablecoins on sites like stablecoinindex.com, it is clear to see that they are growing in sync.

Source: https://stablecoinindex.com/marketcap

Are all of the stablecoin issuers conspiring and coordinating to print at the exact same time? We seriously doubt that. This distribution of stablecoin market cap growth across all of the players indicates that funds flowing into Tether are likely legitimate and in sync with the rest of the market.

Again, Tether Limited is a black box and we cannot say for certain how it manages its business, but to date, the market has treated tether as being worth $1 consistently.

Debunking Point 4: Bitcoin Insiders Are Blind To How Tether Is Manipulating The Bitcoin Market

We think that, at this point, it is clear that Bitcoiners understand the Tether market far better than the author of “The Bit Short” does. We will just provide a few more examples of Bitcoiners addressing these tired Tether concerns over the years.

2021:

Dan Held, “Don’t Fear Tether”
Nic Carter, Twitter Thread:

the current Tether FUD makes QAnon look reasonable

— nic carter (@nic__carter) January 15, 2021

2020:

Stuart Hoegner, Twitter thread on Bitcoin Fundamentals:

Interesting piece by @nic__carter: https://t.co/fu9Ojg9PcG

“Now many of you will be reading critical takes on Bitcoin’s current rally from people insistent that stablecoins like @Tether_to are somehow responsible for its price. I would invite you to ask these critics … 1/19

— Stuart Hoegner (@bitcoinlawyer) November 29, 2020

2019:

Samson Mow Twitter thread pointing out Tether clickbait articles on CNBC:

2018:

Deleting tweets is a classic move from regular tether alarmists:

Due to the difficulty in opening new Bitfinex accounts late last year and the minimum account size of 10k usd imposed this year, there’s an entire generation of crypto traders susceptible to tether fud and blame it for all sorts of ills in crypto itself.

— Su Zhu (@zhusu) October 21, 2018

Debunking Point 5: Legitimate Exchanges Are Not Affiliated With Tether

Bitwise, which offers the Bitwise Bitcoin Fund in U.S. public markets, maintains the aforementioned resource bitcointradevolume.com. On the site, it only lists legitimate bitcoin markets with estimates of what it believes to be legitimate volume.

The following exchanges all offer tether markets and appear on Bitwise’s list; Binance, Bitfinex, Kraken, Poloniex and Bittrex. Five out of 10 legitimate exchanges, according to Bitwise, use USDT. Again, this is another sign that tether is a part of the legitimate bitcoin market.

The most compliant and largest bitcoin P2P market, Paxful, added tether support in 2020 and is based and operated in the U.S. The only two cryptocurrencies it supports are BTC and USDT.

Debunking Point 6: Legal Authorities Are Needed To Regulate Bitcoin

It has become completely obvious to the average investor that the current financial system is rigged against the little guy. This week, everyone from Donald Trump Jr. to Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez has been raising calls against the censorship from apps like Robinhood, WeBull, TD Ameritrade, and the Nasdaq itself. Yet these systems are legal…

We would argue that this final point is the ultimate tell that the author of “The Bit Short” does not understand bitcoin from first principles. Early bitcoin investor Tyler Winklevoss synthesized Bitcoin’s value proposition quite nicely in this famous quote:

“We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.”

The famous Latin phrase vires in numeris, “strength in numbers” in English, is another great way to understand the Bitcoin world view. Bitcoin was never about authority, it was always about opt-in, permissionless systems enabled by math and cryptography. For the people, by the people, the people’s money. To call for regulation means that you do not understand the Bitcoin paradigm shift.

One could argue that without the legal authorities’ war on cash, incessant need to tax, dystopian financial surveillance and arcane banking system, there would be no need for tether… if legal authorities are so adept at bringing transparency and integrity to our monetary systems, why don’t they fix their own currency first?

However, there’s a greater point to be distilled here. Bitcoin already is regulated, not by the law of man but by the law of nature. With no “buyer of last resort,” there is nobody to bail investors out from their bad choices… burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me. If tether is a scam, it’ll eventually blow itself up. Investors will learn something new, the markets will temporarily go haywire and bitcoin will continue to clear transactions as if nothing ever happened.

Throughout Bitcoin’s 12-year history, it has survived Silk Road, Mt. Gox, OneCoin and much more.

Technical research contributions to this article were made by David Bailey.

The post Debunking Misconceptions From “The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine” appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Soteria To Launch Bitcoin-Backed, USD-Pegged Stablecoin

29/01/2021 by Idelto Editor

Soteria has announced the forthcoming launch of USDS, a USD-pegged stablecoin that is 100 percent backed by bitcoin, meaning that users can issue or redeem it in exchange for BTC. Testing of the product has concluded and Soteria expects to launch it in the near future.

Stablecoins are digital currencies built to retain stable value, usually be pegging them to a fiat currency, collatorizing them with other cryptocurrencies or algorithmically balancing their circulating supplies. Soteria envisions USDS as solving inherent problems with each of these approaches.

“Fiat-backed stablecoins suffer from censorship and audit problems,” per a Soteria release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. “Cryptocurrency-collateralized stablecoins can be unstable during extreme market volatility and are capital inefficient. Algorithm-based stablecoins are also unstable and do not hold their pegs. Soteria proposes to solve these problems by eliminating the need to convert to fiat currencies and to be stable under any market volatility.”

Soteria shorts bitcoin futures contracts to hedge the BTC/USD exchange rate risk and maintain an unchanging position in respect to the bitcoin price — this ensures the stability, or consistently pegged value, of USDS. The arbitrage between exchanges and Soteria will be used to keep the stablecoin’s value pegged to the value of USD.

But because USDS is cryptocurrency-backed, as opposed to fiat-backed, users don’t have to interact with the banking system or incur the censorship tradeoffs that come with it. And Soteria also promises that users can earn 10 percent annual percentage yield (APY) interest on USDS without staking or lending the tokens.

“Users of USDS earn interest automatically every day without lending cryptocurrency,” per the release. “This is possible because the interest generated by the futures basis on cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges goes to the users. We currently set the interest rate fixed at 10 percent APY but we will periodically review it since the futures basis fluctuates.”

Soteria’s website indicates that it will allow for instant conversion between BTC and USDS while maintaining a 0.1 percent issuance fee and a 0.2 percent redemption fee.

The post Soteria To Launch Bitcoin-Backed, USD-Pegged Stablecoin appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Bitcoin Is The Only Investment-Grade Digital Asset

27/01/2021 by Idelto Editor

Every four years or so, bitcoin’s seemingly cyclical nature rears its head and the rise of another bull market begins. There are headlines across mainstream media outlets boasting massive price action, and droves of people start coming out of the woodwork to claim that they have been long on bitcoin for years! However, there is also another, more nefarious cyclical event that inevitably surfaces as well. The seemingly irresistible allure of alternative cryptocurrencies, tugging at the minds and wallets of individuals who are looking to recapture what bitcoin has achieved.

Those who think they have missed out on bitcoin begin looking to compensate by finding the next big thing, because they are plagued with the mindset that they somehow have “missed out” on bitcoin. There’s no shortage of these dubious crypto assets that claim to be able to unseat bitcoin. They might declare to have faster transactions, cheaper fees or that they are capable of more complex applications. There are literally thousands of these coins, and they have all failed to dethrone the king for 12 years running.

The truth is that none of them are even close. In actuality, when you look deeper than surface level, they are illiquid, insecure, centralized copycats perpetuated by bloated marketing budgets, seeking out dummies with deep pockets. They chase the wrong metrics, and are built with flawed incentive structures. Do not fall for the siren’s song. The reality is there is only one “investment-grade” digital asset — Bitcoin.

“100 out of 100 of the last conversations I’ve had with investors seriously looking to allocate, let’s say over 50 million dollars, 100% of those conversations have been about Bitcoin and 0% of them have been about any other crypto asset.”

Robert Gutmann, CEO of NYDIG

Crypto Copy Cats Will Continue To Fall Short

Silicon Valley startups go to sleep at night, and dream about building something that captures the massive returns that bitcoin has offered. Bitcoin has gone from being an idea on a white paper worth $0 to having a $700 billion market cap in just 12 years’ time. All with no funding. No CEO. No marketing team. Just the correct set of economic incentives, embodied in a robust protocol that continues to grow and adapt against all odds. What Silicon Valley’s tech crowd is failing to realize is that this is not solely a competition for who has the best technology or marketing strategy. Bitcoin is truly the first creation of digital scarcity, and was built in such a way that once its first version was released, it would never change.

“When tech workers see Bitcoin, they want to fiddle with different parameters: block size, monetary policy, it’s core capability/utility, etc. This is exactly the right mindset when building applications, but the wrong mindset when it comes to building the base layer of the financial system.”

Dan Held, “Why Silicon Valley Doesn’t Get Bitcoin”

The tech contingent in Silicon Valley can continue to launch VC-funded cryptocurrency projects by the thousands. When they get their hands on these cryptocurrency projects, their first instinct is to tinker. They want to tweak and prod at existing structures and rules, or as the more commonly-used Mark Zuckerberg moniker states “move fast and break things.”

This is exactly the opposite of what you would want to do with the software underpinning a $700 billion financial network. Their efforts fail to realize that it is precisely these boring, slow and unchangeable characteristics of Bitcoin that make it so great. At its core, a base layer protocol that aims to be the foundation upon which an entire financial system is built should be exactly that. Rigid, slow-moving, precise and unchangeable.

Blockchain Buzzwords And Decentralization Theater

Crypto projects everywhere are trying to woo investors with marketing efforts, business partnerships and buzzwords like “blockchain technology.” Their marketing budgets may be large, but their words are hollow.

Many crypto projects love to plaster the term “decentralized” all over their websites and marketing materials, as if it gives their coin an air of legitimacy. Here’s the bad news: If your cryptocurrency has a website, a pitch deck, a marketing budget, an HR department and a CEO that can ultimately be called before Congress… well then, it’s not quite decentralized is it?

True Decentralization

Bitcoin’s code base is maintained by a widely-dispersed set of developers all over the world, and its network is made up of tens of thousands of individuals freely choosing to run its open-source software. With Bitcoin, there is no marketing budget. In fact, there’s no marketing department at all. There is no leader, no CEO and no HR department. Bitcoin does not have employees on a payroll. Rather, Bitcoin works by aligning human action through a series of elegantly-balanced economic incentives.

It’s decentralized. No company controls it. No government regulates it. It runs on thousands and thousands of decentralized nodes and the obvious thing it is, is an investment-grade safe haven treasury reserve asset.

Michael Saylor, Founder and CEO of MicroStrategy

Buyers are incentivized to hold, miners are incentivized to be honest actors, developers are incentivized to commit code, and network participants are incentivized to enforce the consensus rules of the network.

Bitcoin even has its brand marketing taken care of. There are thousands of evangelists, writers, podcasters and educational content creators alike who all feel compelled enough to take up the task best suited to them. Out of their own free will, they work to propel the network forward, and push for the mainstream adoption of this nascent digital asset because they believe in the protocol rules and monetary policy enabling a non-sovereign sound money to emerge on the free market. This is what true decentralization looks like.

More Than Just Technology

Yes, at its core, Bitcoin is just code. It is a software program, widely dispersed and run on individuals’ computers. But do not let that confuse you into thinking this is solely about technology. Bitcoin’s success is rooted in monetary and social revolution as well. It is the antithesis of the debt-based monetary system we have today. Its network effects have propelled it outside of reach from any competitors for a myriad of reasons. Chief among those is its ability to incentivize humans to carry out the protocol rules via social consensus.

“The social layer and its rules are the heart of bitcoin. But the protocol layer makes them enforceable for the first time, while simultaneously making the social contract more credible to outsiders.”

Hasu, “Unpacking Bitcoin’s Social Contract”

Image from Hasu’s article, “Unpacking Bitcoin’s Social Contract”

Entrenchment Is Growing

Regulatory Entrenchment: Entrenchment by both investors and regulators has gained significant momentum over the last several years. On the regulation front, we have seen the following individuals placed in prominent positions within the new administration:

Gary Gensler, U.S. Securities And Exchange Commission Chief: Taught cryptocurrency course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Chris Brummer, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair (pending confirmation): Authored a book titled “Cryptoassets: Legal, Regulatory, and Monetary Perspectives”
Brian Brooks, Acting Comptroller of the Currency: Former chief legal officer at Coinbase, the leading cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S.

Institutional Entrenchment: Prolific investors like Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller and the like have removed career risk for interested money managers. We have also seen an increase of adoption from hedge funds, financial institutions and publicly-traded companies like MicroStrategy and Square, which chose to allocate treasury reserves in bitcoin.

None of these significant players listed above are here to pump altcoins, or dubious VC-backed cryptocurrency projects. They are all here for Bitcoin and Bitcoin only. The main reasons for that are clear and obvious. Bitcoin is king when it comes to three core tenets of an investable asset — liquidity, security and the credibility of its monetary policy.

Bitcoin has grown and flourished for 12 years and counting. It has withstood network attacks, gained adoption and its heart has kept beating, cranking out a new block of transactions every 10 minutes.

However, chief among all characteristics that make bitcoin the only investment-grade digital asset is the credibility of its hard-capped supply, rooted in its protocol rules since inception. It is the cornerstone of what makes Bitcoin the most significant alignment of computer science, economics and game theory ever discovered. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.

This is a guest post by Nick Ward. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

The post Bitcoin Is The Only Investment-Grade Digital Asset appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Rick and Morty Creator Sells NFT Art Collection for Over $1 Million in Ether

22/01/2021 by Idelto Editor

Justin Roiland, the co-creator of the Adult Swim cartoon series Rick and Morty has joined the growing trend of celebrity artists creating non-fungible token (NFT) artwork. After the animator released the collection called “The Best I Could Do” on the NFT auction house Nifty Gateway, the artwork sold for over $1 million in ether.

Justin Roiland is well known for co-creating the animated television show Rick and Morty alongside his producing and voice-acting abilities. Just recently, Roiland, who also maintains an animation studio and video game studio decided to sell a collection of artwork backed by blockchain technology.

On January 18, on the non-fungible token (NFT) auction house Nifty Gateway, Roiland raised over a million dollars in ethereum (ETH) for his artwork. The collection is called “The Best I Could Do” and Roiland tweeted about his NFT collection as well.

“The best I could do,” the Rick and Morty animator told his 760,000 Twitter followers. “Testing the boundaries of crypto art. What makes something valuable? The art? The artist? The process? The state of mind while created? The intention of the piece? Feeling really good about this collection,” the artist added.

Following the release, Nifty Gateway’s official Twitter account tweeted about all the auction sales. One of the pieces of artwork was called “The Smintons,” which featured his own adaptations of Matt Groening’s Simpsons characters.

The NFT called “The First Ever Edition Of Rick And Morty Cryptoart.”

“All proceeds going to help the Los Angeles homeless encampments,” the NFT auction house said on Twitter. One of the auction’s five-minute open editions aggregated a total of $275k in ether. After the Roiland NFT collection sale ended, Nifty Gateway tweeted about the artist’s record auction.

“With the close of his auctions, Justin Roiland has surpassed $1mm total volume on a single drop, the 3rd Nifty Gateway artist to achieve this milestone,” the NFT marketplace emphasized. “Congratulations to Justin and all the collectors,” Nifty Gateway added.

The Rick and Morty animator’s recent NFT sale follows the acclaimed NFT artist Beeple’s auction in mid-December, which saw the artist raising $3.5 million in sales.

During a silent auction, Roiland sold a unique NFT that was called “The First Ever Edition Of Rick And Morty Cryptoart.” The artwork which featured the characters from the hit show sold for $150k in ether. Non-fungible token artwork continues to be a popular trend as the crypto community and onlookers are watching artists reap seven-figure payouts.

What do you think about the Rick and Morty co-creator selling over a million dollars worth of ether for his latest NFT art collection? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.