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Goldman Sachs Leverages Crypto Management Firm Galaxy Digital to Swap Bitcoin Futures

19/06/2021 by Idelto Editor

Galaxy Digital’s co-president Damien Vanderwilt announced today that his firm has partnered with Goldman Sachs to help provide bitcoin futures products. The partnership marks one of the first occasions where an American multinational investment bank has partnered with a crypto asset service provider.

Galaxy Serves as Goldman’s Counterparty for Bitcoin Futures Trading

Goldman Sachs is trading bitcoin futures products with Galaxy Digital according to statements made by Galaxy’s co-president Damien Vanderwilt during an interview with CNBC.

Galaxy Digital is a financial services and investment management innovator founded by the company’s CEO Mike Novogratz. Vanderwilt explains that Goldman Sachs, the bank with $2.1 trillion assets under management (AUM), may entice other financial incumbents to follow its lead.

“There’s a whole dynamic with the major banks that I’ve seen time and time again: safety in numbers,” Vanderwilt explained during his discussion about the subject. “Once one bank is out there doing this, the other banks will have [fear of missing out] and they’ll get on-boarded because their clients have been asking for it.”

According to Vanderwilt, Goldman depends on Galaxy because regulatory policy stops the multinational investment bank from handling the leading crypto asset directly. Max Minton, head of digital assets for Goldman’s Asia-Pacific region said during the announcement that the bank procures clientele with the assets they demand.

“Our goal is to equip our clients with best-execution pricing and secure access to the assets they want to trade,” Minton remarked. “In 2021, this now includes crypto, and we are pleased to have found a partner with a broad range of liquidity venues and differentiated derivatives capabilities spanning the cryptocurrency ecosystem.”

As More Institutional Players Join the Fray, ‘the Less Volatility There Will Be’

The statements from Minton and Vanderwilt follow the report that said Goldman was prepping to offer ether futures and options swaps. At the time, Goldman said “institutional adoption will continue” in the crypto space.

In mid-April Galaxy Digital revealed it had entered the bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) fray when it submitted its Form S-1 registration with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).

Vanderwilt also said that when more institutional players join the crypto ecosystem volatility will grow less and less.

“You’re moving the market participants from being north of 90% retail, a huge chunk of which have access to ridiculous amounts of leverage, into an institutional community, who have proper, tried-and-tested rules and regulations about leverage, asset-liability mismatch, and risk,” Vanderwilt concluded. “The more activity that moves into the institutional community, the less volatility there will be.”

What do you think about Goldman Sachs and Galaxy Digital partnering to offer bitcoin futures to clients? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Vitalik Buterin Says People Difficulties Not Technical Difficulties Slowed the Ethereum 2.0 Rollout

03/06/2021 by Idelto Editor

The cofounder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, recently discussed the highly anticipated full transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus model to proof-of-stake (PoS) as its replacement. Buterin admitted at Hong Kong’s Startmeup HK 2021 Festival that the transition was taking too long and highlighted that it wasn’t technical problems but “related to people.”

Buterin: ‘If You Build a Team, It Is Important to Know Who You Are Working With

Vitalik Buterin has discussed the anticipated Ethereum 2.0 transition during the Startmeup HK 2021 Festival in Hong Kong this past week. The Ethereum cofounder detailed that he understood the changes were taking a long time and said that it was mostly people deterring the improvements.

“One of the biggest problems I’ve found with our project is not the technical problems, it’s problems related with people,” Buterin said during his interview with Forkast news. “Ethereum is now in a better economic position, but it took us five years to get to where we are now. We have a lot of internal team conflicts in these five years. If you are building a team, it is important to know who you are working with.”

When Buterin was asked about Ethereum 2.0, he said that the developers have been calling it by that name less and less these days.

“We actually call it Ethereum 2.0 a bit less because we want to emphasize that, this isn’t throwing out the existing Ethereum platform and making a totally new one. It’s a much more kind of incremental set of changes,” the programmer remarked.

Scalability and Proof-of-Stake Are Important Says Ethereum Cofounder

Buterin further said that sharding and rollups would greatly improve the scalability of Ethereum by a factor of 50 to 100. “The two of them stack on top of each other so once you have rollups and sharding, Ethereum and things on top of Ethereum will actually be able to have the kind of scalability that the large scale enterprise applications are expecting,” Buterin told the video host.

Buterin then explained that there’s a lot of people building and said that the transition to PoS will be important going forward. Buterin stressed:

There’s a lot of other things that people are building in the Ethereum space, but the blockchain’s ability to handle all the transactions is having a hard time keeping up with the demand, which is exactly why all of these things that we’re working on the technology side with scalability and proof of stake are so important.

During the end of the interview, Buterin’s conversation grazed up on decentralized finance (defi) and the non-fungible token (NFT) space. The Ethereum cofounder expects the defi ecosystem to continue evolving, and he sees some unique applications coming in the future.

“The functionality and programmability that crypto and defi provides could eventually provide the tools to do a lot of much more interesting things,” Buterin noted.

What do you think about Buterin’s statements about people difficulties rather than technical difficulties concerning the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Market Forecaster Jim Bianco Says Ethereum Has a Lot of Upside, Investor Doesn’t Hold Bitcoin

29/05/2021 by Idelto Editor

On May 27, the president of Bianco Research, Jim Bianco explained during an interview that he believes there’s a lot of upside potential when it comes to the crypto economy. Bianco said since 2017 he’s owned a basket of crypto assets like ethereum, but he doesn’t hold bitcoin.

Bianco Research President Owns a Basket of Digital Coins but Doesn’t Hold Bitcoin

Bianco Research, L.L.C. is a service provider that offers qualitative and quantitative macro investment analysis for the institutional investor. The company’s president and market analyst, Jim Bianco, sat down with the hosts of CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Wednesday to discuss the crypto economy. Bianco is a believer in digital currencies and has been investing for the last four years, collecting a basket of crypto assets since then.

However, Bianco doesn’t own bitcoin (BTC) and he believes “coins like ethereum are going to be a lot higher way down the road.” Even though this may be the case, Bianco stressed that crypto investors will have to deal with some busts and booms along the way.

“You’re going to have to stomach through much more of what we saw in the last week coming in the next several months or year or so,” Bianco remarked.

The US Will Face ‘Non-Transitory Inflation’ Says Bianco, ‘Cryptocurrencies Show a Lot of Promise’

Bianco has also been a staunch critic of the Federal Reserve’s monetary expansion over the last year and recently opposed Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s “transitory” inflation statement. The Bianco Research executive doesn’t believe it will be temporary and said America will see “non-transitory inflation.” Up until March 9, 2020, Bianco said he was a “bond bull” but quickly reconsidered the optimism after the 10-year Treasury bond dropped to 32 basis points.

As far as cryptocurrencies are concerned, Bianco told the hosts of CNBC’s Trading Nation:

That’s got a lot of promise, and that’s really what’s significant. The problem is the other driver is kind of an out-of-control casino with people betting on these coins going up and down.

The analyst warns, however, that crypto-assets can plunge 50-70% in value because the technology is so new. Nevertheless, after crypto assets fulfill an “adoption phase,” Bianco thinks digital currencies will be a mainstay in the global economy.

“That means from that point forward the gains will be a lot less,” Bianco said. “The risk and the reward is now you’ll have less risk and less reward once it gets adopted and the volatility slows down.”

Furthermore, Bianco noted that crypto assets are showing correlations to other risk assets like equities and gaining exposure to these new assets is key. “That wasn’t the case three or four years ago. But it is the case now,” Bianco concluded during his interview. “If we were to get higher financial market volatility either in the stock market like the VIX index, that could help bolster the cryptocurrency space as a belief, yes, we need a new fix, and this is the fix,” he added.

What do you think about Jim Bianco’s opinion about the crypto economy and his prediction that ethereum will see a lot more upside potential? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Fund Manager Wisdomtree Files With SEC to List Ethereum ETF on Cboe BZX

28/05/2021 by Idelto Editor

The financial asset manager, Wisdomtree, is now the second institution to file for an ethereum-based exchange-traded fund (ETF), following Vaneck’s recent filing on May 7. The recently filed S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says the fund’s “investment objective is to gain exposure to the price of ether.”

Wisdomtree Follows Vaneck’s Lead and Files for an Ethereum-Based ETF

On Thursday, Wisdomtree revealed it wants to list an ether-based ETF on Cboe BZX Exchange, according to the firm’s latest S-1 filing. The SEC must approve the ETF and if the regulator does, investors can purchase Wisdomtree’s ether trust shares via regulated brokerage services.

The prospectus describes ether as “a digital asset that is not issued by any government, bank or central organization, and is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization behind bitcoin.” The WisdomTree Ethereum Trust is a Delaware statutory trust, invoked on March 8, 2021. The Wisdomtree ETH-based ETF’s sole objective is to:

Gain exposure to the price of ether, less expenses, and liabilities of the Trust’s operations. In seeking to achieve its investment objective, the Trust will hold ether and will value its Shares daily based on the [CF Ether-Dollar US Settlement Price], which is an independently calculated value based on an aggregation of executed trade flow of major ether spot exchanges.

Ethereum Trust Will Follow Emerging Growth Company Reporting

In recent times, Wisdomtree’s bitcoin (BTC)-based exchange-traded fund was being reviewed by the U.S. financial regulator, and the company recently launched an ether-based exchange-traded product (ETP). Wisdomtree’s ethereum ETPs are listed on Deutsche Boerse’s Xetra and Switzerland’s Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX).

Wisdomtree’s S-1 filed on Thursday says the ether trust will qualify as an “emerging growth company,” and leverage the JOBS Act reduced reporting requirements. For instance, the trust doesn’t have to present an auditor’s attestation report or comply with 2012’s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board guidelines, unless the SEC disapproves of these actions.

“The Trust will cease to be an ‘emerging growth company’ upon the earliest of it having $1.0 billion or more in annual revenues,” Wisdomtree’s ether ETF filing notes.

What do you think about Wisdomtree’s ether-ETF filing? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

US Convenience Store Chain Sheetz to Accept Cryptocurrencies for Payments

28/05/2021 by Idelto Editor

The American chain of convenience stores and coffee shops, Sheetz, announced on Thursday that the firm would be accepting digital currencies like bitcoin, ether, and dogecoin for payments. The major Mid-Atlantic chain’s executive payments manager says accepting crypto-asset acceptance bolsters Sheetz’s mission to provide customers with the “ultimate one-stop-shop.”

Convenience Store Chain Sheetz Adds Digital Currency Payments, Fuel Pump Crypto Payments to Roll out This Summer

On May 27, Sheetz revealed the company will be accepting crypto payments via the digital payments network Flexa. The company, headquartered in Altoona, Pennsylvania, operates 622 convenience stores and coffee shops in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland.

Sheetz noted in its announcement that the firm aims to “provide customers with the ability to pay for items inside the store or fill up their cars, trucks, and RVs at the pump using digital currencies like bitcoin, ether, litecoin, dogecoin, and more.”

“Above all else, our mission at Sheetz is to continue providing our customers with the ultimate one-stop-shop where they can refuel their car and refresh their body,” Linda Smith, the payments manager for Sheetz said. The Sheetz executive further added:

As a result, we are constantly innovating and exploring new offerings to truly give our customers what they want, when they want it, 24/7/365 — that includes accepting many forms of payment. We’re very excited to be working with Flexa to roll out support for cryptocurrencies and other types of digital assets at our stores.

Sheetz Leverages NCR payment gateway for Crypto Point-of-Sale

According to the announcement, Sheetz will leverage Flexa’s “climate-neutral payments technology” at a number of select cafes and stores at first. Later this summer, the company will roll out crypto payments for the firm’s fuel pumps. Sheetz customers can also tether their “Sheetz Rewardz” loyalty points to Flexa-enabled applications. Further, Sheetz is also leveraging Flexa’s point-of-sale (POS) partner NCR.

“Connecting through the existing POS solution to the NCR payment gateway enables retailers to quickly integrate new solutions making it easy to introduce new innovations enabled by digital currencies,” Tim Vanderham, the chief technology officer of NCR noted during the Sheetz crypto acceptance announcement. “Retailers benefit through increased loyalty, lower transaction fees, and reduced fraud while improving convenience and choice for shoppers,” Vanderham added.

Trevor Filter, the cofounder of the payments firm Flexa, detailed that his company looks forward to helping Sheetz roll out digital asset payments at the fuel pumps.

“Sheetz is one of the most forward-thinking brands in the business and understands their customer base better than anyone else. We’re absolutely elated that Flexa can help them become the first convenience and retail chain to accept digital currencies directly at the pump,” Filter remarked.

What do you think about Sheetz accepting digital currencies like bitcoin, ether, and dogecoin for payments? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.