In December, the Financial Times called it. 2020 was the year that bitcoin went institutional. Existing investors, such as Microstrategy, significantly increased their cryptocurrency holdings to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Newcomers such as U.K.-based investment firm Ruffer also bought in, citing bitcoin’s capacity to act as a hedge against a precarious…
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The chaos around the COVID-19 fallout has consumed the worries of many companies as city quarantines kick in and commercial activity comes to a halt. The economic fallout from COVID-19 is daunting, to say the least, something we see reflected with the Fed Bazooka response and the government’s multi-trillion fiscal stimulus plan. Needless to say,…
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Bitcoin’s mining industry has transformed from a dispersed set of hobbyists extracting large sums of bitcoin from the protocol with CPUs to a vast confluence of innovative hardware manufacturers, pools, and upstart technology firms pushing the limits of ASIC mining. Bitcoin mining has industrialized at a daringly rapid pace. As the industrialization of the bitcoin…
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Bitcoin’s halving events are when the block reward issuance is sliced in half every 210,000 blocks, which equates to roughly every four years. An integral part of Bitcoin’s overall economic and incentive structure, the halving events are the pivotal moment that is the manifestation of Bitcoin’s deflationary stature — with its capped supply at 21…
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Tulip Mania was a flashpoint in the Dutch Golden Age, where the price of the Tulip flower soared to meteoric levels before crashing in an epic bubble of historic proportions. A scarce good at the time, Tulips sparked some of the original debates about speculative economic bubbles and what constitutes the intrinsic value of an…
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Bitcoin’s price has been undergoing some high intensity, short-term volatility over roughly the last week as the price dropped precipitously on August 28th, triggered by a large sell order on Coinbase, which is one of the 3 exchanges that feed into the critical BitMEX index mark price. Subsequently, the price violently rebounded off the lower…
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Cryptocurrency investment instruments are much more abundant than even some of the most ardent proponents could have imagined just a year ago. On the cusp of the impending entrance of institutions into the crypto markets, products from perpetual swaps offering high leverage to indexes covering lower-end altcoins, the market sophistication of crypto is maturing. One…
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Circle — the popular crypto investment app — is packing up the majority of its exchange operations and moving them to the blockchain-friendly island of Bermuda in a move that is a microcosm of the broader regulatory sentiment in the US on the crypto market. The firm announced the move in a blog post on…
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The New York Attorney General’s Office has issued a stunning press release that officially announced a court order against cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex’s parent company, iFinex, detailing violations against New York residents for alleged fraud. The allegations involve an apparent loss of $850 million by the exchange Bitfinex, that it attempted to surreptitiously cover with using…
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What was at one point the leading cryptocurrency exchange in Canada, QuadrigaCX has devolved into a tangled mess of lost user funds, creditor protection initiatives, and mystery surrounding the deceased founder and missing funds. Now, QuadrigaCX is officially transitioning into bankruptcy following a ruling by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court that transfers the exchange out…
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