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French Lawmakers Petition to Allow Central Bank to Buy and Hold Cryptocurrency |
Jean-Michel Mis, a member of the French National Assembly, announced in a tweet Friday that he has signed a petition to amend the laws to enable the central bank of France to buy and hold Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies. The petition looks to grab the attention of lawmakers, warning that "not owning bitcoin will put France in a financially weak position within 5-10 years.”
The petition was started on March 5th by Francois-Xavier Thoorens, a president of a blockchain development firm in france. The petition will reside on the French Senate's e-petitions platform where it can be signed until September 5th. If it gets a minimum of 100,000 signatures within 6 months, then it is moved along to the Conference of Presidents, which debates and decides if the petition is worth pursuing. So far, only 742 people have signed at the time of writing.
Mr. Thoorens reason that the petition is needed because "the risk of a weak dollar over the next 5 years destroying medium-term financing capacities." According to the peititon, not owning bitcoin will put France in a financially weak position within 5-10 years stating that it cannot decently remain as an observer of a race which has already started. Thoorens emphasizes the urgent need for France to adopt a cryptocurrency strategy, writing I, therefore, propose an update of the monetary and financial code to endow the Banque de France with the capacity to buy, sell and hold bitcoins and other crypto assets.” The strategy would need lawmakers to deliberately create a sustainable crypto-asset holding ratio amongst other things.
This news comes at a pivotal time for both corporate and public cryptocurrency adoption. Unless you live under a rock, you would have seen mainstream corporations like Microstrategy and Tesla (used as examples in the petition) adopt bitcoin into their treasuries as a hedge against inflation - a reoccurring theme since late 2020. Political policy wise, you seeing USA politicians become somewhat 'neutral', a win in most books ,the mayor of Miami & candidate for New York welcome crypto into their international hubs. And just recently, India announcing the ban of all crypto. Therefore, seeing a lawmaker from a G10 country petition to bring cryptocurrency into Frances national reserve is more than welcomed, it could be the start of something big.
To put it in perspective, the Banque de France has over €1.7 Trillion in assets, thats more than $2.06 trillion. €120.6 billion of that is in gold. If France, and some of the other richer nations, were to adopt bitcoin into these reservers than the 'tidal-wave of institutional money' pouring into the market recently is just the start.
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Morgan Stanley Allows Select Clients Access To Bitcoin |
Last week, Morgan Stanley became the “first big U.S. bank to offer its wealth management clients access to bitcoin funds.” Clients can likely make investments as early as next month, after the bank’s financial advisors complete training courses tied to the new offerings.
This fund is a brand new offering to the US market. Unlike JP Morgan's "crypto exposure basket" (which only invests in companies that have high exposure to Bitcoin) or Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust, Morgan Stanley is allowing their customer's direct exposure to the actual underlying asset.
With that said, this announcement comes with some major caveats and restrictions:
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Wealthy Only - The fund will only be available to Morgan Stanley's wealthiest clients. Individual investors must have over $2 million in assets invested with the company, and corporations must have over $5 million.
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Small Percentages - Moreover, if you meet the previous restriction, you are still only allowed to allocate 2.5% of your portfolio to Bitcoin
While these strict guidelines were most likely a necessary evil in order to get regulatory and compliance approval on the fund, they remind us of the importance of the ideals that built the crypto industry: fair, inclusive, permissionless, public markets. Bitcoin was built to be a free and permissionless settlement network, which is why it feels almost violating for these services only to be offered to the most wealthy. Nonetheless, retail Bitcoin investors have had the opportunity to front-run institutional investors for over a decade, so maybe it is finally time to give them a piece of the action.
Either way, this fund will allow Ultra-High Networth investors the ability to get direct exposure to Bitcoin. Something that was previously not possible in the US given that there is still no approved ETF. That said, whether you are a zanother group of investors, and that is something we can all cheer for.
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OpenSea Closes $23M Funding Rounds, Lead by a16z |
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With the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) craze full-steam ahead, one of it's most known marketplaces - OpenSea - has raised $23M. The round was led by a16z, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that's known for backing bold entrepreneurs in the blockchain & tech space. There was additional participation by many angel investors and leaders, such as Naval Ravikant, Mark Cuban, and Tim Ferris.
With over 20 million NFTs spawning 200 categories, OpenSea claims to be the largest 'Catch All' NFT Marketplace. DappRadar calls OpenSea "the eBay on the blockchain". Users visit the site to buy VR, trading cards, legendary CryptoKitties & CryptoPunks, virtual real-estate, and much more. Several other NFT Marketplaces operate on OpenSea, such as Decentraland, Rarible, and Axie Infinity. Buyers and sellers conduct transactions using ether and the sites sales volume is growing exponentially; more than 100 times over the last six months.
The funding round was announced Thursday on both Opensea & a16z's blog. "When we raised our second crypto fund last year, part of our core thesis was that crypto and NFTs would catalyze new business models for creators", states Katie Haun from a16z. "OpenSea provides the link between the consumer layer and the infrastructure layer for the digital goods economy and is a key utility in this new world of digital ownership," she adds.
Haun also explains theres more OpenSea aside from phenomenal growth. The founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah, CEO & CTO respectively, "can only be described as all-star." The pair boast an impressive resume, previously founding some well-known tech startups. OpenSea didn't comment on it's next steps with funds in hand, but they're motto "build an ocean, not an aquarium" gives an idea of the scalability this company looks to achieve.
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Bitcoin From a 10,000ft View |
This week for our Bitcoin segment, we decided to do things a bit differently. To put this bull run into perspective. We wanted to take a step back and look at Bitcoin's past market cycles in order to get a better picture of how far along we are in this bull run. Bitcoin has seen a head-spinning 5x in the last 6 months, and while it may be easy to believe "Bitcoin only goes up" as investors, we must step back and realize this is simply not the case.
In the chart above, we looked at Bitcoin's price history for the entirety of its history. We can see that Bitcoin moves in cycles, and as the market has gotten more mature, those cycles have been getting longer and longer.
Bull Market 1: ~ 1 year (+100,000%)
Bull Market 2: ~ 2 years (+58,000%)
Bull Market 3: ~ 3 years (+14,000%)
Bull Market 4: ~ 4 years ?
We can see by this pattern, Bitcoin's bull runs seem to be expanding, however, if this trend held true, we would still have roughly 18 months left in the bull run. However, we have grown so fast that the Bitcoin price is already getting close to the upper band of its exponential growth curve. Therefore, while we do not think we are even close to the end of this bull market, we do recognize the possibility of a short-term correction before pushing up to new (six-figure) heights.
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Alt-Coins In No Trend Scenario |
Alt-coin dominance has not made a decisive move in one direction or another in nearly two months. Dominance for alt-coins remains in a range between 35-40%. Over the past week, we did see a slight movement towards the alt-coin market as it was able to claw back 2% market-share from Bitcoin.
If our theory about Bitcoin (above) holds true, we suspect the alt-coin dominance is far from reaching its peak during this cycle. If we suspect this bull cycle to last another ~18 months, we expect the real volatile moves in alt-coin dominance will happen in the latter half of that timeframe. This is suspected because when there is hysteria in the cryptocurrency space, retail investors flock into low-cap coins hoping for life-changing returns. Sometimes weeks in the cryptocurrency space can feel like years, and while sideways movements like this can sometimes feel like an eternity, those who are patient and discipline will see their reward once the market heats up again.
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Swipe is a decentralized finance app comprised of a multi-asset digital wallet, instant token exchanges, buy and sell capability as well as a virtual debit card allowing users to spend crypto as if it were cash. Swipe Token (SXP) is a utility-based cryptocurrency designed to be the gas and fuel of the Swipe Network. Swipe has partnered with major players in traditional finance like Visa, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, as well as crypto security partners Coinbase Custody and BitGo. Swipe is currently trading roughly 85% down from its all-time high versus Bitcoin but is showing strong bullish momentum over the past month.
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Yearn Finance has quickly become one of the Blue Chip tokens in DeFi and has even been called "The Bitcoin of DeFi" by some. Yearn is a protocol for capital allocation. It coordinates capital allocation by incentivizing capital providers with the highest possible yields while incentivizing capital allocators (i.e. “strategists”) with the highest possible AUM to allocate. Yearn's founder and lead developer, Andre Cronje is also widely considered to be one of the best developers in the DeFi space. With a total supply of only 30,000 tokens and a fair launch, the tokenomics of Yearn's governance token are extremely bullish.
YFI is currently trading 85% down from its all-time high versus Bitcoin. It has found support on a previous horizontal level and may be ready for a trend reversal after its consolidation. For more info on Yearn Finance, read The Theory of the Yearn, by Massari.
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We at CryptoWeekly are not Financial Advisors. None of the content or opinions expressed in this newsletter should be considered financial advice. We highly recommend that you do your own research before investing in any project within or outside the cryptocurrency space. |
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