Bitcoin Below $50,000 | Venmo Goes Crypto

BITCOIN’S RETREAT

Following Coinbase’s flashy public debut, the cryptocurrency market had quite a rough week. After blackouts in China led to massive declines in bitcoin’s mining rates—tanking prices and spurring billions of dollars in liquidations—the market plummeted early Sunday by about $310 billion in less than 24 hours, shrinking from more than $2.2 trillion to less than $1.9 trillion. Halfway through the week, bitcoin (BTC), the world’s largest cryptocurrency, was hovering around $55,000.

Early Friday morning, BTC plunged below $48,000, with some attributing it to investor jitters over President Biden’s plan to nearly double capital gains taxes for the wealthy. As of 7:48 a.m. ET, bitcoin had recovered some of those losses and climbed to $49,771 per coin, with market cap losses of about $93 billion. Other popular cryptocurrencies followed suit on Friday, with ether paring 12% losses overnight down to about 8% by 8:00 a.m. and Ripple’s XRP paring 18% losses back to about 11%. One investment manager has cautioned bitcoin is “very frothy” and could pull back to the $20,000-$30,000 price level.

VENMO JOINS THE GAME

Venmo became the latest payment app to embrace cryptocurrency this week, joining the ranks of payment service providers PayPal (Venmo’s parent company) and Square, which are taking crypto mainstream. Like PayPal, which began offering cryptocurrency services late last year and has since expanded to allow its use for merchant payments, Venmo will support four popular cryptocurrencies: bitcoin, ether, litecoin and bitcoin cash. The feature was launched on Tuesday, but it will take the company a “few weeks” to extend the offering to all of its 70 million users.

The Venmo app will let the customers get started with “as little as $1,” and display the purchases on the in-app social feed. Venmo has also created a series of educational videos to explain some of the basic concepts behind crypto and blockchain on its website and within the app.

DOGEDAY WAS A DUD

Did you know that April 20 is now known not only as “the Weed day” but also the “Dogeday?” The unofficial holiday is celebrated by hodlers of the meme-based cryptocurrency dogecoin, which has been briefly propelled into the cryptocurrency top five with a mind-boggling market capitalization in the tens of billions of dollars and passed the market caps of Barclays and ING among others—largely thanks to Tesla chief Elon Musk, who has been actively promoting it on Twitter.

Since the beginning of the broad bitcoin and crypto bull run in October last year, the price of dogecoin had surged a staggering 15,000% to $0.40 as of the beginning of the week, so the dogecoiners’ community was hoping April 20 could see the cryptocurrency reach the lofty high of $1. By late afternoon that day, however, DOGE was down 28% falling below $0.30. As of Friday morning, it is trading at $0.23.

CRYPTO TASK FORCE ON THE WAY?

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill called the ‘‘Eliminate Barriers to Innovation Act of 2021.” If passed by the Senate and enacted into law, it would create a working group between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to work out regulatory frameworks for digital assets, the first task force of this kind in the U.S. Within one year, the coworking group would also have to examine the impact of the existing regulatory regime on the United States’ competitiveness versus other countries and issue a handful of recommendations and standards for the market.

BLOCKCHAIN 50 SPOTLIGHT

China’s search giant Baidu and its fintech venture Du Xiaoman Financial have introduced more than 20 blockchain solutions, including Libra Chain, a blockchain-based electronic evidence platform serving as the infrastructure for China’s three internet courts: Beijing Internet Court, Guangzhou Internet Court and Qingdao Arbitration Commission. Established to handle internet-related cases such as copyright and e-commerce disputes, these courts enable fully virtual litigation processes. To date, more than 35 million pieces of electronic evidence have been filed at the Beijing Internet Court.

ELSEWHERE

 
Cryptocurrency Giant Binance.US Hires Former Top Bank Regulator [The Wall Street Journal]

Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital Said to Be in Talks to Buy Crypto Custodian BitGo [CoinDesk]

WeWork will accept crypto as payment and hold digital currency on its balance sheet [Markets Insider]

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