In brief

6 REASONS IT'S BEEN A BAD YEAR FOR BITCOIN.
In today's @Markets newsletter, I wrote about all the ways that 2020 has undermined a bunch of popular Bitcoin narratives.
https://t.co/001CaQMvIB— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) June 15, 2020
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-0.23%Reading
Bitcoin failed to take advantage of the “perfect storm” created by the coronavirus crisis, falling short of becoming “digital gold,” according to Bloomberg on Monday.
When the coronavirus pandemic began to engulf the whole world, many experts, such as Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz, argued that “Bitcoin’s moment” could be just around the corner. For a start, the US Federal Reserve was printing billions of new US dollars and inflating its supply while the new supply of Bitcoin was instead being reduced during its halving. Bitcoin was presented as a hedge against economic uncertainty, a digital version of gold and the one thing to remain resilient in a world of chaos. But per Bloomberg, Bitcoin failed at exactly that.
6 REASONS IT'S BEEN A BAD YEAR FOR BITCOIN.
In today's @Markets newsletter, I wrote about all the ways that 2020 has undermined a bunch of popular Bitcoin narratives.
https://t.co/001CaQMvIB— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) June 15, 2020
“Despite the extraordinary market volatility, it hasn't surged to new heights. In fact, it continues to make a general trend of lower highs. This takes away the argument that an economic crisis creates a boom for Bitcoin,” Bloomberg editor Joe Weisenthal wrote, in a market briefing.
He pointed to the clear correlation between the price of Bitcoin and traditional markets in the last few months. On March 12, most markets around the world crashed amid the outbreak—and Bitcoin followed suit. The price of BTC dipped twice in two days, plunging from around $9,000 to as low as $4,100. Then, as the market recovered, so did Bitcoin.
“This undermines the argument that Bitcoin has good portfolio diversification properties,” he said.
One of the biggest arguments for Bitcoin is that it has a fixed inflation rate that decreases over time until it effectively goes to zero. It is often contrasted against fiat currencies, like the US dollar, which have high inflation rates—and in some cases, hyperinflation.
A symbolic moment of Bitcoin’s alternative (and fixed) monetary policy was its recent halving, when the new supply of Bitcoin was cut in half. This is a process that occurs every four years. But it failed to stimulate a price rally in the near term.
The Bitcoin halving, one of the most anticipated events in the crypto world, finally happened today at 19:23 UTC by AntPool. Miners who support the most valuable and revered blockchain network in the cryptocurrency ecosystem will now earn half as much as they used to, 6.25 BTC per block, just as Satoshi Nakamoto designed. Today’s milestone occurred when the 630,000th block was mined, triggering a 50% reduction in the reward miners receive. Miners will now receive only half as much Bitcoin per b...
“The Bitcoin halving (a slowing of new supply) which many Bitcoiners championed as a likely catalyst for a move higher came and went without much impact,” said Weisenthal.
“The Fed has engaged in extraordinary balance sheet expansion, and governments around the world are running major deficits, and it hasn't led to the kind of inflation or currency collapse that many Bitcoiners would have predicted. So that undermines some of the popular stories about what would catalyze a Bitcoin boom,” he added.
Worse, Bitcoin fever is moving back into traditional stocks. While the ICO boom was characterized by retail investors ploughing into speculative cryptocurrencies, it has largely died out (with the SEC cracking down heavily on ICOs). And now, modern apps like Robinhood are making it much easier for retail investors to get involved in stocks and shares much more easily.
“Young people are discovering the stock market via platforms like Robinhood. So to the degree that people were putting money into Bitcoin because they liked volatility and action, there's a new competitor on the block for those dollars,” he said.
Does that make stocks the new Bitcoin?
For years, airdrops have been a staple of on-chain engagement. For many users though, they’ve often been hard to access, heavily gamified, or skewed towards large traders. Gate Alpha is looking to change that. Gate’s newly upgraded incentive model has seen the crypto exchange distribute more than $800,000 worth of rewards to over 100,000 users, through a 33-day event that users could take part in with as little as a single 0.5 USDT trade. Billed as the first large-scale user incentive campaign s...
The first exchange-traded fund offering investors exposure to Solana in the U.S. generated $12 million worth of investments in its Wall Street debut on Wednesday, a REX Shares and Osprey Funds spokesperson told Decrypt The Rex-Osprey Solana + Staking ETF, which also offers investors yield by staking at least half of the fund’s assets—another first for U.S. markets—registered $33.6 million in trading volume, per Nasdaq data. “[The ETF’s] day 1 trading volume was 82% less than what one would’ve ex...
Shares of publicly traded Solana treasury company DeFi Development Corporation finished the trading day down following word that the company upsized its latest convertible notes offering to $112 million. The firm first announced a new convertible notes raise of $100 million on Tuesday before boosting it to $112 million Wednesday, with an option for initial note purchasers to add a further $25 million in the next seven days. The bulk of the net proceeds from this raise will be used for a prepai...