For the fourth and final entry in our year-end review-cum-listicle experience, we’re looking at September through December, which saw institutional investors flooding into Bitcoin, propelling the price to new all-time highs. Meanwhile, Ethereum 2.0 launched, and digital artist Beeple became the doyen of the crypto art world, raising $3.5 million in a series of NFT sales.
PayPal announced in October that it would soon begin accepting cryptocurrencies, and enabling crypto transactions for all of its merchants. Its crypto service went live in the US in November, though it comes with some pretty significant caveats.
The most glaring of these is that crypto is never actually exchanged between the buyer and the merchant. PayPal actually converts your crypto to fiat at the moment it’s transacted, which is what the merchant ends up receiving.
Also, you can only pay for things with crypto you’ve bought within the app, and can’t transfer your coins out to other wallets. Still—this was a big moment, with potential long-term consequences for crypto adoption.
Institutional Investments Pile Up
October-December
Michael Saylor’s tech company MicroStrategy, which invested $250 million in Bitcoin in August, poured another $175 into the asset in September, and $50 million more in December.
More important than Square investing $50mm in #Bitcoin is sharing how we did it (so others can do the same): https://t.co/35ABYHuz4f
Square, led by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (a longtime Bitcoin proponent), invested $50 million in Bitcoin in October. And MassMutual dropped $100 million on Bitcoin through NYDIG, a prominent crypto shop.
Wall Street Influencers Cheer
October-December
Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, erstwhile Soros money manager Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones, and Mike Novogratz were among crypto’s wealthiest proponents this year; the number of bullish comments they made felt roughly proportional to the success of Bitcoin, which may explain why they all spoke out this fall.
Bitcoin Takes Off
October-December
Bitcoin, which started the year at around $7,000, had by the end of October reached the high $13,000s. By the end of November, it had broken its previous all-time high of $19,783.
While some traders have worried about the possibility of a bubble, or a crash like the one that followed Bitcoin’s previous all-time high, analysts have said that the market looks much stronger this time around.
Potential contributing factors include COVID-induced fiscal stimulus, which saw central banks turn on the "money printer", as well as those large institutional investments from the likes of MicroStrategy and Square.
That the pandemic has deemphasized physical cash in favor of digital payments has been another boon for crypto—fuel for the fire of Bitcoin’s 2020 bull run.
Efforce's stated aim is to enable people to invest in energy efficiency projects by "acquiring tokenized future savings."
Driven in part by name recognition, WOZX promptly shot up in value to highs of $2.77, before settling back to its current price of around $1.60.
Bitcoin Goes to Washington
December 7
Joe Biden defeated the incumbent Donald Trump in one of the most consequential presidential elections in the modern history of the US. It gave the majority of Americans what they wanted four years ago, even as Democrats performed somewhat worse than expected down-ballot.
If you checked United States Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s Twitter account on July 15, you would’ve seen a rather surprising message from the former Vice President, now President-elect. Not only was his account tweeting about Bitcoin, it offered to double any amount sent to the specified account within 30 minutes as a way of “giving back to the community.”
The offer—and the tweet—were the work of hackers who’d broken into Biden’s account, along with those of 130 other prominent public figur...
Biden has already said he’s tapping Gary Gensler, a Bitcoin-minded ex-Goldman executive and progressive regulator, to handle Wall Street oversight. It’s a sign that the incoming administration could clear the (low) bar set by Trump in the realm of crypto legislation.
Digital Artist Beeple Makes $3.5 Million on NFTs
December 11-13
Beeple, a digital artist, capitalized on percolating public fascination with NFTs in a massive multi-day art sale that raised $3.5 million. He made almost $600,000 of that in the first five minutes, and, later, $777,777 on a single NFT.
The Russian Ministry of Energy is considering offering its now strictly regulated Bitcoin mining industry incentives to move to the north of the country.
The move follows Russia slapping a Bitcoin mining ban on ten regions (mainly in the south) in January of this year: Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, North Ossetia, Chechnya, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson.
Russia to Ban Crypto Mining 'In Some Regions' Due to Electricity Shortages
The ban is set to rema...
Kraken will soon offer overseas customers the ability to trade U.S.-listed stocks through the crypto exchange’s platform, the company said in a press release on Thursday.
The offering, which covers more than 50 U.S.-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds, will be facilitated through a partnership with Backed, a firm specializing in tokenized securities, using the Solana blockchain to offer so-called xStocks, the company said.
Tokenization refers to the process of taking real-world assets, wheth...
Managing a crypto portfolio is a complicated business—unnecessarily so, according to Glider Co-Founder Brian Huang.
“We need to get to a point where we can say, ‘Hey, Mom, do you want to participate in this?’” he told Decrypt. “We spend a lot of time on this at Glider: how can we make the barrier to entry so low that anybody could do it?”
Glider is designed to enable users to “come to the platform with any trading idea,” Huang said, “and what we do is we automate that whole process for you. So...
