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Another week, another round of Crypto Tidbits. Bitcoin saw quite the past week in terms of price action, rallying from a low of $9,100 to as high as $9,900 (a high just set hours ago as of the time of this article’s writing). The asset is up 5% in the past week, per data from Coin360.
Interestingly, unlike other weeks, other digital assets outperformed BTC in the past seven days. Ethereum, especially, saw a massive surge higher, gaining 22% as buyers finally stepped in after 2019’s brutal drawdown.
The underlying industry was just as exciting as the crypto market, with there being a confluence of developments that may excite readers.
Related Reading: Crypto Tidbits: Bitcoin Stalls Above $9,000, Andrew Yang Bumps Cryptocurrency, Japan’s Digital Currency
Bitcoin & Crypto Tidbits
- Bloomberg Analyst Bullish on Bitcoin’s 2020 Outlook: Bloomberg’s senior commodities analyst, Mike McGlone, recently revealed that he remains optimistic about Bitcoin’s prospects in 2020, calling the trend “favorable.” He wrote that “indications for the first-born crypto remain favorable in the key metric that matters for an asset where supply is increasingly limited — adoption.” McGlone, backing his sentiment that Bitcoin adoption is increasing, cited the growing number of active addresses on the network, which is an on-chain metric that many say is an indicator of investor demand:
“Address totals suggest Bitcoin is likely to sustain above $9,000, as we see it. One of the most robust indicators of the 2018 price decline and 2019 recovery — the 30-day average of Bitcoin active addresses from Coinmetrics — is the highest since July, when the price peaked at about $14,000.”
- Tron CEO Meets With Bitcoin Skeptic Warren Buffett: It was revealed that on January 23rd, Tron’s Justin Sun met with Warren Buffett, a prominent Bitcoin skeptic, for dinner in Buffett’s home town of Omaha, Nebraska. There were six attendees in total: himself, Buffett, Charlie Lee of Litecoin, Binance Charity Foundation’s Helen Hai, eToro CEO Yoni Assia, and CFO of Huobi Chris Lee. Sun gifted Buffett “his first Bitcoin” stored on a gifted Samsung Galaxy Fold (Samsung has its own blockchain wallet in some regions), two Galaxy Fold devices “with Tron built in” and with an aggregate 1,930,830 TRX ($43,000 worth), a bronze horse, and a paper cutting of a rat in celebration of Chinese New Year. While Buffett was seemingly impressed by the gifts, he affirmed his belief that Bitcoin is not yet ready to be a proper investment.
- Ethereum DeFi Hits $1 Billion: Ethereum decentralized finance ecosystem is growing much faster than that of Bitcoin. This week, the amount of capital locked in DeFi applications based on Ethereum passed $1 billion, a sum hundreds of percent higher than it was a year ago.
- Mastercard CEO Explains Why He Left Libra: Last year, Mastercard left the Libra Association, Facebook’s crypto venture, though little was known about the company’s reasoning for this dramatic move. Mastercard CEO recently revealed more about this decision, telling the Financial Times that there were risks in Libra not enforcing mandatory KYC, AML, and data management protocol, adding that the partners in the project did not put adherence to global laws into writing. He continued that Libra’s model for making money made no sense.
- BitMEX Unveils XRP Quanto Swap: On January 23rd, leading Bitcoin derivatives exchange BitMEX revealed its intent to launch a new financial product for XRP. In a blog post, the company said that this product would be a “Ripple USD quanto swap,” which will allow traders to leverage trade the cryptocurrency with leverage of up to 50x. The product launched on February 5th.
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