Beyond digital gold: unlocking the true value of bitcoin December 11, 2020 Digital gold has gone mainstream. JP Morgan, BlackRock and the biggest names in global finance are now echoing the cypherpunks and suggesting that Bitcoin could replace the yellow metal as a safe haven in investment portfolios. But while Bitcoin does share characteristics with gold, a big reason why the digital gold narrative has found so [...]
From Crypto to Tokens. The Great Migration December 1, 2020 My journey to crypto was not direct. I’d spent 20 years working for traditional banking houses, trading foreign exchange for Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and others. The high points in my career came during the most chaotic times, managing trading books through devaluations in Asia, Latin America and Iceland. I spent my first career studying [...]
Solving the crypto-fiat conundrum: how banks can offer a premium and trusted crypto-fiat service November 30, 2020 PayPal recently announced that it will enable US users to buy and sell crypto currencies in early 2021. This has immediately fueled the interest of traditional banks in the cryptocurrency market, convincing many that it is simply impossible to ignore the record-high investor interest in digital assets. Financial institutions see the hunger for legal crypto [...]
Ethereum 2 goes LIVE November 24, 2020 The 1st of December 2020 at 12pm UTC has been selected as the exact moment when the Ethereum 2 beacon chain can go live – but there are conditions to be met first. One of these is that there must be 16,384 validators, each putting up a stake of 32 ETH. That is a total [...]
How central bankers see the prospects for digicurrencies November 17, 2020 Last week three of the world’s central bankers met for an online European Central Bank Forum: BoE Governor Andrew Bailey, ECB President Christine Lagarde, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Their opinions will affect policy for the near-term—policies that determine inflation, interest rates, economic activity, the sales your company makes and the salaries or raises you [...]
What grassroots use of Bitcoin could mean for liquidity October 29, 2020 The road to the recent announcement from PayPal goes back 10 years. 2010 famously saw the first recorded commercial transaction of Bitcoin when a user spent 10,000 BTC on pizza. Pizza is delicious, but we would all be kicking ourselves for exchanging what is currently worth $130 million on 2 pizzas. This is now celebrated [...]
Where is the Institutional Money? October 22, 2020 For over a decade now, we have seen the growth and development of digital assets. Some have been highly successful in terms of increasing their value and use (for example Bitcoin and Ethereum) whilst many have been less successful. What is clear is the lack of institutional capital, compared to other tradable assets, that has [...]
CryptoAM.io goes DeDays and together create “The Mallorca Roundtable” September 29, 2020 Over the course of the past nine months, we have seen many things grow: fear, uncertainty, doubt and the number of bankruptcies, especially in hospitality. I myself was impacted by this loss in business and am still working on saving the remains of a great idea that was the Craft Coin Company which still holds [...]
Ethereum: A New Financial Network September 29, 2020 “The greatest risk is in not looking, not seeking to understand” — Christine Lagarde If we are to understand the financial services innovation brought forth by blockchain (a form of Distributed Ledger Technology) we first must comprehend the architecture behind our current banking and financial services industry. As of today, the industry consists of centralised service providers [...]
Protokol launches to lower the barriers to entry for enterprise blockchain adoption September 23, 2020 Following Crypto AM’s piece on new enterprise blockchain provider Protokol last month, the business is fully launching to the enterprise market today. Protokol creates and delivers tailored blockchain solutions that solve real business challenges quickly and effectively, enabling enterprises from a range of different industries to enhance their digital transformation strategies and open up new [...]
