First Bitcoin ETF, Ethereum, Matic and Metaverse — Part I

Interesting trends lead by a new generation — [October 2021]

Lai Woen Yon

Follow

Published in

Coinmonks

8 min readNov 4, 2021

--

October is jam-packed with exciting events. I’ll be sharing some updates about my holdings.

Table of Content

→ A new catalyst for Palantir — $800 million Army contract

Palantir

The next quarterly report is due on November 9th 2021.

Foundry for Builders was launched by Palantir in July of this year. Earlier this month, Palantir announced a new cohort of participants for its initiative. This effort aims to help early-stage companies establish a centralized operating system for their data in an easy and less expensive manner, thereby strengthening their unique value proposition.

“ Palantir Foundry is offered as fully managed SaaS and provides an end-to-end platform that spans from cloud hosting and data integration to flexible analytics, visualization, model-building, operational decision-making, and decision capture. Having these capabilities as part of a single platform eliminates friction and protects against the loss of data history, security, and privacy as users move across siloed technologies.” — businesswire.com

Their business model involves expanding from large corporations to smaller, hyper-growth companies. The company initially works only with companies connected to its alumni. Now the initiative is slowly expanding to other early-stage companies as well. I think this is a wise move from Palantir. In the face of stiff competition from other consumer-oriented data platform providers such as Verint, a SaaS company that works with more than 85% of Fortune 100 companies, it must find ways to grow its consumer offerings. Taking the time to grow with the start-ups is much easier than trying to convince the larger companies to move their data.

A new catalyst for Palantir — $800 million Army contract

Palantir has been awarded an $823 million contract by the US Army, which is part of its effort to modernize legacy battlefield intelligence systems. As a result of this acquisition, Palantir will assist the Army in delivering a worldwide data fabric for intelligence, enabling the service to distribute intelligence data globally.

What is data fabric ?
A data fabric is an architecture and set of data services that provide consistent capabilities across a choice of endpoints spanning hybrid multicloud environments. It is a powerful architecture that standardizes data management practices and practicalities across cloud, on premises, and edge devices. Among the many advantages that a data fabric affords, data visibility and insights, data access and control, data protection, and security quickly rise to the top. — netapp.com

Simply put, soldiers will have access to timely intelligence gathered by an exponentially growing number of sensors and national intelligence agencies. As the government funds currently make up nearly two thirds of Palantir’s business, this contract will undoubtedly expand Palantir’s biggest growth engine even further.

Cryptocurrency

I am diversifying my portfolio by holding several cryptos this year. As a result of the bull run in major coins, I was able to balance the losses on the rest of the US stocks.

First Bitcoin ETF Approval

There are already several legal Cryptocurrency exchanges around the world which allow investors to directly invest in Bitcoin. However, the BITO Bitcoin ETF offers low ownership costs to traditional investors who used to invest through traditional investment brokerages such as Fidelity and Vanguard. It is interesting to note that most people believe that an ETF like this holds Bitcoin directly. That is not true. Instead, it holds Bitcoin future contracts.

ETF data, analytics, and education, for when you need to decide.

Need some focus in all the ETF noise? See how Trackinsight can help you make better investment decisions.

www.trackinsight.com

As a result, ETF investors are subject to management fees and also have to bear the costs associated with rolling into futures contracts whenever their contracts expire. Comparatively, this results in lower performance when trading the underlying assets. In terms of price movement, this was good news for most Bitcoin investors, since it increased the trading volume. In the future, I believe that more companies will join Proshare and offer their own bitcoin ETF, which will probably further stabilize the crypto market.

ETH — Matic — NFTs

Image from https://polygon.technology/brand-resources/

As some of you know, I am a strong believer in Ethereum and Matic (now called Polygon, it is an Ethereum token that fuels the Polygon Network). The recent boom in NFT market has made me more confident in ETH and Matic than ever before, so why is it?

First, let’s see how Matic relates to Eth. It is widely known that Ethereum hopes to be the internet of blockchains with ETH 2.0. However, the upgrade to ETH 2.0 could take years due to internal team conflict and not because of technical difficulty as Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, pointed out. In the face of competition from Polkadot and Chainlink, Ethereum launched Matic network, a scaling solution, which has since become Polygon. Ethereum’s features and core protocol layer are now accessible to countless blockchains and decentralized applications without being bound by Ethereum’s slow transaction times and exorbitant gas fees. Furthermore, Polygon has launched their SDK (currently in beta) and Protocol which, when combined with Ethereum’s security, make it easy to deploy highly secure and scalable blockchains. AAVE and Curve Finance are two other major platforms that have ported their protocols over to the Matic sidechain. In this way, end users can use DeFi without having to pay high gas fees in exchange for ETH.

We now have a better understanding of Matic. Can the growth of Matic and ETH be attributed to the surge of interest in NFT? As I wouldn’t want to spend time explaining what NFTs are, I’ll leave a link here so you can learn more about it if you’re interested.

People are spending millions on NFTs. What? Why?

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have been A Thing for a while now, but what's the meaning of "NFT"? A couple of…

www.theverge.com

NFTs are used most commonly in the arts. Digital certificates of authenticity are provided to the buyer once the digital artwork is purchased. DappRadar, an analytics platform, reports that Opensea has a total trade volume of over $6.5 billion, making it the largest NFT marketplace by far. Since July 2021, Opensea has been integrating Polygon POS into blockchain support, allowing its users to conduct transactions faster and cheaper. According to its official website, OpenSea accounts for just 1.5 percent of Ethereum’s volume. This means that the room for growth is still very high. Additionally, due to Polygon’s low gas transaction fee, it might overtake its sibling’s popularity in the future. Therefore, as interest in NFTs continues to rise, I believe that Matic and Ethereum will become more valuable in the near future.

**Monthly Volume has maintained on Ethereum NFTs on OpenSea. Image from** https://dune.xyz/queries/3469/6913

**Monthly Volume has maintained on Polygon NFTs on OpenSea. Image from** https://dune.xyz/queries/130812/257532

Metaverse

The name of Facebook has recently been changed to Meta, which aims to bring the metaverse to life. Cryptos with a Metaverse focus, such as Mana, have also soared as a result of the name change. Despite Mana gaining traction among investors, many people may not know that Polygon has been supporting a metaverse platform — The Sandbox — since June. Because of better user experience and reduced carbon footprint, the platform migrated the entire NFT system to the polygon blockchain. In a recent announcement, the company announced it had raised US$93 million in Series B funds led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. A growing economy in the metaverse will boost the utility of the polygon blockchain, as well as its native currency Matic, resulting in massive price rises for the tokens. Also, the issuance of Ether will continue to drop as ETH gets burned. As a result, Ethereum users and Ether holders will benefit from the emergence of a decentralized metaverse.

Image from https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic/status/1456091349745295362/photo/1

Part II

My reasons for being bullish on Palantir and some cryptocurrencies I am currently holding are explained above. I have yet to clarify my reasons for holding coins such as Shiba Inu and Ada. The next part will explain my outlook for the Chinese market in Q4 and why I believe investing in Shiba Inu and Ada now may be a smart move.

Follow me on Medium and stay tuned for my second part of analysis.

About the Author

Woen Yon is a Data Scientist based in Singapore. His experience includes developing advanced artificial intelligence products for several multinational enterprises.

Woen Yon works with a handful of smart people to offer web solutions including web crawling services and website development for local and international start-up business owners. They are well aware of the challenges of building quality software. Please do not hesitate to drop him an email at wushulai@live.com if you need assistance.

He loves making friends! Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn and Medium

Lai Woen Yon - Medium

Read writing from Lai Woen Yon on Medium. Data Scientist, TDS contributing writer. I love making friends from all…

medium.com

Reference

Join Coinmonks Telegram Channel and Youtube Channel learn about crypto trading and investing

First Bitcoin ETF, Ethereum, Matic and Metaverse — Part I

Interesting trends lead by a new generation — [October 2021]

Table of Content

Palantir

→ A new catalyst for Palantir — $800 million Army contract

Cryptocurrency

→ First Bitcoin ETF Approval

→ ETH — Matic — NFTs

→ Metaverse

Palantir

A new catalyst for Palantir — $800 million Army contract

Cryptocurrency

First Bitcoin ETF Approval

ETF data, analytics, and education, for when you need to decide.

Need some focus in all the ETF noise? See how Trackinsight can help you make better investment decisions.

ETH — Matic — NFTs

People are spending millions on NFTs. What? Why?

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have been A Thing for a while now, but what's the meaning of "NFT"? A couple of…

Metaverse

Part II

About the Author

Lai Woen Yon - Medium

Read writing from Lai Woen Yon on Medium. Data Scientist, TDS contributing writer. I love making friends from all…

Reference

Also, Read

Written by Lai Woen Yon