Outlier Ventures Daily Brief
Issue #16- Reasons for the bullish trend in Bitcoin, banks positioning their private ledgers against public ones & an interesting list of token related definitions.
Bitcoin set a new all time high while you were away. When looking back over the last few weeks of updates, a clear theme that emerges is the professionalisation of the industry. All of the news stories are about Governments, Corporates and the Media paying real attention to the crypto community. While there are indeed scams out there and eye-popping valuations; the industry is maturing quickly. It’s a very exciting time to be involved in the industry!
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1. Bitcoin sets new ATH at $8000 😳
$8000 Bitcoin is here. Investors have turned bullish about the token with Segwit 2x fork being called off, Square’s Cash now allowing you to buy Bitcoins instantly & CME Group’s bitcoin futures being available as early as December 10th. Bitcoin’s price has been in a constant uptick since the beginning of the year. Part of the reason is renewed retail investor interest in the space. Coinbase, a prominent American exchange alone sees over a million new users each month. In addition, anticipation of traditional money into the ecosystem has been fuelling speculation amongst a high number of buyers. We are only a 25% increase away from seeing bitcoin valued in over 5 figures. Even though individuals have been calling the rise in the price of cryptocurrencies a bubble, the arrival of services like Coinbase Custody only indicates the possibility of an increase in institutional, large sized investments into tokens. We are going mainstream, so strap in!
2. UBS Prefers Blockchains Over Bitcoin 🙄
Mark Haefele of UBS group stated in a recent interview that the bank would not be taking any position in Bitcoin. He further added that the market-cap of all cryptocurrencies combined is not even the size of some of the smaller currencies UBS allocates funds towards. His concerns stemmed from the fact that the risk in these currencies could not be easily quantifiable by the firm. This comes at a time when over 120 hedge funds stand in the sidelines waiting to take positions in the space next year. Statements like these from banks further shed light on the divide between public blockchains and the banking sector’s desires to capture the market with private, permissioned ledgers. UBS for instance has been developing a trade finance platform in collaboration with Hyperledger. As bearish as these statements seem, the bank has been advising its clientele to invest in companies actively building infrastructure for the blockchain era. Catch up on their official report on cryptocurrency here. The public versus private blockchain story has plenty of mileage in it, yet.
3. 100 Tokens Explained In 4 Words Or Less 👽
I am tempted to leave a 4 word description for this section, but oh well. A recent article by Techcrunch breaks down the top 100 cryptocurrencies on basis of market-cap into simple jargon-free 4 worded definitions. The definitions vary from “Madoff-like investment fund” to “Decentralised Netflix” and show the extent of innovation (and lack of) in the space. Inspired by Greg Wilson’s latest post in Medium explaining what Google cloud offers, the list by Techcrunch is an easy for new entrants in the space to quickly refer to understand what a token does. It’s actually a very good summary and useful for beginners to the industry. Catch up on the entirety of the list here.
4. Indian Banks To Soon Deploy Blockchain based AML/KYC Solutions 🙏
State Bank of India (SBI) will be integrating smart contract enabled ledgers into its operations by as early as next month. Stemmed out of a consortium of 27 banks named Bankchain, the primary initiative would include banks leveraging AML and KYC solutions atop blockchains to reduce the occurrence of fraud and account verification times. Constrained with limited resources & faced by an ever-increasing customer base owing to the population in the region, banks have been increasingly relying on technology to assist with operations. India has been warming up to blockchains since over a year. A recent project named IndiaChain aims to bring lending & identity-related solutions to the blockchain. However, all is not well in the democratic republic of over 1.2 billion people. Increasing number of individuals have been losing money to fraudulent investments touted as blockchain projects. The Supreme court has prodded the government to create regulations around tokens at the earliest to handle the same. Emerging markets are always touted as the regions we are likely to see blockchain adoption first because of the leapfrogging theory so it’s worth keeping an eye on Indian progress.
