READ MY PREVIOUS POST “ETHEREUM THE FUTURE IS NOW”
According to google search data, Ethereum interest hit an all time high!
Ethereum Far Outpaces Bitcoin in Developer Activity in 2020: Electric Capital Report
Almost 2,300 average monthly developers worked on Ethereum across the third quarter of 2020, with Bitcoin in second at a bit under 400.
Some of the smartest people in the world are building on Ethereum
ETH 2.0 Is Underway
The years-long upgrade of Ethereum, the world’s largest smart-contract platform, went live on Dec. 1.
The first phase of development for Ethereum 2.0 is centered on the creation of a separate proof-of-stake blockchain network called the Beacon Chain.
- On the Beacon Chain, ether holders with a minimum of 32 ETH can earn rewards in the form of annualized interest on their holdings. (CoinDesk is among those staked in Eth 2.0.) Using Kraken to stake can yield as much as 17%.
According to ETHERSCAN $5,443,954,871.04 (@ $1,790.34/ETH) has been locked up for staking. Which means supply is taken off the market.
DeFi Continues to Grow
DeFi Pulse shows the Total Value locked in Decentralized Finance Apps is pushing $40 Billion.
Earnst and Young’s Global Blockchain Leader, Paul Brody, predicts financial institutions will bring decentralized finance (DeFi) to a consumer audience in this year.
“If I had to make a bold prediction, I think by the end of 2021 at least one major financial institution will up the game on everybody else by offering some form of consumer DeFi, accessible through their single transactional window to a large consumer base.”
EY’s blockchain team is always talking to banks and enterprise players, said Brody, and large companies are seeing things like Square’s published bitcoin numbers for its Cash App (growing at 700% per annum), and they want a piece.
WSB Wants to Tear Down the Old Financial System; DeFi Wants to Build a New One
DeFi is, at its core, open, non-custodial, transparent, and decentralized. Its exchanges cannot be shut down, and hence cannot be subjected to intermediation. That’s not the case in traditional stock markets as the WSB frenzy served up one more example after another of the dangers of centralization.
Nasdaq CEO, Adena Friedman said on CNBC yesterday that the stock exchange, upon seeing “unusual trading activity” would “potentially halt that stock to allow ourselves to investigate the situation, to be able to engage with the company, and to give investors a chance to recalibrate their positions.”
“Robinhood was down for 2 hrs; TD Ameritrade has placed restrictions on GME trades; Trading 212 had disrupted service; Regulators suggested a 30-day GME halt” Nick Chong of ParaFi Capital.
Additionally, as has been documented, Robinhood sells data to high-frequency trading firms, allowing them to front-run the market. This means that while some institutions are in the limelight and at the brink of bankruptcy due to WSB’s buying, still others are profiting on the short squeeze.
Solution:
Digital assets in decentralized finance trade on permissionless protocols. There is no entity who can single handedly limit their access.
Injective Launches Decentralized Stock Exchange
Injective Protocol is the first layer-2 decentralized exchange protocol that unlocks the full potential of decentralized derivatives and borderless DeFi.
Injective Protocol enables fully decentralized trading without any restrictions, allowing individuals to trade on any derivative market of their choosing
Injective Protocol is backed by a prominent group of stakeholders including Pantera Capital, one of the most renowned venture capital firms in the world, and the leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.
St.Louis Federal Bank Talks DeFi
Interested in learning more about DeFi? You can check out Professor Fabian Schär of the University of Basel.
Professor Fabian Schär teaches distributed ledger technologies and is the managing director of the Center for Innovative Finance at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Basel. In this comprehensive overview, he explains the multi-layer nature of DeFi with Ethereum serving as the base settlement layer in all examples he gives in the article.
In this article, he covers popular DeFi building blocks that enable exchange, lending, derivatives, and asset management. Mainstay projects like MakerDao, Uniswap, and Aave are directly referenced multiple times.
Pioneering Aussie engineer refinances home loan using DeFi in a single day
After hitting a wall with banks, a borrower has turned to DeFi to pay off his mortgage. A software engineer has taken decentralized finance to a new level of practicality, by paying off his mortgage with Commonwealth Bank of Australia and refinancing the loan through fixed-rate lending protocol Notional Finance.
Notional Finance provides fixed-rate loans for up to six months for users that deposit crypto collateral in wrapped BTC, ETH, wrapped ETH, or DAI.
Leading DeFi protocol Aave has also started down the mortgage path with its latest partnership.
In an announcement on Feb. 2, Aave stated that the scheme was in collaboration with RealT, a firm that tokenizes real estate in order to allow users to stake their property as collateral to take out loans. The ability to use these assets as collateral is the first step in making “mortgage” loans on Ethereum available to a wider audience.
Tokenization of real world assets is a big use case for Ethereum.
RealT allows investors to buy shares of managing properties. Each holder earns revenue directly into their wallet via stablecoins like DAI and USDC. This is very similar to how Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) work in traditional finance. The key difference between is that RealT aims to remove any central point of failure and to make the system fully decentralized.
REITs are a massive market globally. In 2019 alone the combined market capitalization of all the US REITs amounted to 1.33 Trillion USD. If RealT can manage to capture a fraction of that market, then it could rake in hundreds of billions of US dollars.
Check out this example of how RealT tokenizes Real Estate
Reddit announces partnership with the Ethereum Foundation
Reddit has teamed up with the Ethereum Foundation to establish Reddit’s first-ever blockchain partnership!
As Reddit continues to grow with more than 50 million daily users and hundreds of thousands of communities, the platform has long maintained a decentralized ethos by empowering users to create, govern, and grow their own communities. Through this partnership, we will be increasing our commitment to blockchain, accelerating scaling and resources for the Ethereum ecosystem, and bringing the value and independence of blockchain technology to millions of redditors.
CME Group to Launch Ether Futures on February 8, 2021
CME Group’s recent announcement that it will launch Ethereum(ETH) futures on Feb. 8, 2021, is the “writing on the wall” that institutions will being buying the cryptocurrency next year.
Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital to Launch Ethereum Funds
Galaxy Digital ($815 million under management) is launching a vehicle called the Galaxy Ethereum Fund, along with two other ETH-focused funds geared toward onshore and offshore institutional investors. The institutional fund requires a minimum investment of $250k, though the minimum is lowered to $100k for the offshore fund.
“Six applications in the Decentralized Finance space (“DeFi”) are now worth more than $1 billion and are generating up to $100s of millions in annualized revenue. Galaxy Digital believes Ethereum is an emerging substrate for programming and interacting with digital value that will become ubiquitous in the future.”
More Institutional Investors Are Buying Ether, Seeing It as a Store of Value
According to Coinbase’s annual review for 2020, more institutional investors are seeing ether as a store of value.
“The case for owning Ethereum we hear most frequently from our clients is a combination of, first, its evolving potential as a store of value and, second, its status as a digital commodity that is required to power transactions on its network”
The number of “whales” holding over 10k ETH ($17.5Mil) continues to grow.
Ethereum-Based ConsenSys Quorum Partners With China’s BSN Blockchain
New York-based Ethereum hub ConsenSys has partnered with the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) to bring its enterprise ledger, Quorum, to China’s nationwide blockchain project.
As part of the partnership, announced Monday, ConsenSys Quorum, an open-source protocol layer that serves as a foundation for businesses to build Ethereum-based applications, will be available in about 80 different cities through BSN’s public city nodes throughout mainland China.
China’s State-Backed Blockchain Services Provider Partners With EY to Add Ethereum Compliance Tools
Ernst & Young’s OpsChain will integrate procurement and traceability functions into BSN, where its users on Ethereum can run procurement activities using tokens and smart contracts. The EY Blockchain Analyzer will offer blockchain analytics and financial statement audits to the users.
China plans to hand out $1.5 million in a digital currency test during the Lunar New Year
This marks the third major test of the digital currency under development by the People’s Bank of China. The cities of Shenzhen and Suzhou held similar experiments in the last few months.
The previous trial of their National Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) was with over $3 million-worth of “e-yuan” distributed among 100,000 residents in the tech hub of Shenzhen, double the number of participants in an earlier trial.
China is rapidly leading the world in the race to digitalization. Already implementing their Central Bank Digital Currency, and leveraging the Ethereum Blockchain.
Amazon Preparing to Launch a ‘Digital Currency’ Project in Mexico
The yet-to-be-announced project, which Amazon sketched out across a series of recent job posts, appears to be an effort to keep lucrative Prime customers eternally plugged into Amazon’s platform.
This Digital Currency is likely to be developed using Ethereum.
Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network
“Our strategy here is to work with wallets and exchanges to enable users to purchase crytpo-currencies using their Visa credentials or to cash out onto our Visa credential to make a fiat purchase at any of the 70 million merchants where Visa is accepted globally,” Kelly said.
“Today, 35 of the leading digital currency platforms and wallets have already chosen to issue Visa, including coin-based Crypto.com, BlockFi, Fold and BitPanda. These wallet relationships represent the potential for more than 50 million Visa credentials. The next leading network has a fraction of that. And it goes without saying, to the extent a specific digital currency becomes a recognized means of exchange, there’s no reason why we cannot add it to our network, which already supports over 160 currencies today.”
Visa Partners With Ethereum Digital-Dollar Startup That Raised $271 Million
Credit card giant Visa announced it is connecting its global payments network of 60 million merchants to the U.S. Dollar Coin (USDC) developed by Circle Internet Financial on the Ethereum blockchain.
As Visa’s lead cryptocurrency executive Cuy Sheffield noted on the news:
“This will be the first corporate card that will allow businesses to be able to spend a balance of USDC. And so we think that this will significantly increase the utility that USDC can have for Circle’s business clients […] We continue to think of Visa as a network of networks. Blockchain networks and stablecoins, like USDC, are just additional networks. So we think that there’s a significant value [here] that Visa can provide to our clients.”
Circle Announces ACH Payment Integration For Easy USD Transfers
Circle announces Automated Clearing House (ACH) payment integration that will allow customers to transfer between the US dollar and the USDC stablecoin.
Crypto exchange FTX will be the one for the first customers to use the new ACH system and right after the supply of USDC increased 700% this year with no signs of slowing down. Circle announced the new addition of the Automated Clearing House payments for the USDC dollar-pegged stablecoin to the Circle API will allow US customers use ACH payments to transfer funds between the regulated banking institutions, draw from their bank accounts, and pay bills.
Fintech company Circle, as well as Coinbase, are partners in supporting and managing USDC as the cryptocurrency pegged 1:1 to the US dollar compared to the price volatility of other assets like ETH and BTC, stablecoins are designed to start offering crypto traders as a safe-harbor holding asset to cash.
Mastercard to Support Cryptocurrency Payments in 2021
Mastercard is moving beyond crypto cards to support direct payments in “select cryptocurrencies” — but not Bitcoin. Their focus will be primarily stable coins like USDC.
Though Mastercard already works with cryptocurrency payment companies Wirex and BitPay on crypto debit cards, today’s news represents a shift to allowing cryptocurrencies to move within the actual network.
Check out their blog post here
“Our crypto partners convert the digital assets on their end to traditional currencies, then transmit them through to the Mastercard network. Our change to supporting digital assets directly will allow many more merchants to accept crypto — an ability that’s currently limited by proprietary methods unique to each digital asset. This change will also cut out inefficiencies, letting both consumers and merchants avoid having to convert back and forth between crypto and traditional to make purchases.”
The world is changing. We are entering a digital age. Ethereum is being integrated on a number of levels from enterprise adoption to institutional investments. Ethereum is the oil that acts as settlement layer for DeFi and for the first time, Visa and Mastercard are bridging the crypto space with seamless interaction with the “real world”. Crypto is no longer “magic internet money”
ETH has a lot of potential, breaking it’s all time high of $1430
From here, many experts see a price of $10k-20k for Ethereum. It is not too late.
