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Greater adoption of crypto assets by payment companies recently may help support bitcoin’s price spike to an all-time high.
In the last check, the world’s most popular crypto was changing hands at around $ 58,868 on CoinDesk, up around 2%. So far this year bitoin BTCUSD,
rose more than 100% and gained more than 27% in March. By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
is up 7% and the S&P 500 SPX,
has gained 4% since the month.
“Bitcoin has had a bumper year and things only seem to be improving for the world’s largest cryptocurrency after these latest corporate announcements,” wrote Samuel Indyk, senior analyst at Investing.com, in a note from Tuesday by email.
“In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Bitcoin hit $ 100,000 by the end of the year, as cryptocurrencies are gaining more business interest and the attention of institutional and retail investors,” added the analyst.
Pay Pal
The rise of the blockchain-powered asset on Tuesday comes as PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL,
said it would start letting its U.S. customers buy items with crypto, a move seen as the latest adoption of digital assets by a traditional payments player.
In reality, the move is part of a gradual but steady integration of crypto into PayPal’s payment infrastructure and was widely expected after the company, in October, allowed PayPal users to buy bitcoin, ethereum ETHUSD. , Bitcoin Cash BCHUSD and Litecoin LTCUSD through its platform.
Visa adopts USD Coin
PayPal’s deepening moves into the world of virtual assets come in the form of Visa Inc. V,
recently announced a pilot program allowing crypto platforms to settle transactions made with their Visa cards issued in USD Coin without converting funds into fiat currency, marking the first major payment network to use the so-called stablecoin.
In January, the Office of the Comptroller of Monetary Cryptocurrency said in an interpretive letter that U.S. financial institutions are allowed to use stablecoins for payment activities and can participate as nodes on a blockchain.
Stablecoins: digital currencies linked to an asset like GC00 gold,
the US dollar DXY,
or the euro EURUSD,
usually in an equal proportion – are considered a bridge between highly volatile assets such as Bitcoin and Ether tokens and traditional assets.
Bitcoin futures
In addition, the CME CME Group,
announced the deployment of micro bitcoin futures contracts. The CME, which started offering bitcoin futures in 2017, said the micro-futures are one-tenth of a bitcoin in size and will be available on May 3.
Bitcoin futures contracts are primarily used by institutions to hedge their positions and some investors have said that the introduction of the smaller version of Bitcoin contracts is likely to contribute to the liquidity of larger futures and the spot market. underlying digital asset.
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“The recent appreciation of Bitcoin which pushed the price up to $ 60,000 made the CME Bitcoin Futures contract difficult to trade, from a theoretical point of view, as it is a five-coin contract,” he said. writes Steven McClurg, chief investment officer at Valkyrie Investments. That’s an entire bitcoin contract would be around $ 290,000 as defined by the CME’s CF Bitcoin benchmark rate.
“Micro contracts will allow more active traders to trade, hedge and speculate by decreasing the notional value to 1/10 the size of the current supply,” said McClurg.
The increase in speculation is of course not a good thing in and of itself, but the product offering by CME underlines the growing interest in bitcoin among institutional grade investors.
Dapper
Meanwhile, privately held Canadian blockchain technology company Dapper Labs Inc., the startup behind the NBA Top Shot virtual trading card platform, said on Tuesday it had raised $ 305 million from investors, including legends of NBA Michael Jordan and Kevin Durant and other athletes and celebrities such as Stefon Diggs, Ashton Kutcher, Shawn Mendes and Will Smith. The deal, led by Coatue Management LLC, values the company at $ 2.6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The sums reflect the growing interest in non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which use the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrencies to authenticate unique digital assets such as art, music or video of basketball highlights. .
Read: ‘Obviously we had no idea this was going to happen here,’ say the guys who made the first NFT
Want to understand the future of cryptos and NFTs? Register for MarketWatch’s free live event: https://events.marketwatch.com/crypto/home
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