BitGo: Crypto Water Cooler — March 22
GM. It’s Wednesday, March 22.
Newsmakers
Do Recent Bank Failures Bolster the Case for Digital Assets?
Bitcoin came out of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, promising a decentralized financial system immune to crime and meddling governments. Now, amidst a spate of bank failures and bailouts, the price of Bitcoin and other digital assets have been soaring. Does this validate the original case for crypto?
Not exactly. But the use case is evolving. While Bitcoin has been largely immune from financial crime, the centralized intermediaries and decentralized protocols that have grown up around it have been anything but. The idea that technology alone can protect investors and ensure sound management is dead. Nor does it look like digital currencies and smart contracts will replace TradFi.
In fact, current events show how intertwined digital assets and TradFi have become. Lamentations about crypto becoming unbanked lay bare the industry’s dependence on banks. Meanwhile, TradFi interest in digital assets has been steadily growing. Giants like?Fidelity,?BNY Mellon, and JPMorgan are increasingly serving the crypto industry, albeit selectively, and crypto clients now?turning to major banks?are finding a “surprisingly warm welcome.”
Bitcoin hasn’t become money, or even?digital gold, but it is a?compelling?macroeconomic investing play. Ethereum has emerged as the infrastructure on which many dApps are being built. There are no other clear winners, but with over?$4b in venture capital?poured into decentralized finance since 2013, market validation is on the horizon.
However, it’s too soon for DeFi to take a victory lap. As Eric Sumner writes on CoinDesk, it may be time for crypto to learn a few things from their banker friends, chief among them that regulation works. “The naive sentiment that prevailed in crypto circles during the industry’s early days, that individuals can perform the same financial actions they would in a bank only minus the intermediary and minus the regulation, has simply been proven wrong,” he says. “Businesses exist to earn maximum profit. The fact that a company happens to use blockchain doesn’t change that, and it won’t prevent shady practices if there aren’t any legal consequences.”
Bank failures are not a good look, and they leave people with the same hunger for TradFi alternatives that they had in 2008 — a hunger that digital assets have, thus far, not satisfied. But that does not diminish their future prospects, the value of what has been built to date, or interest on the part of institutional and retail investors alike.
Read more →CoinDesk
The Fall of Signature Bank: Government Plot or Years of Mismanagement?
A?January joint statement?by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Company about crypto-related risk to the banking system had some industry influencers accusing the government of running “Operation Chokepoint 2.0,” a secret plot to take down crypto. In our?February 15 edition, we covered the reasons this seems unlikely. However, the closure of Signature Bank spawned a plot twist: its closure, and those of Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank, were orchestrated.
If that is the case, mismanagement at the banks played right into regulators’ hands. But it seems more likely that Signature, which held U.S. dollar deposits for crypto companies, including FTX, was caught in a perfect storm of overconcentration, mismanagement, and panic. That it held deposits for crypto companies is a red herring.
The twenty-two-year-old bank primarily lent in the?New York real estate rental market. It began diversifying around 2015 after warnings from regulators, entering new markets that were high risk and brought new problems — and write offs. They also courted crypto firms, which came to account for nearly 25 percent of deposits. Signature never invested in, held, or traded crypto, or made loans using it as collateral, but it did launch an instant payment service that catered to the needs of the industry. Its stock price?declined 20 percent?in the wake of the FTX collapse. In December of 2022, Signature?announced?it would reduce crypto deposits to 15 percent. In February, it was hit with a?class action lawsuit?for helping facilitate the fraud at FTX.
When the government took over Silicon Valley Bank, rumors arose about other banks that might topple, Signature among them. New York real estate investors rushed to?pull their funds?out, creating a bank run. New York state regulators took over Signature, saying leadership didn’t provide reliable data, which triggered a lack of confidence. Signature was hit by a?class action lawsuit?saying it had misrepresented its financial position. The bank went into FDIC receivership, and false reports that the agency would bar any buyer from crypto briefly seemed to bolster charges of a plot. The FDIC later?denied?making that stipulation. Yesterday, the FDIC entered into an agreement with New York Community Bank for its Flagstar division to?acquire?the bulk of Signature’s assets — but not its crypto business. While evidence of a plot is in short supply, evidence of mismanagement is not.
Read more →The Wall Street Journal ($)
News In Brief
Regulation and Security
Business of Crypto
领英推荐
DeFi and Web3
Midweek Market Pulse
Total Market Cap:?$1,179,053,742,845–7 day change as of Tuesday 3/21/23 Noon EST: +3.7%
Bitcoin?(BTC, +13.5%)?enjoyed another banner week as crypto and traditional markets alike awaited the Federal Reserve’s?decision on interest rates at this week’s meeting. Not only is BTC shrugging off turmoil in the banking sector,?some observers believe that Bitcoin is being propelled by?it. Interestingly, BTC outperformed?Ethereum (ETH, +6.7%)?and alt coins and layer-1s that are typically more volatile, putting. Bitcoin dominance at?its highest level in nine months.
Other outperformers included?Mask Network?(MASK, +59.2%), which climbed into the top 100 cryptos by market cap on the back of?whales accumulating the alt coin. Mask Network allows social media users to send cryptocurrency and encrypt private messages on social networks and was recently added to?Binance’s Proof of Reserves report.
Conflux Network (CFX, +32.2%), a?proof-of-work crypto that facilitates smart contracts?is up 1,600% for the year. This week it?announced a pair of new partnerships?that helped vault it into the top 50 cryptos by market cap.?Stax (STX, +23.1%)?climbed after its?Stax 2.1 upgrade went live on Monday. The layer-2 companion chain for smart contracts on Bitcoin is also likely benefitting from Bitcoin’s rise.
The Last Word
Dominance
noun
: Bitcoin dominance measures BTC’s share of global digital asset markets.
/ BTC dominance is calculated by taking Bitcoin’s current market capitalization and dividing it by total market capitalization.
About BitGo
BitGo provides the most secure and scalable solutions for the digital asset economy, offering regulated custody, borrowing and lending, and core infrastructure to investors and builders alike.
Founded in 2013 — the early days of crypto — BitGo pioneered the multi-signature wallet and later built TSS to improve upon other companies’ MPC offerings. Between multi-sig and TSS, BitGo offers the safest technology on the market and safeguards over 600 tokens across a wide variety of blockchains.
Over the years, BitGo has expanded from offering wallets into providing a full-suite solution that lets clients hold assets safely and then put them to work.
BitGo launched BitGo Trust Company in 2018, providing fully regulated, qualified cold storage to complement BitGo Inc’s original hot wallet solution. In 2020, BitGo launched BitGo Prime, which allows its clients to trade, borrow, and lend. Moreover, BitGo also provides access to DeFi, staking, NFT wallets, and beyond, and serves as the world’s sole custodian for WBTC, or wrapped Bitcoin.
Today, BitGo is the leader in digital asset security, custody, and liquidity, providing the operational backbone for more than 1500 institutional clients in over 50 countries — a list that includes many regulated entities and the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms. BitGo also processes approximately 20% of all global Bitcoin transactions by value.
For more information, please visit?www.bitgo.com.
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