Good Morning!
Bitcoin has $40,000 in its sight as Musk tweets that Tesla will now start accepting cryptocurrency as an alternative payment. The caveat to this however is miners will need to show confirmation that there is at least 50% of clean energy used in the mining of said bitcoin. A recent study conducted by Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index found that the energy used to mine bitcoin matches up to the annual carbon footprint of Argentina. Although the comments made by Musk are encouraging, one does have to think about how Tesla will actually vet miner’s clean energy usage. As expected, the tweet created a bullish sentiment for bitcoin with many buyers jumping in on Sunday leading to a new 2.5 week high of $39,794.
There are still many optimists in the market betting on a $200k price by year-end despite the cryptocurrency struggling to hold any resistance following May’s 35% drop. Laevitas, a crypto options exchange provided data showing options contracts north of 400 with strike prices of $200k with an expiration data of Dec 31st 2021. A call option is a derivative contract that gives the purchaser the right but not the obligation to buy the underlying asset at a predetermined price on or before a specific date. Meaning that buying a call option at the $200k strike price expiring on Dec. 31 is a bet that the bitcoin will end the year above that level.
Looking at bitcoin in isolation often gives a fragmented view of the total crypto market cap. From a macro standpoint, the total market cap (mcap) is still bouncing around the parallel lines stemming from the highs of August last year. The total support for the mcap currently stands at $1.5T, meaning that we need to see a daily/weekly close above the $1.8T resistance area to create room for the next leg up in the range of $2.2T – $2.3T. If we were to see anything below the current support of $1.5T this would indicate there is weakness in the market and the probability of the total mcap closing near the lower support level of $1T. Bitcoin jumped slightly off the El Salvador news which may create a domino effect amongst other countries like India and the Philippines, but buyers still have a lot of work to do to create an autumn/winter bull run that everyone is expecting.
Let’s get started.
Markets
As of 14th June 09.30 BST
(source: coinmarketcap)
Headline roundup
Austrian blockchain company builds platform to tokenise solar energy (CD)
Cayman Islands, U.S. and Gibraltar are top crypto hedge fund jurisdictions (Yahoo)
Paraguay may be next to court crypto businesses with July bill (Yahoo)
El Salvador’s legislature votes to adopt bitcoin as legal tender (Yahoo)
China’s Qinghai province has ordered all crypto miners to shut down (CD)
Indian president wants to regulate crypto as soon as possible (CD)
Nasdaq listed Victory Capital plans entry into crypto (BW)
Basel Committee proposes banks to set aside capital to cover bitcoin exposure (Coinpage)
State Street announces launch of digital asset division (LI)
Leading healthcare firms launch blockchain utility Aveneer health (LI)
Details about the digital yuan wallet officially disclosed (LI)
Kaleido open sources consortium system for enterprise blockchains (LI)
Tesla will resume taking bitcoin as payment once miners go 50% green, Musk says (CD)
CBDC
Bank of England releases discussion paper on stablecoins & CBDC (BI)
G7 plans common CBDC ‘principles’, reiterates global stablecoin cooperation (LI)
Bank of Ghana working towards CBDC pilot (LI)
Shanghai digital yuan trial extends pilots to more than 2 million people (The Block)
HKMA to study a retail CBDC (FM)
Bank of France and Swiss National bank begin cross-border CBDC experiment (CT)
American Bankers Association pushes back on CBDC (LI)
BIS Survey: cross border use of CBDCs may trigger forex controls (LI)
Nigeria may pilot CBDC this year (CT)
Brazil’s central bank pushes back target date on CBDC by two years (CD)
VC
Blockchain staking firm Blockdaemon raises $28m in Series A funding (CD)
Gemini acquires crypto custody firm Shard X(The Block)
BlackTower capital buys ‘market-neutral’ crypto hedge fund gamma point (CD)
Solana labs raise $314m in token sale led by a16Z and Polychain(Forbes)
Hardware wallet maker Ledger gets $380m in Series C funding (CD)
Developer of China’s blockchain based service network gets $30m in Series A funding (CD)
Square to invest $100m in minority, underserved communities (SP Global)
Yearn’s Cronje backs $10m funding round for DeFi’s Instadapp (CD)
Stake technologies raise $10m ahead of Polkdaot and Kusama auctions (CT)
Blockchain mineral traceability firm Circulor raises $14 million (LI)
Meme of the week
About Me
My name is Michael Burke, and I started working in the blockchain space about 4 years ago, firstly with Deloitte, now with R3, where I help our customers build enterprise solutions utilising the Corda platform. My interest in blockchain and cryptocurrency stems from the sheer potential of the technology to completely transform industries and value chains for the better.