BT Daily News: Is the bitcoin winter beginning to thaw out?

by CHarvey September 29, 2022

1. Is the bitcoin winter beginning to thaw out?

Ben Gagnon, chief mining officer at Bitfarms sees anything below $20,000 as the price where fair-weather institutional investors retreat from the currency for good, which will help stabilize bitcoin’s current volatility and send it up an upward path.

“I’d be very surprised if we ended the year this low,” said Gagnon. “I think Bitcoin is going to start to recover now that it’s kind of shaken out of a lot of the excess.”

“This is an interesting time,” said Chris Kline, COO and co-founder of Bitcoin IRA, a digital asset technology platform. “For the last eight months, bitcoin has been acting like a tech stock because there have been so many institutional investors in it.” As that money floods out, he said, things could change.

It’s a big TBD, but bitcoin advocates remain cautiously optimistic.

2. Jerome Powell weighs in on crypto

Crypto advocates aren’t too happy with the Federal Reserve, and that sentiment appears to go both ways.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell urged for more regulation of digital assets on Tuesday morning at a Bank of France conference about the digitization of finance.

While crypto bulls are likely to claim the decline in markets and other assets have caused digital currencies to plummet in value, Powell said he was worried about the opposite. The recent plunge in bitcoin prices, he said, could spread and cause broader financial turmoil. Digital currencies need to be regulated and have checks in place just like other market assets, he said.

Other central bankers weren’t as nuanced as Powell. “I don’t see any redeeming value” in cryptocurrencies, said the Singapore Monetary Authority’s Ravi Menon. “Their time for reckoning has come.”

The Federal Reserve does not regulate cryptocurrency in the United States, but it does monitor cryptocurrencies held by banks. The central bank is also considering the launch of a Central Bank Digital Currency, which is essentially a digital version of the dollar.

That currency isn’t coming anytime soon, said Powell. “We see this as a process of at least a couple of years, where we’re doing work and building public confidence in our analysis and in our ultimate conclusions, which as I say, we certainly haven’t reached yet.”

3. What You Can Do with Your Old Ethereum Mining Rigs

When the merge finally arrives, as it did earlier this month, your ETH mining world is turned upside down, swept away in minutes. Setting aside more metaphysical mysteries, one practical question looms large: What can you do with a shed’s worth of pricey GPUs?

One miner, who calls himself Alphamine (probably not his birth name) told me that he plans to heat his house with his old power-guzzling GPUs. Another miner who identified only as “stepwn” also uses old mining rigs for heat—not to heat his home, but to heat his greenhouse.

Truth be told, the greenhouse is heated with Monero (XMR), not ETH chips. He’s got another scheme in mind for the ETH chips: a “PC gaming bar.”

GPUs have other interesting uses, of course. Nick Hansen (probably his birth name) is the co-founder of Luxor; Hansen’s main preoccupation now is helping his customers find other uses for their hardware—urgently. (A third of them have already switched their GPUs off, he told me.) One promising solution: using the leftover GPUs to power large neural networks, AI data centers and digital rendering products. “We’ll most likely be able to recoup our losses,” Hansen said.

4. BitMEX CEO: Ether merger in line with ESG, ETH will be asset of choice

Alexander Höptner, CEO of BitMEX, said institutional investors are still interested in cryptocurrencies and ethereum and said that the bear market provides more time for institutions and financial industry players to innovate. alexander said that the ethereum merger is ESG compliant and that institutions will start to flock to ethereum again and said that ethereum is the financial products, in addition to stressing that ESG compliance is critical.

5. Nansen CEO: Solana and Magic Eden's NFT market has been growing rapidly

At the "Token 2049" Summit event in Singapore today, Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, discussed "On-Chain: What's really happening on the blockchain?" During the discussion, Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, pointed out that it is important to consider ethical issues, which is a subjective statement. Tornado Cash is now being used less, yet before this it was used less than people realised, for example less than 25,000 addresses in total. Ethical judgement is an important point about how people value privacy, as people have different opinions. Another issue he wanted to highlight was the NFT market. He pointed out that Solana and Magic Eden have been growing massively, compared to other NFT chains which are declining massively. If you limit your focus to one ecosystem, you may be missing out on a much larger market.

6. UAE government official: digital currencies will become part of the mainstream financial system in the future

Omar Bin Sultan Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Telework Applications, believes that the future of finance is closely linked to cryptocurrencies. In his view, "many of those involved in the initial development of cryptocurrencies and related technologies want to use them to circumvent mainstream financial institutions and the monetary system", but "this is neither a practical nor a desirable goal for obvious reasons ". Instead, he argues, "the future of digital currencies is firmly within the mainstream financial system, and they can have a huge impact on a number of issues in areas such as payments, banking and investment."

7. Crypto VC Pantera Capital Looks to Raise $1.25B for Second Blockchain Fund: Report

Crypto venture-capital investment firm Pantera Capital is looking to raise $1.25 billion for its second blockchain fund.

Pantera founder Dan Morehead said at a conference in Singapore that the fund will invest in digital tokens and equity, including shares in company Pantera already owns that have dropped in value.

The crypto industry has been treading water in recent months following its crash in mid-June. The market cap of the crypto market has been fluctuating below the $1 trillion mark since then, while the traditional markets are also experiencing turmoil.

“We want to provide liquidity for people that are kind of giving up because we’re still very bullish for the next 10 or 20 years,” Morehead said.