Paypal confirmed this week that crypto is
in the future, at least for some of their 325
million users.
Welcome to the program everyone, we’re going
to take a closer look at this story along
with some other top headlines including movement
towards the mainstream for Bitcoin and the
biggest story of the week, Twitter hack 2020.
We’re going to kick off this week covering
the great Twitter hack of 2020.
Where everyone saw that all it takes is one
individual to bring down an entire centralized system.
This hack started in the cryptospace and at the outset looked like an attack
on crypto users but then moved beyond by reaching
high profile accounts like presidential candidate
Joe Biden, and Apple.
In mid-afternoon on Wed, July 15th out of
the blue some verified accounts including
Binance, CZ, Gemini, and Coinbase tweeted out
this Message.
“We have partnered with CryptoForHealth
and are giving back 5000BTC to the community…”
Now, this was obviously a scam and the bigger
question here was how this was happening.
How could it be possible for
all these high profile crypto companies and
individuals not have their twitter accounts
locked down?
Ripple was the last major crypto company to
be targeted and, just a few minutes later
came a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s
account that said,
“I’m feeling generous because of Covid
19.
I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC
address in the next hour.
Good luck and stay safe out there.”
It was at this point the attacker shifted
audiences and took bigger fish including Bill
Gates, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Kanye West,
presidential candidate Joe Biden,
and Apple Computer (whose entire tweet history was deleted).
The attack finally ended about 3 hrs later
when twitter disabled the platform for all
verified users until they could restore order.
This thief made out with over 12 bitcoin,worth
just north of 100,000 dollars.
According to Twitter Support, the breach in
their security was due to compromised individuals
at the company and a story in Vice asserts
that a Twitter insider was involved.
I’ll post a link to the article in the description
below.
The 1st takeaway is that a single point of
failure can take down an entire centralized
system.
This is a strong argument for decentralization
and the huge irony I see here is that
a centralized system was used to steal Bitcoin.
The second is that although some have associated
Crypto with hacking more people have heard
about bitcoin today than yesterday
So a couple of weeks ago we mentioned rumors
of Paypal supporting cryptocurrencies.
Fast forward to this week when that news has been
confirmed in a letter Paypal sent to the European
commission about the EU building a framework
for crypto assets.
It’s not clear at this time what currencies
the company will support but it is looking
to work with multiple exchanges.
In the letter paypal said:
““PayPal is continuously monitoring and
evaluating global developments in the crypto
and blockchain/distributed ledger space.
Of particular interest for us is how these
technologies and crypto-assets can be utilized
to achieve greater financial inclusion and
help reduce/eliminate some of the pain points
that exist today in financial services.”
This should not surprise anyone as Paypal
was one of the early adopters of the stunted
Facebook Crypto project, Libra, and one of the
first to pull out of the project followed
by Visa and Mastercard.
Paypal hopes within the next 3 months,
depending on what country you live in, if
you are a paypal or Venmo user, you will be
able to buy cryptocurrencies directly within
Paypal’s app.
Meaning there could be the potential of over
300 million people who have instant access
to the new digital economy.
What do you think this will do to the price
of Bitcoin?
We know it’s becoming more scarce by the
day, every time a block is mined there is
less and less bitcoin to be found.
You know what my prediction is….
We're going to the moon.
Let us know yours in the comments below.
We’re going to shift gears here a bit and take a quick look at some pretty astounding movements in the market this week.
Link, Vechain, and Tezos were like magic in the portfolio.
Chainlink gained 27% over the last 7 days topping out at $8.73 on July 15th,
erasing most of the loss over the last year and claiming a spot in the crypto market top 10.
Vechain has cooled off a bit since it’s moonshot last week but is still managing to hold on to its 89.9% gains in the last 14 days.
Was this rally justified or only riding the coattails of other similar projects tying real-world data to the blockchain?
I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Tezos (XTZ) also saw a 7-day double-digit increase topping out at $3.28 on July 16th
from a low of just under $2.50 earlier in the week.
Here’s the big number with XTZ though. The one-year gains are over 215%.
XTZ seemed to have a rough start but has made great strides in the last 12 months.
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earning interest on crypto and sports betting, you can use Exodus
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We can add a couple more examples of institutional
adoption for this week’s crypto news.
Digital asset manager Grayscale Investment
saw a record-breaking 900 million dollars
worth of crypto flow into its trust funds
for Q2, bringing their trust’s
first half purchases up to about 1.4 billion
dollars.
Our friends over a Decrypt have broken this
down for us and according to Grayscale’s
Q2 report, over 85% of the money came from
Institutional investors.
And while the majority was held in Bitcoin,
135 million went towards their Ethereum trust
with Grayscale’s Litcoin and BCH trust having
their largest inflow since 2018.
The report shows that assets held in Grayscale’s
various altcoin trusts are up a whopping 650%
in the last 12 months.
Now all these numbers sound impressive and
it sure looks like we are past the chasm of
discovery, at least for large scale institutions
so what does that really mean for you and I?
We can figure that out with the next nugget
of information gleaned and widely covered
from the report indicating that Since the
last Halving ( That was just a couple of months
ago) that inflows into their Bitcoin trust
have exceeded the newly minted bitcoin in
the same period.
Let’s let that sink in…
The fund manager said that this in itself
could cause a “Reduction in supply-side pressure.”
This of course could cause the price of bitcoin
to go where?
Of course, this is just for illustrative purposes,
Grayscale is not actually buying 1.5 times
the amount of newly minted coins and factors
in what they consider in-kind purchases [meaning
that…these are payments, not purchases?
I don't know how this accounting is done but grayscale
indicates they are only actually buying, 31%
of newly minted coins.
Let’s do a little treasure hunt.
What is the total amount of BTC Grayscale
holds in their trust?
I’ll highlight the viewer with the first
right answer in the comments below on next
week’s program.
There are some more details to this story
and I’ll provide a link to the Decrypt article
in the comments below.
2 trillion dollar asset manager Fidelity Investments
is no stranger to bitcoin.
We did a story on Fidelity late last year
about their opening up custodial BTC solutions
for institutional investors.
Let’s take a look.
In this story, we found that Fidelity was
actually an early adopter into the crypto
ecosystem and had a skunkworks mining facility
set up in one of their office buildings.
According to the CEO of Fidelity, Abigail
Johnson, in a 2017 talk at consensus…
“We set up a small bitcoin and ethereum
mining operation…that miraculously now is
actually making a lot of money”
Well, this week news surfaced that Fidelity
has not lost the mining bug and has purchased
a large stake in mining Canadian firm Hut8.
Hut8 raised 6.1million dollars in June by
selling shares to investors as it plans to
ramp up its mining capacity and at the front
of the line was Fidelity who gobbled up a
majority of the offering.
“Turns out Fidelity was the largest investor
in Hut 8’s US$6.1M public offering from
last month.
According to a recent filing, Fidelity purchased
71% of the “units” (combo of shares and
warrants) sold in the offering.
Fidelity now owns 10.6% of Hut 8’s outstanding
shares.”
I’m sure Fidelity can smell future profits
from mining and it’s proof that the trusted
and respected firm is open-minded towards
crypto.
What more could you ask for?
That’s all the news for today! Thanks for coming along for the ride.
Please leave your thoughts about any of the stories in the comments below.
If you enjoyed this video, please hit that like button and subscribe for more Crypto Videos from Exodus.
Until next time, HODL on!
