Day: January 14, 2021

Someone Wants to Pay $7,777 for Elon Musk’s Dogecoin Tweet

by Decrypt

In brief

  • Last month, Elon Musk tweeted about Dogecoin.

  • Now, an NFT investor wants to pay him $7,777 for a tokenized replica of that tweet.

  • It’s all made possible by a new service called Valuables.

Tesla founder Elon Musk is no stranger to posting silly things on Twitter. He’s used the platform to mock public safety precautions connected with the pandemic, and to inadvertently(?) depress the value of his own company’s stock.

He’s also tweeted from time to time about the niche cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which is based on the popular “doge” meme. His posts have significantly influenced the price of the coin.

Last month, he wrote, “One word: Doge.”

Now, someone has offered to pay $7,777 for a tokenized replica of the tweet through a service called Valuables.

Valuables allows users to put up money for a tweet, which the tweeter can then accept if they so choose. The buyer then gets to “own” the tweet as an NFT, or non-fungible token. 

Where fungible crypto assets like Bitcoin are all the same, in that each Bitcoin is worth just as much as every other Bitcoin, NFTs are one-of-one artifacts on the blockchain; they’re often used as hosting mechanisms for digital art and other collectibles.

Valuables describes these tokenized tweets as akin to “an autograph on a baseball card.”

The offer on this particular tweet comes from the NFT collector Tim Kang, who uses the alias @illestrater_.

“I offered $7,777 to Elon hoping he would take note and experience a simple example of what a smart contract can do,” Kang told Decrypt. “At least publicly, [Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey] and [Elon Musk] are not conveying that they understand the deeper implications of crypto… So it’s my hope for our leaders to dive deeper into blockchain and be able to communicate what’s in store for our future.”

Still no word from Elon—now the richest man in the world—on whether he’ll take the handout.

Source

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Grayscale inflows hit $3.3B in record-breaking fourth quarter

by Cointelegraph

Institutional investors continued to pile into Grayscale products in the fourth quarter, highlighting the continued urgency for exposure to Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) 

Total investments into Grayscale’s family of products reached $3.3 billion in the final quarter of 2020, which translated into average weekly inflows of $250.7 million, the digital-asset manager reported Thursday. That’s a threefold increase from the third quarter when Grayscale products raked in $1.05 billion.

Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust generated $217.1 million in average weekly inflows. The Ethereum Trust saw an average of $26.3 million in new capital invested.

Ninety-three percent of new investments came from institutional investors, with asset managers accounting for the largest share, according to Grayscale. That’s a nine percentage point increase from the third quarter when institutions accounted for 84% of new capital.

In all of 2020, investments into Grayscale products totaled $5.7 billion. That’s more than four times the cumulative inflow between 2013 and 2019.

Grayscale’s data reflect a turning point for Bitcoin in 2020, as smart-money investors began to view the digital asset as an inflationary hedge and long-term store of value. That narrative helped propel Bitcoin to a price of nearly $42,000 in early January after more than doubling in just three weeks.

Institutional adoption of Bitcoin has put the asset on a path to maturity, according to Goldman Sachs executive Jeff Currie. However, he acknowledged that Bitcoin still has a long way to go before it’s considered an institutional-grade asset.

The bull market could be given added impetus in the coming weeks as the incoming Biden administration prepares a multi-trillion-dollar stimulus program. The considerable devaluation of the U.S. dollar is pushing more investors into Bitcoin.

Grayscale did not immediately respond to a request for comment