According to a recent poll, most cryptocurrency investors from Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have entered the digital asset market with long-term goals such as securing their families’ wellbeing.
Crypto to Fund Children’s Education
The London-based company – Luno – conducted a survey with nearly 7,000 participants from Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, the UK, Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia to determine the reasons that drove them into getting involved with digital assets.
Per the results, most residents of the three African countries are financially savvy and invest in sensible and long-term goals as 69% of them deal with crypto to provide a better life for their families.
Taking a closer look, 48% would allocate their salaries in digital assets to pay for their children’s future educational costs. In comparison, 43% would do the same to establish a fund to pass on to their relatives. Only 3% admitted they have no plan when making investment decisions.
Marius Reitz – Luno’s General Manager for Africa – described the situation in Africa as a “crypto revolution,” adding that there is vast potential in the continent:
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“In recent weeks, there’s been a lot of attention on the scale of Africa’s crypto revolution, and whilst its potential is hugely exciting, it’s vital we ensure consumers are engaging with this transition in a safe and responsible manner.”
However, a large proportion of the locals lack basic knowledge about cryptocurrencies, which is why they would not consider investing in them. 55% of Nigerians revealed they don’t understand anything about the asset class, while the percentage in South Africa and Kenya stood at 56% and 64%, respectively.
What about The Rest of The Countries?
The majority of the participants from the UK, Indonesia, Australia, and Malaysia shared somewhat different arguments for entering the digital asset space than the African residents.
41% of Australians admitted they invest in crypto to save for a property while adding to the pension pot is the top answer for the participants from the UK, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
The results also informed that nearly one-third of crypto investors have up to 10% of their portfolio in digital assets. 12% have 11 to 20%, and 10% have allocated 21 to 30% of their wealth in bitcoin or the altcoins.
Additionally, the survey revealed that crypto holders are much more likely to hold other types of financial assets versus the general population. For example, 4% of the Kenyan participants said they own both digital assets and gold, while this metric jumped to respectively 39% and 63% in Malaysia and Indonesia.
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Crypto veteran and Morgan Creek Digital co-founder Anthony Pompliano is naming what he thinks is the biggest risk to Bitcoin (BTC).
In a new episode of The Best Business Show, the Bitcoin bull lays down his hypothetical long-term bear case for the leading cryptocurrency.
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“Unlike what the Bitcoin proponents believe, Bitcoin won’t cross over into becoming a currency and therefore, that will drastically hamper the kind of addressable market.
The most it can grow to is gold, which is basically a store of value. [It] isn’t really used to go purchase things on a day-to-day basis and therefore, yes there may be more upside, but it’s kind of a capped upside.”
Pompliano also highlights a few factors that he says can have undesirable effects on the growth of Bitcoin.
“The second one is eventually we’re gonna figure out who Satoshi is and if we figure out who Satoshi is, that’s going be a bad person, and we’re not gonna want to know who it is and like there’s gonna be a negative impact.
The next thing is nobody’s using it for specific use cases like being able to actually do cross-border payments, all stuff. It’s slow. It’s expensive. It’s kind of all these like technical issues with it.
Then there’s an argument of the unknown like the government’s gonna clamp down on it in the future. They’re going to regulate it. They’re going to tax it. They’re going to shut it down. They’re going to outlaw it. They’re going to do all this stuff.”
But among all issues,Pompliano says there is a particular risk that could undermine the integrity of the Bitcoin network.
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“I think that best argument somebody could make and what I think is the biggest risk to Bitcoin – it really pisses the critics off because it has nothing to do with anything external.
There’s still a development process. There is still an upgrade process to Bitcoin, and it’s incredibly methodical, it’s incredibly intentional, it’s slow on purpose, lots of kind of filters and security checks, etcetera. But technically there could be a bug in the code that’s introduced, like shooting yourself in the foot right.”
Despite the presence of various risk factors, Pompliano says that Bitcoin remains an attractive asset.
“The reason why Bitcoin is so attractive is I actually don’t need to have the best returning asset. I don’t need to be greedy. I want the thing that has a great economic return, but also I know it’s gonna be around in 50 years.”
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Bitcoin is singular. The word singular refers to just one instance of an object or occurrence. A secondary definition of the word describes that oneness as remarkable or outstanding. A singular beauty, for example. A singular individual might also be described as unique.
Bitcoin is a technological singularity by both definitions of the word. It is unique. There is only one Bitcoin network. There is no other distributed network of digital money, property, and energy, that has the guarantees that Bitcoin offers, that is also immune to capture or forfeiture by governance. As to the second definition, it is precisely this singleness of purpose, this guarantee to property, that sets Bitcoin apart as remarkable or outstanding.
A singularity in mathematics and physics is certainly a unique phenomenon. Unlike most objects or regions of the universe, a singularity is unique by virtue of its infinite mass. A singularity is the point or region of a black hole where space and time become infinitely distorted. Mass becomes infinitely dense.
While I don’t think it is intellectually honest to talk about the physical and digital realms as if they were subject to distinct laws of separate universes, we could perhaps agree that within the physical universe, the mass of Bitcoin, while extremely elusive to qualify and quantify, would be something less than infinitely dense. That is, while Bitcoin must consume energy to stay alive as a network, that energy is indexed on a digital ledger, and is quite light, informationally, and physically, to store and to transmit.
Nonetheless, Bitcoin can be thought of as a financial black hole, in that if it continues to operate as it currently does, it will subsume the market share of other stores of value. The asymmetric advantage that Bitcoin has over every other object, is that it is not an object. It can be stored as a tiny amount of data anywhere data can exist. It can be transported and copied for no cost. The maintenance cost for the average Bitcoin holder is zero. (Though the shared maintenance and security cost of the network is large.) These few considerations alone ensure that people (if they are rational) who have been storing their wealth in what are figuratively and literally sinking ships, will move that wealth into Bitcoin indefinitely.
The singular nature of Bitcoin doesn’t mean that people will stop owning real estate, gold, stocks, dollar reserves, or art. It means that many people who have sought stores of value in non-dynamic physical objects with high maintenance costs, or arbitrarily debased digital assets, will move their wealth into Bitcoin permanently. Bitcoin’s function is what it does, to store and appreciate value. As Bitcoin has historically stored and appreciated wealth on longer time scales better than any other asset, there is no reason to trade wealth back out of Bitcoin again. This one-way trade of buying Bitcoin is a financial and technological event horizon for many, wherein their wealth, once it has been turned into Bitcoin, will be stored for generations.
A technological singularity could be described as an intelligence explosion. It’s a process of improvement one could argue humans have all ready entered. The internet is perhaps the broad intelligence explosion of our lifetime. The distributed hive mind of the internet is irrevocable. Even if it were to be dismantled, knowledge about the internet would remain in tact and its eventual reemergence is highly probable. A technological singularity is irreversible. Another technological singularity, that falls within the bounds of the internet intelligence explosion but is somewhat more narrow in domain is Bitcoin. What I mean by narrow is of course that Bitcoin has very specific applications, and while it is the best technology for storing and transferring value, it is not the best way to transfer other data or knowledge, because its program is specific. But Bitcoin, like the internet, would be very difficult, if not impossible to destroy. And upon its destruction it would likely reemerge simply by virtue of the fact that it is the best solution to the store of value problem and the best assurance of property rights humans have. So broadly, the internet as an information system, and more narrowly Bitcoin as a value system, can both be considered the technological singularity of distributed systems.
In theory, on a long time scale, no internal or external, anthropogenic or non-anthropogenic existential risks really pose a threat to a technological singularity. After the advent of singular technologies such as the internet and Bitcoin, generations of technology will improve exponentially, so quickly that for humans alive today the technological experience becomes nearly incomprehensible on increasingly shorter time scales. The internet and Moore’s law have had such an effect on the last few decades. One would be remiss not to see that the financial universe is drastically different in terms of the user experience of products and services offered over a decade after Bitcoin’s creation.
A technological singularity cannot really occur without resulting in a superintelligence, a powerful form of machine intelligence which would quickly eclipse the potential of the smartest humans who have ever lived. Have we not achieved this with computers and distributed systems already? The controversial nature of this point is merely an empirical error. We can move the goal post on what qualifies intelligence to make ourselves feel in control, however, one must admit that the hive mind of the internet, and most computers today can read, write, and transmit exponentially more information than any human. So the internet is superintelligent from the vantage of human capacity for knowledge or information processing and transmission. Given the indestructibility of distributed systems, and the way they subsume or surround our understanding, it’s probably worthwhile to investigate them as legitimate forms of machine intelligence.
Bitcoin within its specified domain, by these same measures is also more intelligent than humans, as it requires computations to operate that are at any given moment intractable for any one person to comprehend. As we’ve seen with the Lightning Network, Bitcoin has a method of scaling and solving difficult problems outside of its original scope. What remains to be seen is how this technological singularity of distributed systems will effect humans going forward. While Bitcoin alleviates future uncertainty for individuals, because it is a singular technology, its broad adoption will surely present singular problems and consequences, and have unanticipated effects on society at large.
Although anyone with an internet connection more or less can find a way to purchase Bitcoin, and could in theory secure it offline, many don’t. Adoption is spreading, but it’s worth pointing out that the wealth disparity between those who hold Bitcoin now and those who first buy some in, say, ten years, will be enormous. The fundamental rule of Bitcoin is that you have to have Bitcoin to spend it. Ten years from now, some extremely wealthy people by fiat standards, which we could consider a legacy financial system, will have absolutely none of the the apex asset. There will be masses getting in at much higher costs. The societal transition is not as simple as exchanging one currency for another at a later date. Accumulating Bitcoin is time sensitive, and unforgeable. Laggards will be at a huge comparative disadvantage.
John von Neumann, among the first to write about technological singularity, expressed that human affairs as we know them could not continue beyond that historic point. There are many reasons for this. What place would humans and our delicate environment hold in the program of a machine superintelligence?
What is essential to humans, our collective values, and our goals, must be engineered into the singularity, or we may lose our power and livelihood simply out of neglect. It is fortunate indeed, that Bitcoin as a distributed system, can store and transmit unforgeable value.
While value is subjective, Bitcoin’s unforgeable costliness, decentralization, and scarcity contrive to make it a far better candidate than dollars or any other digital asset, for programming a superintelligence’s values. Programming the value accretion of a superintelligence wasn’t even on the table until Bitcoin.
One of the reasons we had not experienced a technological singularity on this planet until the internet and Bitcoin is because our capacity for knowledge, our brains, have not fundamentally changed for thousands of years. We have about same biological potential for intelligence as the ancient Egyptians, the Aztecs, and all highly sophisticated civilizations of the past. Since then we have simply accumulated more knowledge, engineered more complicated tools, and made information highly accessible. Every year we engineer far more complicated technology than any humans have before, but we’re still fundamentally limited as biological agents of information processing.
There are at least two viable routes to overcome this problem. One is to improve our own capacity for intelligence. This could potentially be achieved through mass embryonic selection, to collectively raise the intelligence of our populations. The probably faster, more feasible, and morally sound option is through a seed machine intelligence. A technology capable of improving its own capabilities and producing more intelligent machines. In just a few iterations, such a program could qualitatively far surpass human intelligence. But through what measure or value accretion system should such a technology improve itself? Bitcoin.
Whether and to what extent we can control a superintelligence, and the paths and dangers of doing so, are discussions for another time. With Bitcoin we have potentiated programmable technological singularity and possibly superintelligence. Without Bitcoin, machines have no autonomy, no beliefs, no motivations, and no desires.
3 October 2021
Read The Center Cannot Hold: 7: “Bitcoin Will Advance Science And Technology”
Read The Language of Bitcoin: 6: “MircroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor Interview: The Predator Prey Dynamics of Bitcoin”
Read The Language of Bitcoin: 5: “Bitcoin Has No Competition”
Read The Language of Bitcoin: 4: “Bitcoin And Existential Risk”
Read The Language of Bitcoin: 3: “Bitcoin: The First and Final Rival Money”
Read The Language of Bitcoin: 2: “Bitcoin Alleviates Future Uncertainty”
Read The Language of Bitcoin: 1: “BTC Is The Best Explanation For The Way Money Is”
The sentiment in the crypto markets can change quickly as seen from the Crypto Fear and Greed Index, which has risen from levels of extreme fear on Sept. 30 to neutral today. The sentiment may improve further if Bitcoin (BTC) breaks out and sustains above the psychologically critical level at $50,000.
One important event that may boost short-term sentiment is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) decision on Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications. Although the SEC extended the deadline of four Bitcoin ETF applications by 45 days on Oct. 1, Bloomberg’s senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas is hopeful that a futures-backed Bitcoin ETF may receive the green signal by the middle of October.
Crypto market data daily view. Source:Coin360
Balchunas said the Bitcoin futures-based ETF applications, which have found support from SEC chair Garry Gensler, “are very much alive and likely on schedule (we think 75% chance approved in Oct).”
If bulls build on the recent strength in Bitcoin and clear the hurdle at $50,000, several altcoins may pick up momentum. Let’s study the charts of the top-5 cryptocurrencies that may outperform in the short term.
BTC/USDT
Bitcoin broke above the 50-day simple moving average ($46,633) on Oct. 1 but the bears are attempting to stall the recovery near the resistance at $48,843.20. However, a positive sign is that bulls have not allowed the price to dip below the 50-day SMA.
BTC/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
The 20-day exponential moving average ($45,141) has turned up and the relative strength index (RSI) is in the positive territory, indicating advantage to the bulls. If buyers push the price above $48,843.20, the BTC/USDT pair could rally to $52,920.
This level may again act as stiff resistance but if bulls bulldoze their way through, the head and shoulders pattern will be invalidated. That could result in a pick-up in momentum and the pair could rise to $60,000.
Contrary to this assumption, if the price turns down from the current level and breaks below the moving averages, it will suggest that higher levels are attracting aggressive selling from the bears. The pair may then drop toward $40,000.
BTC/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
Both moving averages on the 4-hour chart are sloping up and the RSI is near the overbought zone, indicating the path of least resistance is to the upside. The price has been consolidating in a tight range between $47,000 and $48,495 for some time.
If bulls thrust the price above $48,843, the pair could rise to the psychological mark at $50,000 and then challenge the stiff resistance at $52,920.
Conversely, if the price turns down and breaks below the 20-EMA, it will suggest that short-term traders are booking profits. The pair could then drop to $45,000 and later to the 50-SMA.
LUNA/USDT
Terra protocol’s LUNA token broke above the downtrend line on Oct. 2 and bulls followed it up with a break above the all-time high at $45.01 today. However, the long wick on today’s candlestick suggests that bears are attempting to defend the $45.01 level aggressively.
LUNA/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
If the price turns down from the current level but rebounds off the downtrend line, it will suggest that the sentiment remains positive and traders are buying on dips.
The bulls will then make one more attempt to push the price above the $45.01 to $46.17 resistance zone and start the next leg of the uptrend. The psychological level at $50 may act as a resistance but if it is crossed, the LUNA/USDT pair may rally to $65.
On the contrary, if the price turns down and breaks below the 20-day EMA ($36.30), the next stop could be the 50-day SMA ($32.97). A break below this support will suggest that the bulls are losing their grip.
LUNA/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
Although bulls pushed the price above $45.01, the long wick on the candlestick shows selling at higher levels. The bears are currently attempting to trap the aggressive bulls who may have gone long above $45.01.
The first support on the downside is the 20-EMA. A strong bounce off this support will suggest the sentiment remains positive. The bulls then try to propel the price above $46.17.
Alternatively, a break below the 20-EMA could pull the price down to the 50-SMA. If this support cracks, the pullback may deepen to $33.
ATOM/USDT
Cosmos (ATOM) successfully held the breakout level at $32.32 on Sep. 29, which suggests that sentiment remains positive and bulls are buying on dips.
ATOM/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
The bulls pushed the price above the 20-day EMA ($35.88) on Sept. 30 but the momentum has failed to pick up. This suggests that bears have not thrown in the towel yet and are selling on rallies. The bulls will have to thrust and sustain the price above $44.80 to signal the resumption of the uptrend.
The long wick on today’s candlestick suggests selling at higher levels. If the price turns down from the current level and breaks below the 20-day EMA, the bears will make one more attempt to sink the price below $32.32. If they succeed, the ATOM/USDT pair could drop to the 50-day SMA ($28.54).
ATOM/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
The pair turned down from the resistance line of the symmetrical triangle, indicating that bears are defending this level aggressively. If the price rebounds off the moving averages, the bulls will make one more attempt to push the price above the triangle.
If they succeed, the pair could rally to $44.80 and then to the psychological level at $50. A break and close above this level could open the doors for an up-move toward the pattern target at $57.61.
On the contrary, if the price slips below the moving averages, the next stop could be the support line. If this level cracks, the pair could drop to $28.83 and then to $24.50.
Related:Ethereum fractal from 2017 that resulted in 7,000% gains for ETH appears again in 2021
XTZ/USDT
Tezos (XTZ) rebounded off the 50-day SMA ($5.50) on Sept. 29 and the momentum picked up after the bulls pushed the price above the 20-day EMA ($6.40) on Sept. 30.
XTZ/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
Sustained buying pushed the price above the overhead resistance zone at $8.03 to $8.42. Both moving averages are sloping up and the RSI is near the overbought territory, indicating that bulls are in control.
If bulls sustain the price above $8.42, it will suggest the start of a new uptrend. Contrary to this assumption, if bears pull and sustain the price below $8.03, it will suggest profit-booking at higher levels. The XTZ/USDT pair could then drop to the 20-day EMA.
XTZ/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
The 4-hour chart shows the formation of a symmetrical triangle pattern, which usually acts as a continuation pattern. The bulls pushed the price above the triangle and successfully held the breakout level, indicating the start of an up-move.
This setup has a pattern target at $11.33. The rising 20-EMA and the RSI in the overbought zone suggest that bulls have an edge.
The first sign of weakness will be a close below $8.03. That could open the doors for a retest of the 20-EMA. A strong rebound off this level will suggest that the sentiment remains positive and traders are buying on dips. Conversely, a break below the 20-EMA could pull the price down to $7 and later to $6.50.
AXS/USDT
Axie Infinity (AXS) soared above the previous all-time high at $94.67 on Oct. 1, which suggests the resumption of the uptrend. A coin hitting a new all-time high is a positive sign as it shows strong demand from traders.
AXS/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
The AXS/USDT pair has been facing resistance near $120.57 but the positive sign is that bulls have not given up much ground. This shows that traders are not hurrying to book profits after the recent rally and are buying the dips.
The 20-day EMA ($77) has started to turn up and the RSI is in the overbought zone, indicating that bulls have the upper hand. If buyers drive the price above $120.57, the pair could start its northward march toward $150 and then $165.58.
Contrary to this assumption, if bears pull the price below the breakout level at $94.67, it may result in aggressive profit-booking by traders and the pair may then drop to the 20-day EMA.
AXS/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
The pair has rebounded off $103.22 and the bulls are currently attempting to push the price above the overhead resistance at $110.50. The upsloping moving averages and the RSI in the overbought zone indicate the path of least resistance is to the upside.
If buyers push the price above $110.50, the pair could retest the critical resistance at $120.57. A break and close above this level could signal the resumption of the uptrend.
On the other hand, if the price turns down from the overhead resistance, the pair may consolidate for some time before starting the next directional move. The first sign of weakness will be a break and close below the 20-EMA. Such a move will suggest that the bullish momentum has weakened and supply exceeds demand.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is pushing back the deadline to decide on four Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications currently awaiting approval.
The regulator saysit needs additional time to look into a proposed rule change that will allow the Nasdaq Stock Market to list and trade shares of the Global X, Kryptoin, Valkyrie and WisdomTree Bitcoin ETFs.
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“The Commission finds that it is appropriate to designate a longer period within which to take action on the proposed rule change so that it has sufficient time to consider the proposed rule change and any comments.”
The SEC’s decisions on the Valkyrie, Global X, WisdomTree and Kryptoin ETFs are now due on December 8th, November 21st, December 11th and December 24th, respectively. The Valkryie ETF is the only one in which its performance is linked to the Bitcoin futures market rather than directly to BTC.
The delay comes after SEC chair Gary Gensler signaled potential support for a futures-based Bitcoin ETF.
“[Regarding] investment vehicles providing exposure to crypto assets, earlier this year a number of open-end mutual funds launched that invested in Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)-traded Bitcoin [BTC] futures.
Subsequently, we’ve started to see filings under the Investment Company Act with regard to exchange-traded funds seeking to invest in CME-traded Bitcoin futures.
When combined with the other federal securities laws, the ’40 Act provides significant investor protections for mutual funds and ETFs. I look forward to staff’s review of such filings.”
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any loses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing.
Featured Image: Shutterstock/Barandash Karandashich
An anonymous buyer at an Australian auction paid $361,000 in bitcoin to acquire a classic Subaru WRX driven by the rally champion Colin McRae.
Racing Car in Exchange for BTC
According to a recent report, the automobile was located in the back of a Victorian shed for some time, and few people knew how valuable it was. When Lloyds Auctions introduced it, the machine’s estimated price was not more than $15,000.
An investigation, though, found out that the car was particularly symbolic as champion drivers like Colin McRae and Carlos Sainz have been behind its wheel. Moreover, the British firm Prodrive built it for the World Rally Championship, and the former won top titles on the global stage with it.
After revealing its history, the car’s value spiked significantly, and an anonymous Subaru fan purchased it for roughly $360,000. Interestingly, he or she paid in bitcoin.
The classic Subaru WRX was so popular in the late 90s that it became one of the iconic cars in the Colin McRae Rally PlayStation game. Named after the prominent Scottish driver, it is still one of the top racing video games.
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Speaking of Colin McRae, the legendary racer was arguably the best in his field, becoming the youngest person to win the World Rally Championship Drivers’ title in 1995 when he was only 27. The Scottish lost his life in a tragic helicopter crash in 2007, but it seems like his legacy is still alive as it managed to escalate the Subaru’s price by more than 20 times.
Colin McRea Subaru. Source: AutoSport
Can One BTC Buy a Lamborghini?
The CEO of the crypto exchange Kraken – Jesse Powell – recently predicted what exactly people can purchase with one coin of the primary digital asset in the near future. Saying that bitcoin was heading towards “infinity,” he forecasted that by the end of 2021, it could buy a Lamborghini car. What’s more, the same amount of BTC could provide a Bugatti model in 2022:
“It might be easier to understand if we measure it in terms of Teslas. Now 1 BTC is one Model 3. Probably by the end of the year, it will be one bitcoin for a Lambo. Probably by the end of next year, it will be one bitcoin per Bugatti.”
Specifying what “infinity” means in terms of the USD, Powell said that $1,000,000 per bitcoin sounds reasonable in the next ten years.
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Digital asset giant Grayscale is adding smart contract platform Solana (SOL) and decentralized exchange Uniswap (UNI) to one of its crypto investment products.
In a new press release, Grayscale says it added SOL and UNI to its Digital Large Cap Fund amid a quarterly rebalancing of crypto assets.
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The crypto asset manager, which is the largest of its kind with more than $41.50 billion in digital assets under management, says that it had to sell certain amounts of assets from the Digital Large Cap Fund and used the proceeds to make room for Solana and Uniswap. As of October 1st, Solana is the fourth largest component of the fund with a 3.24% weighting. Uniswap comes in fifth with a 1.06% allocation.
Other crypto assets included in the portfolio are Bitcoin (62.19%), Ethereum (26.08%), Cardano (5.11%), Chainlink (0.82%), Litecoin (0.77%) and Bitcoin Cash (0.73%).
Digital asset manager CoinShares reports that Solana led the altcoin space in terms of institutional capital inflows for the month of September. According to CoinShares, SOL has seen at least $59 million in monthly institutional inflows as of September 27, dwarfing Ethereum’s $35.10 million.
CoinShares also reported that institutional investors essentially shrugged off Solana’s recent network outage last month, pouring capital into SOL rather than being cautious.
“This suggests investors were happy to shrug off the attack, seeing it as teething problems rather than something more inherent with the network.”
At time of writing, Solana is trading at $174, while Uniswap is changing hands at $27.00, according to CoinGecko.
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any loses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is changing the way that people all over the world think about money faster than any previous financial revolution. Banks, which have monopolized the way we’ve accessed money since antiquity, are finally seeing their status being challenged. Now, it’s DeFi which is starting to provide an alternative that could turn the economic landscape on its head and democratize access to finance.
This seismic shift in power away from governments and banks and towards real people is long overdue, particularly in developing nations where DeFi is already emerging as a tool for remittances and small loans. Financial inclusion is another significant advantage that DeFi can deliver, particularly when 1.7 billion adults remain unbanked.
Related:The great unbanking: How DeFi is completing the job Bitcoin started
The growth of the DeFi space is staggering. By taking concepts from traditional finance and turning these into transparent protocols through smart contracts, DeFi provides a trustless ecosystem that delivers anything from insurance to loans to savings accounts. The appeal for DeFi is evident, with the total value of assets held in DeFi financial products nearly topping $175 billion.
Yet, with DeFi on the rise and governments and banks not wanting to lose control of the monetary system, they are turning their attention to issuing digital currencies themselves. Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are seen as a way of maintaining control over the monetary system while giving users faster and cheaper transactions. If we fast forward to the year 2030, what elements of decentralization can we expect to see in our everyday lives?
DeFi in the future
Imagine, if you will, that the year is 2030. Célia, a young Parisian woman, pulls out her phone to buy a Eurostar ticket from Paris to London. When she reaches the payment screen, she chooses her primary digital wallet. Switching over to her wallet, Célia sees that her digital euro balance has gone down. Nowadays, nobody holds cash savings, as loans can be taken out and paid back within a person’s wallet depending on the value of any assets they own and are paid back automatically over time.
Related:Tales from 2050: A look into a world built on NFTs
While DeFi is playing a primary role in 2030, so, too, are CBDCs, which have become the default tool for banks worldwide. China is leading the way in following the success of its previous trials. However, they lean toward greater state control, scrutiny and censorship. As a result, DeFi has become the primary way that individuals who value freedom choose to manage finances and now underpins the world financial system. And because of DeFi’s prominence, we’ve said goodbye to bank accounts, enabling us to access and use our money anywhere at any time and loans to be borrowed when required.
Cryptocurrency’s aim to make money universally available worldwide means that underlying DeFi protocols provide liquidity on swaps, borrowing and lending. And despite the complexity of DeFi, end users are not aware that they’re interacting with these global liquidity sources directly as complete privacy is ensured on all DeFi and spending.
On top of that, we transact all international payments on layer two zero-knowledge proof rollups (zk-Rollups), a scaling solution that bundles up hundreds of transactions off-chain into an Ethereum smart contract thus helping to reduce congestion on the blockchain. A cryptographic proof, known as a SNARK, is produced, ensuring the validity proof and is posted on layer one. Delivering free and open alternatives to government money, Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and permissionless stablecoins are spent and swapped straightaway for any major government coins.
Defeating DeFi’s challenges
The way DeFi is going, this is certainly a plausible future for it. Ultimately, though, for DeFi to reach what many may consider a utopian future, some hurdles need to be overcome first.
One area to consider is the barriers to widespread adoption. For instance, the vulnerability of smart contracts, the unpredictability of the DeFi market, regulatory issues and accessibility to emerging technologies.
Other centers around the space being too complex for the average trader or investor. And blockchain inefficiency is a problem that needs to be addressed, particularly relating to energy consumption and the cost of transactions on Layer 1 protocols on the blockchain. While alternatives have so far compromised on security, early-stage technological solutions are coming to the fore. Examples of this include ZK-proof cryptography, or layer-two solutions, packing more transactions into the space, and therefore reducing cost.
Of course, some of DeFi’s challenges can’t be mentioned without talking about the naysayers. For instance, Dan Berkovitz, Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), believes that DeFi is a “bad idea.” And Tom Mutton, the Bank of England’s fintech director, had said that any CBDC would be “ten times more efficient per transaction” than Bitcoin. Yet, one has to question if he realizes that zk-Rollups are already 1,000 times more efficient than Bitcoin?
What is DeFi doing to overcome these hurdles?
More education is needed. The DeFi Education Fund is an example of one organization attempting to educate policymakers on the benefits of the DeFi ecosystem and to help achieve a regulatory framework for it. In a bid to boost knowledge of DeFi, it’s funding applicants working on DeFi research and advocacy in legal research and DeFi practices, among other things. With an increased understanding of DeFi, mainstream adoption will be easier as new users are onboarded.
Related:Mass adoption of blockchain tech is possible, and education is the key
Another means of expanding the number of users is by improving the user’s experience. This is already seen with layer-two protocols, which are building wallets and infrastructure that support DeFi. And by doing so, they remove friction and cost and deliver better ways for users to recover lost keys while making the space less complex.
Long-term, though, regulatory clarity is something that will give confidence to traditional investment service providers such as banks and institutions while creating a pathway for allowing users to access DeFi on their terms within existing apps. What’s great about this is that many customers won’t even know they are interacting with a blockchain behind the scenes as all the complex wallet interactions will be hidden. It is this collaboration between traditional finance and decentralized finance that could give DeFi the push it needs to broaden further into the mainstream.
Related:DeFi: Who, what and how to regulate in a borderless, code-governed world?
Taking action now
It’s clear that DeFi is here to stay and could become the core of finance in 2030. For that to happen though, more needs to be done today.
Right now, it’s the growing development of CBDCs that pose both a threat and an opportunity to DeFi as more nations experiment with them and governments begin to adopt them. But, just because CBDCs are gaining pace, that doesn’t mean DeFi can’t find its place in our future world too.
Yet, if people want to control their own money and know where it’s coming from while giving developing nations access to banking, then DeFi is where the future is heading. The core elements of DeFi infrastructure, such as decentralized exchanges (DEXs), borrowing and lending protocols, exchange aggregators that automatically find the best prices and cross-chain bridges, will also be needed by CBDCs in the future if these government currencies want to be able to interoperate with each other and be used as fully digital money.
DeFi is therefore playing a role as an innovation laboratory, allowing different infrastructure issues to get tested at a break-neck pace and ensuring that the correct infrastructure required by CBDCs will already be available when they are being rolled out around the world. CBDCs that adapt to make use of the rapid innovation in public blockchains and DeFi will benefit through connection to massive liquidity pools, allowing users, for example, to instantly swap between digital euro and Ethereum, or to use DeFi infrastructure to earn a yield on the digital pound.
Related:Understanding the systemic shift from digitization to tokenization of financial services
It’s the CBDCs that are purposely disconnected from DeFi that will lose out to private stablecoins — one of the fastest-growing sections of the crypto industry. But, we do not need to rush to make this a contemporary reality. There are plenty of hurdles that DeFi needs to overcome before we see the kind of mainstream adoption that becomes present in everyday life.
By 2030, our Parisian friend Célia may not know or care what part of her transactions are CBDC and DeFi, and it shouldn’t matter to her. There is still lots of work to be done to make that a reality. We hope that by 2030, Célia will be just one of the hundreds of millions of individuals who are enjoying the bright uplands of a decentralized financial world, one that will have forever changed the way we view money.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Will Harborne is a co-founder and CEO of DeversiFi, a layer-two DeFi trading platform powered by StarkWare’s scalable technology. Will has worked on technology consulting projects, first at Cambridge Consultants and then at IBM, before transitioning into work full-time in the public blockchain space and joining Bitfinex in 2017. There, he led several projects before combining his experience with his passion for Ethereum’s ecosystem of permissionless innovation to help spin out Ethfinex. Will is a member of the Melon Technical Council — one of the first major governance experiments for a blockchain-based protocol. He also holds a Masters of Engineering from the University of Cambridge.
Context had launched a beta of its NFT search platform.
The free-to-use platform makes searching for NFTs like searching Instagram.
Have you ever wondered which NFTs Twitter influencers, TikTok traders, and DAO members are actually trading? A new Web 3.0 app calledContexthas made tracking that data a lot easier.
Launched in beta on Friday, Context feels like Instagram or Pinterest for non-fungible tokens. It lets you search for NFT collections, artists, and DAOs like Friends with Benefits.
Context is a new service that makes it easy to see what’s happening on Web3.
And it goes into beta….. right now ✨
A thread 🧵
— Context (@context) October 1, 2021
“Our vision is to create a community-powered contextual layer for Web3,” wrote Context co-founder Adam Ludwin.
Unlike other NFT wallet trawlers likeNansen, Context is free. Once you’ve connected a MetaMask wallet and selected a username, youcan search the platform’s database, follow your favorite artists, and share and bid collections.
Context’s stream of NFTs is also very pretty—especially once you’ve found a collector with good taste. The app indexes Ethereum NFTs and includes market data, like reserve prices and bids, from marketplaces such as OpenSea, Rarible, and Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks.
Context was created by former Stripe software engineerLuke Milesand Chain and Pogo Financial co-founder Adam Ludwin. Ludwin was the president of a short video app called Byte, which Discord acquired earlier this year.
Every sixth death in the world is due to cancer, making it the second leading cause of death globally, and the numbers are increasing.
In 2020, 9.9 million people were estimated to have died from various forms of cancer, compared to 5.7 million in 2000, which is an increase of 66% in under 2 decades. Treatment of other forms of death has effectively improved in comparison to treatment for cancer.
Cancer was first recognized in Ancient Egypt. Once the microscope became widely used in the 18th century, it was discovered that cancer spread from its original tumor to other parts of the body.
In 1902, the genetic method by which cancer spreads was discovered by a German biologist. The American Cancer Society was founded in 1913, and the United States government alone has spent over $200 Billion on cancer research since 1971. Despite the progress, the burden of cancer and its uniform cure remains an evasive challenge to our world, as there are many hurdles for those seeking to resolve this, from misinformation to slow drug discovery.
One of the main challenges relates to cancer research and access to patient data which is critical in cancer research and therapy. Clinical trials are one part of this, where patients are enrolled into phase 2, 3, or 4 trials to test the safety and efficacy of each therapy. However, the more stages of drug discovery that involve insights using patient’s real-world data (RWD), the more accuracy and speed can be brought to the process.
However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. There are several barriers to accessing patient’s data, either through clinical trials or directly from patients. Patients may feel uncomfortable being under observation, or may not want to undergo additional visits to doctors.
For researchers, finding the right group of patients with a diverse enough representation is tricky, and can be a labor-intensive process. Furthermore, when accessing patient’s data directly from them (e.g. lab reports, doctor’s letters), security and anonymity become a major concern.
The Solution
OncoCoin provides a new way to address these challenges by leveraging blockchain technology to power an ecosystem of data-sharing and patient empowerment.
The ecosystem serves as a facilitator by offering an infrastructure through which patients may submit existing data from the comfort of their homes and researchers can seek information that will aid in drug discovery.
The OncoCoin ecosystem is a first-of-its-kind. It contains features that encourage patients to be motivated and get rewarded for their contributions, with free access to much-needed services which empower them through their cancer journey, as well as a reward for data in the form of the OncoCoin token.
Building an International Community Through Tokenization
OncoCoin is set to unfold a new world by creating new ideas to generate better experiences for patients and cancer researchers.
OncoCoin aims to facilitate an equitable method of data sharing, giving value to data, allowing patients and investors to participate in the value brought by their data.
The OncoCoin tokens (which are in the Binance Smart Chain) can be used to purchase services in the app, such as a second opinion.
OncoCoin’s token incentives will support a platform that allows patients to take control of their cancer journey and accelerates the development of new therapies. This will contribute to the development of a worldwide community of patients, as well as the generation of a more varied data pool for researchers and the reduction of impediments to international exchanging data and information requests.
The CURIA app: Empowering Patients with Unbiased Information
A crucial part of the OncoCoin ecosystem is the Curia app. Curia was born as an idea with the mission to support cancer patients seeking help in order to find the right information about their options through their treatment journey. With that purpose, the Curia app was created to bring current, accurate and relevant information to cancer patients.
Additionally, if a patient is looking for resources for a second opinion, they can use the app to connect with an entire network of healthcare professionals. In the future, patients will also be able to access digital therapeutics and other third services through the OncoCoin ecosystem. The app launched in June 2020 and is available across Europe and India and is rapidly growing into new countries.
OncoCoin Aims to Democratize Drug Discovery
Security and privacy of personal medical data is a concern for most patients. OncoCoin supports that patients should be given control over their data and the option to decide where their data goes or who sees it. Through its open-source blockchain ecosystem, alongside at-source anonymization, OncoCoin will ensure its patients maintain peace of mind that the data is collected in a very secure and transparent manner.
Patient engagement: Through the Curia app, patients access the resources and information they need to make crucial decisions about steps in their journey through cancer therapy.
Access to valuable data: By using blockchain and encryption, patients can license their existing information to research projects and accelerate drug discovery for researchers
Faster outcomes for patients: By making it easier to involve patients at all stages of the drug discovery process, insights are kept on track, meaning less time wasted on incorrect insights.
Support cancer care, globally: Curia is being made available globally, and with a branch out to developing countries, will help improve cancer care across the world.
Equitable investment: OncoCoin will be tradable on the secondary market, allowing everyone to contribute to cancer research, and see returns not only for cancer care but in their own portfolio
OncoCoin is building a new world of possibilities for patients to be involved in their cancer journey, and drive cancer research. Blockchain and tokenization is enabling all stakeholders to be involved in a democratized drive for a cure for cancer – who knows where the potential of these technologies will take us next.
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