Day: November 17, 2021

US Deputy Treasury Secretary: Bitcoin Won’t be More Dominant Than The Dollar

by CryptoPotato

According to Wally Adeyemo – US Deputy Treasury Secretary – the American national currency will continue to be the world’s most dominant one despite the surging interest in bitcoin and the altcoins.

Crypto Cannot Prevail Against The Dollar

In an interview with CNBC, Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo – described the cryptocurrency industry as a controversial one, as it might be full of opportunities, but at the same time, it poses a lot of potential hurdles:

“One of the things that we know is that digital assets present an opportunity in lots of ways for the economy, but potentially it presents challenges.”

The 40-year-old Nigerian-American added that crypto’s biggest problem is its involvement in illicit money transactions in a way that “doesn’t touch the dollar and that we can’t see as easily.” To resolve this issue, the US government should collaborate with other nations and tighten the anti-money laundering rules, Adeyemo asserted.

It is worth noting, though, that many reports continue to indicate that employing cash is still the most used payment method in criminal operations such as drug trafficking, for example. On the other hand, blockchain technology is entirely transparent as all transactions are recorded on the digital ledger and are visible for anyone with access to the Internet.

Adeyemo further outlined his support for the dollar, explaining that the recently signed $1 trillion infrastructure package would help to “unlock the potential” of the US economy and create investment opportunities for other governments. These developments will have a positive impact on the American national currency, he opined:

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“Ultimately, the thing that is going to drive the dollar’s position in the world is the decisions we make in America about investing in our economy. The reason that people are involved in the dollar-based economy… is because they want to invest in America.”

This is not the first time Adeyemo’s name has been involved in the cryptocurrency space. In September this year, he alleged the Czech Republic-based trading venue – Suex – of facilitating several illegal ransomware transactions. Following that, the digital asset exchange was banned from doing business with US entities.

Wally Adeyemo
Wally Adeyemo, Source: WSJ

Bitcoin Could Be a Threat to The Dollar

Many experts in the financial sector have shared their thoughts on the correlation between the US national currency and digital assets, and more specifically, bitcoin.

At the end of 2020, Larry Fink – Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock – praised the primary cryptocurrency, saying it could evolve into a global market. As such, its progress can question the dominance of the USD.

After considering to hop on the crypto bandwagon for a while, BlackRock did so this summer. The world’s largest asset manager allocated $383 million to two bitcoin mining companies – Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) and Riot Blockchain (RIOT).

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Crypto Exchange Volume Data Suggests Sports Deal Frenzy May Be Working

by Decrypt

It’s becoming difficult to find a professional sports league or team without at least a few cryptocurrency sponsors.

Crypto.com revealed yesterday that it has acquired the naming rights to the Los Angeles arena formerly known as the Staples Center in a 20-year contract worth $700 million. This, in part, is likely what caused its Crypto.com Coin (CRO) to jump as much as 30% today.

The Hong Kong-based crypto exchange also has a deal that adds a branded patch to Philadelphia 76ers jerseys for the next six years. This summer, the company inked a five-year, $100 million deal with Formula 1 that guarantees the company brand presence at F1 events and an NFT partnership. It’s also paying $175 million over the next five years to the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in a sponsorship deal.

It’s not alone. FTX and Coinbase have been busy with their own sports marketing deals. And a Decrypt analysis of CoinGecko exchange data shows that the sports sponsorship frenzy could be paying off.

top-5-exchange-volumes
Credit: Stacy Elliott/Decrypt

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, has started to lose ground as the longstanding dominant exchange, according to the data. At one point in the last 30 days, it accounted for 58% of volume among the top five exchanges–Binance, Coinbase, Huobi, Crypto.com and FTX. (CoinGecko ranks exchanges by a “trust score” that is partly based on the exchange’s volume, but also includes liquidity, cybersecurity and scale.) But today, Binance was down to 45% while Coinbase, Crypto.com and FTX had all gained in volume.

That doesn’t prove the bump in exchange volumes was caused by all the sports deals. Still, the gains have likely not gone unnoticed by the people signing the checks for all these deals.

On Friday, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted a screenshot of exchange volumes showing that his company had comfortably secured the number two spot behind Binance. 

Boosting name recognition, and therefore users, has recently been a popular talking point for Bankman-Fried.

“When someone’s looking to get involved in crypto for the first time, we’ve found that they haven’t heard of FTX,” he said last week at the Decrypt and Yahoo Finance Crypto Goes Mainstream event. And that’s a big part of the reason his company has spent as much as it has on sports marketing, he explained.

There’s recent survey data that backs up the strategy of targeting sports fans. While 39% of all adults say they have some familiarity with cryptocurrencies, that number jumps to 47% among the segment that identify as sports fans, according to a recent poll conducted by Morning Consult. 

Twenty-seven percent of those fans said they own some cryptocurrency. And crypto familiarity seems to scale with a sports fan’s engagement: Two out of three self-proclaimed “avid” sports fans and 72% of sports bettors said they’re familiar with cryptocurrencies.

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Opulous (OPUL) rallies 785% as fans dig the sound of NFTs in the music industry

by Cointelegraph

There is potential for the use cases of nonfungible token (NFT) technology to expand far beyond the simple tracking of unique images with varying degrees of rareness and analysts project that one NFTs will touch every facet of our lives. Already, developers, artists and corporations are considering the tokenization of all assets and some have already experimented with NFT-based concert tickets and sports passes. 

One NFT project that has been gaining traction since September is Opulous (OPUL), a protocol focused on the tokenization of the music industry. The project claims to be angled toward empowering artists to the extent that music rights can be utilized as value-backed assets in decentralized finance (DeFi).

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since hitting a low of $0.635 on Sept. 29, the OPUL token has “climbed the charts” and its price swelled 1,095% to a new all-time high of $7.60 on Nov. 15 as the 24-hour trading volume spiked 564% to $11.67 million.

OPUL/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

Three reasons for the breakout in OPUL include the successful completion of its first S-NFT sale, the token’s cross-chain capabilities which have enabled support from multiple centralized (CEX) and decentralized exchanges (DEX) and the rising popularity of the NFT ecosystem as a whole.

High demand for the first S-NFT sale

The biggest boost in momentum for OPUL came with the launch of its first S-NFT or “security NFT” sale, a special token standard that was created in conjunction with the Republic to represent investments that fans make in artists’ songs.

Opulous partnered with artists Lil Pump and Soulja Boy to conduct the S-NFT sale for their song Mona Lisa, which reached its maximum goal of $500,000 raised in less than two hours.

Once the investment process is finalized by Republic, contributors will be able to go to the Opulous website and mint the S-NFT tokens which will be distributed on the Algorand blockchain.

As the song gains views on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music or attracts other publishers such as radio, television shows, movies or video games, royalty shares will be distributed quarterly in the form of USD Coin (USDC) directly to the wallets holding the S-NFTs.

Cross-chain capabilities and exchange support

A second factor working in OPUL’s favor has been the tokens’ cross-chain capabilities and support from several large CEXs and DEXs which have helped increase traders’ access to the token.

Unlike many of the NFT and DeFi projects that “launched in the wild” since the Uniswap-inspired summer of DeFi in 2020, OPUL received support from several large exchanges at its launch, including KuCoin and Gate.

The token was also able to launch on two of the largest DEXs in the crypto ecosystem – Uniswap and PancakeSwap – thanks to its cross-chain capabilities which currently include Ethereum (ETH), Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Algorand (ALGO).

Being listed on DEXs has enabled token holders to earn a yield through providing liquidity and those who don’t want to risk the possibility of impermanent loss can now stake their tokens on Gate which is offering an APY of 35%.

Rising popularity of NFTs

A third reason for Opulous’s recent gains is the rising popularity of the NFT ecosystem, which continues to attract a large amount of public awareness as time goes on.

A deeper dive into keyword search data on Google shows that searches for “nonfungible tokens” and “NFT” is now at all-time highs with the nascent asset class surpassing searches for other popular terms including “Dogecoin”, “blockchain” and “Ethereum.”

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.