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Feds Seize $3.6 Billion In Stolen Bitcoin, Arrest Couple Five Years After Massive Crypto Exchange Hack

by ForbesFebruary 8, 2022

Topline

U.S. authorities arrested a New York City couple Tuesday for allegedly conspiring to launder $4.5 billion worth of bitcoin stolen during a hack of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016, $3.6 billion of which federal authorities have recovered in what the Department of Justice is calling the largest financial seizure ever.

Bitcoin prices fell sharply after news of the seizure, which authorities called their largest ever.

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Key Facts

According to court filings, 34-year-old Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, conspired to launder the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoins—currently worth about $5 billion—that were stolen from the Bitfinex platform after a breach of the cryptocurrency exchange’s systems in 2016.

At the time, the unnamed hacker allegedly made more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions transferring the stolen cryptocurrency to a digital wallet under Lichntenstein’s control, authorities said Tuesday.

They allege Lichentenstein and Morgan then employed “numerous sophisticated laundering techniques”—including using fake identities to set up online accounts and running computer programs to automate transactions—to transfer about 25,000 stolen coins out of the wallet and into financial accounts jointly controlled by the couple over the next five years.

According to the DOJ on Tuesday, special agents obtained court-authorized search warrants to go through the couple’s online accounts and were able to find files containing the private keys required to access a digital wallet containing 94,000 bitcoins representing about $3.6 billion in stolen funds.

In a statement, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the recovered funds marked the DOJ’s “largest financial seizure ever” and called the case proof that “cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals.”

The couple has been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and conspiracy to defraud the United States, which carries a maximum sentence of five years.

Tangent

The price of bitcoin pared recent gains after the announcement, falling nearly 2% to $42,910.

Crucial Quote

“Cryptocurrency and the virtual currency exchanges trading in it comprise an expanding part of the U.S. financial system, but digital currency heists executed through complex money laundering schemes could undermine confidence in cryptocurrency,” U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves said in a Tuesday statement.

Key Background

Ransomware attacks on Colonial Pipeline and meatpacker JBS, which sparked widespread gasoline shortages and meat-plant shutdowns, placed a massive spotlight on anonymity concerns last summer. In both instances, the companies paid millions in bitcoin to hackers taking advantage of the cryptocurrency’s anonymized transactions. “The only way you can begin to get on top of the pervasive” ransomware problem is “to develop a pattern,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said last summer after the DOJ seized $2.3 million in bitcoin as part of its investigation into Colonial Pipeline. At the time, Blunt called cryptocurrencies the “ransom payment of choice” for hackers and said lawmakers shouldn’t allow cryptocurrencies to operate “behind the scenes.”

What To Watch For

President Joe Biden is reportedly slated to release an executive order that will task federal agencies with regulating cryptocurrencies as a matter of national security as soon as this month.

Twitter

San Francisco, California

Crypto’s town square. America’s third-largest social network is where Elon Musk shamelessly pumps canine-coins and where millions of tiny traders try to send their latest purchases to the moon in 280-characters or less. There were 220 million tweets about NFTs in 2021 and an additional 60 million in January 2022 alone. And just because its crypto-obsessed CEO Jack Dorsey left in November to devote all of his time to Block (see above) doesn’t mean corporate Twitter is forsaking its claim on the decentralized future. Twitter is doubling down on creator tools, like tipping other tweeters with Bitcoin and letting users display their NFT collections as profile pictures—for a fee.

Blockchain platforms: Bitcoin, Ethereum

Key leader: Parag Agrawal, CEO

Tencent

Shenzhen, China

Over the past decade, Tencent has built WeChat into China’s “super app,” used by more than 1 billion people for everything from gaming and social media to messaging and shopping. Now Tencent is developing a one-stop blockchain platform called Tencent Cloud Blockchain. Ten provinces and cities including Hainan, Guangdong, and Beijing already use the platform to issue electronic bills for things like healthcare and transportation. As of last August, Tencent’s blockchain has processed more than 15 million transactions.

Blockchain platforms: ChainMaker, Hyperledger Fabric, FISCO BCOS

Key leader: Bing Shao, head of Tencent Cloud’s blockchain business

LINE Corporation

Tokyo, Japan

Part of Z Holdings, the $43 billion (market cap) Japanese internet conglomerate that also owns Yahoo Japan and Japan’s PayPal, LINE is the country’s largest messaging app with 300 million users. The company has developed a proprietary blockchain, also called LINE, which is owned by Softbank Group and NAVER Corporation. Its services include a cryptocurrency exchange, an NFT marketplace, and a digital wallet with more than 254,000 registered accounts. The associated cryptocurrency, LINK, is a hit, attracting nearly a million miners. As of late January it had a market cap of $655 million.

Blockchain platform: LINE Blockchain

Key leaders: Woosuk Kim, CEO of Unblock & LINE Tech Plus; Keun Koo, blockchain development lead at Unchain

Kakao Corporation

Jeju-si, South Korea

South Korea’s dominant mobile messenger application, KakaoTalk is used by nearly 90 percent of the country’s 52 million population and as of May 2021 it now has a marketplace for trading NFTs . Called KrafterSpace, the exchange is fully integrated with OpenSea the San Francisco-based NFT bazaar that recently raised money at a $13.3 billion valuation. On KrafterSpace users can purchase tokenized artwork directly through Kakao’s messenger app with the accompanying digital wallet named Klip Drops. Both KrafterSpace and Klip Drops are built on Kakao’s own blockchain, Klaytn, which has more than 800,000 active users. Separately, in August, Kakao launched a $515 million Klaytn Growth Fund to support developers willing to contribute to its blockchain’s ecosystem.

Blockchain platform: Klaytn

Key leader: David Shin, Head of Klaytn Global Adoption

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Tagged : All News / Blockchain / Crypto & Blockchain / Money

How Crypto’s Original Bubble Boy Rode Ethereum And Is Now Pulling The Strings Of The DeFi Boom

by ForbesFebruary 8, 2022

OLAF CARLSON-WEE rode 2017’s “initial coin offering” craze to become one of crypto’s top venture investors. Now he’s raking in hundreds of millions, from a blockchain rage called DeFi, which promotes the fantasy of democratized financial services.

On a frigid, windy day in January, Olaf Carlson-Wee is settling in for a long Zoom call from his $10 million Soho loft in Manhattan, reflecting on how far he has come in the four and a half years since Forbes featured him on its cover, labeling him the poster child for the cryptocurrency bubble of 2017.

Back then, a speculative frenzy of hundreds of initial coin offerings (ICOs) pushed the cryptocurrency market to well over $100 billion in value as greedy fools bid up junk tokens backed by little more than a white paper and some quirky computer code. Then 27, with three years of Coinbase work experience under his belt, Carlson-Wee was considered a sage. He had started a San Francisco–based hedge fund called Polychain Capital that was backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital, and his fund’s assets had swollen from $4 million in September 2016 to $200 million.

Today, despite recent turbulence that saw bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fall 30% to 50% in a matter of weeks, the market for them is still close to $2 trillion, and Polychain’s assets are $5 billion—up 125,000% since inception. Carlson-Wee just closed a $750 million raise for his third venture fund, led by Tiger Global Management and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, two of the smartest and most successful investment firms on the planet.

“We had a lot of interest. Many, many hundreds of millions in demand more than we raised,” boasts Carlson-Wee, now 32, clad in a lime-green tie-dyed T-shirt, running his fingers through his spiky, bleached blond hair.

“Whatever the ideal, in practice, DeFi is a speculator’s paradise…even after crypto’s recent correction, the amount at risk stands at nearly $80 billion.”

Carlson-Wee’s net worth has grown to an estimated $600 million because among crypto investors, he has an uncanny knack for deftly navigating a market chronically infected by hyperbole and assets without any discernible intrinsic value. Among the most profitable of his early investments was a major stake in ether, the token underpinning the Ethereum blockchain—now worth $2,700, but trading for less than $12 back in 2016 when Carlson-Wee’s Polychain went all in.

He is not shy about his new riches, quite literally created from ether. His 6,000-square-foot Soho digs, which he recently bought fully furnished, was once an art gallery owned by prominent NYC collectors. Its opulent interior design, described by its realtor as lower Manhattan’s “most Instagram-worthy” residence, was inspired by the luxury Hôtel Costes in Paris and features tin ceilings, gold columns, a cobra-shaped snakeskin chair and chandeliers fashioned from organ pipes and crystal. Its master bathroom is a study in gold, including a mirrored ceiling and a shimmering gold-plated bathtub with a large dollar sign hanging on the wall above it. A few months before he bought this New York party palace, when bitcoin was trading above $50,000, he closed on another trophy property in the Hollywood Hills. That $28.5 million, 12,000-square-foot mansion has breathtaking ocean and Los Angeles skyline views, an indoor pond, infinity pool, seven bedrooms and spaces for ten cars.

One of the keys to Carlson-Wee’s success has simply been being early. He met Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, for example, when the then-19-year-old briefly worked at Coinbase in 2013. That was just before Buterin wrote his revolutionary blockchain white paper, which one-upped bitcoin by creating a multipurpose computing platform based on so-called “smart contracts.” These agreements have no conventional legal standing, but because the terms are blindly enforced by computers, they are more immutable. Without smart contracts there could be no ICOs or NFTs.

Olaf Carson-Wee

GUERIN BLASK FOR FORBES

In 2018, at the Web 3.0 conference in Berlin, Carlson-Wee met MIT research scientist Harry Halpin—the co-creator of a super-privacy protocol called Nym. Halpin was frustrated by traditional VCs’ reluctance to back him. Says Halpin, “This smartly dressed young fella came up to me and said, ‘We at Polychain are interested in funding subversive technology.’ ” Polychain led a $6.5 million round for Nym last July, just before the startup hired Chelsea Manning.

“I like being the first person to believe in someone,” says Carlson-Wee, just back from spending his New Year holiday with a dozen friends in a house he rented in St. Barts. “Our goal is to invest in breakthrough technologies that will enable new types of human organization and behavior.”

Polychain’s most ambitious investment foray to date has been its backing of a phenomenon known as decentralized finance, or DeFi, which uses blockchain technology in peer-to-peer applications. The promise is that DeFi could eventually become a cheaper, more private, secure and accessible replacement for traditional financial institutions, including banks and exchanges. Carlson-Wee was an early investor in DeFi’s biggest winners, such as Uniswap, an exchange; lender Compound; MakerDAO, a lender and stablecoin creator; and DeFi exchange aggregator dYdX. Blockchain-traded DeFi tokens have had eye-popping returns. The total market now amounts to $78 billion, up from $10 billion in January 2020.

Crypto idealists, including Carlson-Wee, believe DeFi is the future of finance, and just the thing to level off a lopsided financial playing field. For centuries middlemen bankers—from the Medicis of Florence to JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon—have wielded great power and amassed huge fortunes. DeFi aims to cut them out.

All DeFi functions—payments, savings, trading, lending—are conducted on blockchain-based software. Changes are made by token holder vote. There is no central control.

Carlson-Wee’s success lies not only in his ability to find the most promising DeFi startups but in Polychain’s willingness to make outsize investments in them. Decentralization and democratization may be the DeFi ideal, but when it comes to decisions that might affect Polychain’s returns, Carlson-Wee is very much in charge. He doesn’t hesitate to use his firm’s formidable voting power to ensure that the interests of his partners come first.

“I’m very much a pragmatist,” he admits. “I don’t think crypto fixes wealth inequality or wealth concentration, but it does shake the snow globe.”

Olaf Carson-Wee

GUERIN BLASK FOR FORBES

OLAF CARLSON-WEE’S crypto journey started in 2011, the summer after his junior year at Vassar College in upstate New York. An avid fan of role-playing video games, he had read about how the underground drug marketplace Silk Road was enabled by a virtual currency called bitcoin. His excitement over the new tech drove him to sink almost his entire life savings—about $700—into bitcoin at prices ranging from $2 to $16. He went on to write his senior thesis in sociology on the emerging cryptocurrency.

After graduating in 2012 and spending a few months working as a lumberjack while living in a yurt on a commune in Washington State, he blindly emailed his thesis to the Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, the cofounders of budding crypto exchange Coinbase. They hired him as their first employee and put him in charge of customer service. Carlson-Wee famously insisted that his entire $50,000 salary be paid in bitcoin.

Though he had little coding experience, he helped automate many of Coinbase’s routine customer-service responses. He was eventually put in charge of risk and lowered Coinbase’s fraud rate by 75%.

Early in his crypto career, Carlson-Wee says, he realized that entrepreneurs with a strong vision for the future were funded and rewarded most, rather than those who were reactive or fast followers.

“Coinbase had the architecture of a central custodian. It was very contrarian in crypto at the time. It was taking on the compliance and antifraud burdens of accepting bank payments,” he says. “This was something nobody had really been able to do.”

But as Coinbase expanded and became more mainstream, it was forced to pay greater attention to regulatory demands. It began to intentionally steer clear of crypto’s bleeding edge, where Carlson- Wee felt the most potential lay. He was most excited about Buterin’s new Ethereum blockchain, which unlike bitcoin could (theoretically) run virtually any type of digital platform, making possible decentralized versions of Uber, Facebook, Google or Dropbox.

Former Coinbase colleague Adam White, recently president of crypto wallet Bakkt, believes that as Coinbase added dozens of software engineers from top schools, Carlson-Wee had become pigeonholed as the “operations guy.”

“I started to realize that Olaf was more than just the guy who was going to work hard and answer [customer] support tickets,” says White, who recalls a holiday party in 2014 at which Carlson-Wee casually told him that bitcoin would never trade as low as $300 again.

In 2016, Carlson-Wee informed Armstrong and Ehrsam that he was quitting to form a crypto hedge fund. “I realized that [Coinbase] was going to broadly follow its path with or without me,” he says. “By founding something, I could regain that feeling of super-high leverage.”

LEVERAGE HAPPENS to be the fuel powering the current DeFi boom. From a capital-raising standpoint, DeFi is the successor to initial coin offerings. Most of the ICOs of 2016 and 2017 were junky digital IPOs in which speculators traded ether tokens to invest in hundreds of questionable projects. The majority were worse than even the shoddiest stocks. There was almost no disclosure, and investors had no real equity or voting power. Billions were lost.

DeFi is touted as an improvement because investors in these Ethereum-based platforms are merely lending their capital, usually in the form of ether or a stablecoin like USD Coin, to others in peer-to-peer networks. The rules are set out in smart contracts embedded in the Ethereum blockchain. By lending crypto, DeFi investors can make money—lots of it— through something called yield farming.

It works like this: Say you own $10,000 worth of ether. Rather than having it sit in your digital wallet on Coinbase earning zero interest, you could deposit it in a DeFi platform like Compound, making it available for somebody else to borrow for a set time. In exchange you’ll earn an annual yield as high as 30%. But that’s not all. You’ll also be rewarded with Compound’s own tokens, COMP, the platform’s native asset, which entitles you to vote and have a say in governing the network. COMP tokens also trade actively. Between their launch in June 2020 and mid-2021, they skyrocketed in value from about $65 each to more than $800. Even after the recent crypto crash they’re up about 90% since release.

“You can now have lending agreements for millions of dollars between two people around the world who don’t know each other’s identities,” says Carlson- Wee, whose 2018 $2 million investment in Compound led its seed round at a $22 million valuation. Compound released its token in June 2020. Its market cap soared to $4 billion in 2021 and now hovers around $800 million.

“These loans can be an agreement between a person and a computer, or a corporation and a computer. There’s no concept of identity or legal contract. And yet [because of smart contracts] you can have literally billions of dollars [move] between these people,” Carlson-Wee says.

Whatever the ideal, in practice, DeFi is a speculator’s paradise. The COMP tokens you’re awarded for lending out your ether on Compound can then be deposited in any number of decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap (also a Polychain holding), where you can likewise earn interest and more free tokens. On Uniswap you earn UNIs. Then you can deposit your UNIs on SushiSwap and earn SUSHI. And so on.

It can seem like a self-perpetuating bubble. Over the last 12 months, DeFi platforms including Uniswap and SushiSwap have averaged over $50 billion in transaction volume per month, but there’s little evidence that any of this goes toward the things banks typically finance—say, company expansion or even buying a home.

“Polychain is among a handful of big hedge funds and VCs including Paradigm, Bain Capital Ventures and Pantera, which, behind the scenes, centrally control many of the biggest decentralized platforms.”

Things don’t always go smoothly, either. Chainalysis estimates that in 2021, 72% of $3.2 billion in crypto assets stolen came from DeFi sites. In early 2020, when the emerging pandemic caused markets to plummet, investors in a Polychain-backed DeFi platform called MakerDAO suffered $8 million in losses when its underlying software liquidated 1,200 collateral positions in response to a 55% drop in the price of ether. At one point the foundation that runs MakerDAO considered an emergency shutdown. The platform was saved in part because ether rebounded 80% in a few months. Much more is at risk now. In March 2020 the total value of digital assets “locked up” in DeFi platforms was about $10 billion; today, even after crypto’s recent correction, the amount at risk stands at nearly $80 billion. Little wonder that powerful opponents, such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have called DeFi “the most dangerous part of the crypto world.”

IF THE NEW WORLD of decentralized finance is a democracy, then Olaf Carlson- Wee is a Tammany Hall boss. With large stakes in the biggest platforms including Compound, Uniswap and MakerDAO, Polychain’s analysts are actively involved in creating their architecture, known as “tokenomics,” as well as designing the incentive mechanisms that attract investors.

When it comes to Compound’s governance, for example, Polychain is the second-most-powerful voting bloc behind Andreessen Horowitz. It controls 306,000 of 2.8 million votes, roughly 11%. Andreessen has 321,000. Important votes on things like lowering loan collateral requirements require that only 400,000 votes be cast, so, as long as they agree, the venture firms can easily sway any vote their way. In fact, Polychain is among a handful of big hedge funds and VCs including Paradigm, Bain Capital Ventures and Pantera, which, behind the scenes, centrally control many of the biggest decentralized platforms.

Unlike voting for common stocks, there is no mandate to notify token holders of upcoming votes, and for those who store their DeFi tokens on exchanges like Coinbase there isn’t even a mechanism to allow voting.

“A decision does not pass on Uniswap, Aave or Compound unless it is approved by the founding team,” says Andre Cronje, founder of Yearn.Finance, a yield farming robo-advisor. Carlson-Wee openly admits that his team works with founders on all major proposals. Adds Cronje, “As much as there is talk of decentralization, unless it is back-channeled there will be no approval.”

Carlson-Wee prefers not to dwell on DeFi’s inherent contradictions. “I’ve never really viewed decentralization as an end goal or a feature that users want,” he says. “What people really want are security guarantees. And decentralization is usually the best way to get them.”

These days, he’s focused mostly on where to deploy his $750 million in fresh capital. Polychain takes a thematic approach to investing in early-stage startups (see table, page 65), something that the youthful money man says he gleaned from VC veteran Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures.

In the fast-moving cryptoverse, DeFi is yesterday’s bubble. NFTs and the metaverse are the next wave of froth Carlson- Wee wants to surf. “The internet generation cares about avatars and profile pictures more than clothing and cars. As we transition to digital lifestyles and, eventually, a fully internet-native metaverse, NFTs become the artifacts all around us,” he says, a glint in his blue eyes. “Imagine a game world where the price of a token going up would actually expand the size of the game.”

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Tagged : All News / Crypto & Blockchain / Daily Cover / DeFi / Editors' Pick / Ethereum / Money

Forbes Blockchain 50 2022

by ForbesFebruary 8, 2022

Cryptocurrencies hog the spotlight, but blockchain’s biggest innovations are below the surface, saving billons each year for the world’s largest companies.

_{Reported by Maria Abreu, Nina Bambysheva, Justin Birnbaum, Lauren Debter, Michael del Castillo, Steven Ehrlich, Chris Helman, Katie Jennings, Jeff Kauflin, Javier Paz, Jon Ponciano, Marie Schulte-Bockum}

You’ve come a long way, blockchain! Since our inaugural roundup of the Blockchain 50, published in 2019, the billion-dollar companies (minimum, by sales or market value) on our annual list have moved beyond test projects and now rely on “distributed ledger” technology to do serious work. A lot of the action is in the back office, verifying insurance claims or facilitating real estate deals. It has also become vital to supply chains, whether checking the provenance of conflict minerals like cobalt or tracking auto parts for Renault. Nearly half of the Blockchain 50 are based outside the United States; 14% are Chinese. New this year: venture capital firms, which as a group invested more than $32 billion in the sector in 2021.

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether grab all the headlines, especially after booming last year and then losing more than $1 trillion in value since November. But in many ways, speculative cryptocurrencies are the least intriguing blockchain application. The most lasting impact will come as more and more multinationals integrate blockchains into their daily operations, unleashing untold efficiencies.

Adobe

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

In October 2021, the company that makes Photoshop and the keeper of the PDF format launched Content Attribution, which lets creators export their images directly to certain nonfungible-token (NFT) exchanges: KnownOrigin, OpenSea, Rarible and SuperRare. The feature lets artists protect their work against fraudulent claims by irrefutably proving their provenance before “minting” them as NFTs ready for auction. The service will eventually be available to all of Adobe’s 20 million Creative Cloud subscribers.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Ethereum

KEY LEADER: Will Allen, VP at Adobe overseeing its Content Authenticity Initiative

Allianz

MUNICH, GERMANY

The insurance giant ($164 billion, 12-month sales) uses blockchain to streamline cross-border auto insurance claims in Europe. Different teams and incompatible databases used to mean lots of back-and-forth emails. Claims could take months to settle. Now there’s a single source record of each claim. Processing time has been reduced to minutes, and costs have fallen 10%. So far it’s being used by 25 Allianz subsidiaries to settle 850,000 claims.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Hyperledger Fabric, Corda

KEY LEADER: Bob Crozier, chief architect of Allianz Technology and global head of blockchain for Allianz Group

Andreessen Horowitz

MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA

Arguably the largest crypto investor in the world, the venture capital shop also known as “a16z” has raised around $3.1 billion in three dedicated blockchain funds over the past three years. That includes the massive $2.2 billion Crypto Fund III, which launched in June 2021. In total, the blue-chip firm has funded at least 60 startups working with blockchain and was an early investor in Coinbase, now valued at $34 billion. a16z also hopes to shape crypto regulation, having hired former officials from the SEC, Treasury and the Department of Justice to lobby policymakers.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Flow, Celo, Near, Arweave and others

KEY LEADER: Chris Dixon, general partner and leader of a16z Crypto

Ant Group

HANGZHOU, CHINA

Since July 2020, this Alibaba affiliate has devoted 10,000 developers to blockchain. Already they’ve created 30 applications, generating over 100 million blockchain-tracked documents including patents, vouchers and warehouse receipts. The most mature AntChain application is Trusple (Trust Made Simple), which connects international buyers of products and components—beads in the apparel industry, say—to 6 million Chinese sellers. The app simplifies tax, customs and shipping, and enables banks to instantly complete payment, reducing auditing costs and default risk. Nearly 20 global banks including CitiBank, BNP Paribas, Singapore’s DBS and Japan’s Mizuho are providing financing via the platform.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: AntChain

KEY LEADER: Geoff Jiang, president of Intelligent Technology Business Group, Ant Group

Anthem

INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA

The $137 billion (sales) Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee is testing the blockchain to try to speed up an arcane administrative process known as “coordination of benefits,” which determines one’s primary insurer. It usually requires a series of faxes (yes! faxes!) and phone calls and can take up to three months. Through a shared ledger with Chicago-based Health Care Service Corporation for certain Medicaid members in Texas, the companies now make this determination in minutes or hours. Anthem’s blockchain program processes around 3,000 to 5,000 verifications a month.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Rajeev Ronanki, Anthem’s president of digital platforms

Aon

DUBLIN, IRELAND

Unintended policy cancellations are a big problem for insurers and often occur when a customer underpays or forgets to pay a premium. In 2021, insurance broker Aon ($12 billion, 12-month sales) partnered with insurance carrier Zurich to move invoicing to an immutable blockchain ledger—already leading to a double-digit decrease in cancellation notices. The technology, known as Adept, was developed by a subsidiary of Acord, the Pearl River, New York–based body that sets standards for the global insurance industry. Aon hopes to bring 10 more counterparties onto its blockchain this year.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Corda

KEY LEADERS: Christa Davies, CFO

A.P. Moller—Maersk

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

The world’s second-largest container shipper ($54.5 billion trailing 12 months) now counts 250 ports and 20 ocean carriers using its proprietary TradeLens blockchain, which cuts time and reams of paperwork out of tracking containers as they move through global seaports. Sportswear giant Puma, which ships out of northern Germany, can now track a specific container in seconds rather than hours, according to Maersk. TradeLens, which Maersk co-developed with IBM in 2018, has tracked more than 55 million container shipments and is now being used by other shipping giants such as Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd and Singapore’s Ocean Network Express.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: TradeLens, Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Christian Hammer, chief technology officer, TradeLens

Baidu

BEIJING, CHINA

China’s fourth-largest tech firm has 20,000 developers building (mostly) financial applications on its open-source blockchain. Last year they generated $47 million in revenue, a drop in the bucket for the $15.5 billion (sales) firm, but the future looks bright. In September Baidu won its largest contract to date, a $25 million deal with the government of Tongxiang, a city southwest of Shanghai, to build software to track the supply chain for the roughly $5 billion worth of synthetic fibers used to make clothes in the textile center. Efficiencies from moving its workflow to a shared ledger have already cut lending costs by 50 basis points. Baidu estimates that the blockchain has helped reduce the supply chain’s energy consumption by 17% and could remove 15,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the environment each year.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: XuperChain

KEY LEADER: Xiao Wei, chief manager of Baidu Blockchain

BHP

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

In 2020 BHP, the $61 billion (sales) Anglo-Australian multinational mining outfit, sold its first “paperless” shipment of Australian iron ore to China. That evolved in 2021 to trading cargoes of copper concentrate to China, with all documents, assays and emissions data enshrined on its MineHub blockchain platform. BHP has since adopted blockchain-based traceability to ensure there’s no “dilution” of the nickel it sells to Tesla’s Shanghai battery factory and to track the carbon emissions of the copper it sends from Chile to electric cable maker Southwire in Carrollton, Georgia. BHP is now in talks with suppliers to use blockchain to guarantee that the rubber in the 6,000 giant truck tires it uses each year was produced without slave labor or illegal deforestation.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: MineHub, Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Michiel Hovers, group sales and marketing officer

Block

SAN FRANCISCO

Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey’s other company, formerly known as Square, generated $42 million in fees from its Cash App’s bitcoin brokerage in just the third quarter of 2021. It’s a safe and easy way for crypto newbies to get into the game: Block generated $9.8 billion in revenue from bitcoin sales in the 12 months ending September 2021. Dorsey left Twitter in November and is a vocal crypto booster, so expect Block to lean into its new name. In July, it created a business called TBD, which focuses on building a decentralized financial system and is looking to build an energy-efficient bitcoin mining system.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Bitcoin

KEY LEADER: Jack Dorsey, CEO

BNY Mellon

New York

This 238-year-old bank is fully embracing the future: The institution that Alexander Hamilton started now wants to be king of back-office servicers for crypto ETFs. The firm already has 90% market share in Canada, meaning it provides tax and administrative services to most of the 17 crypto ETFs currently trading up north. In October it announced another big ETF applicant, Grayscale’s $23 billion Bitcoin Trust. New York–based Fireblocks, which provides crypto custody services, is a new BNY Mellon investment valued at $8 billion.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum

KEY LEADERS: Roman Regelman, CEO of asset servicing and head of digital; Mike Demissie, head of digital assets; Ben Slavin, global head of ETFs

Boeing

CHICAGO

Boeing is partnering with Canada’s TrustFlight and developer RaceRocks to build a so-called digital aircraft record system that helps airlines keep up with required maintenance. This expands on Boeing’s earlier blockchain initiative with Honeywell’s GoDirect Trade platform, which in 2020 securely sold $1 billion in Boeing aircraft parts. In time they envision a global airworthiness records platform, which could save 25% in maintenance costs—worth billions annually across the industry.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Go Direct, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy

KEY LEADER: Charles S. Sullivan, president, Boeing Canada Operations

Breitling

GRENCHEN, SWITZERLAND

The luxury watchmaker now tracks 320,000 timepieces on the blockchain, giving customers access to detailed product history and proof of authenticity. Breitling is also using it to move into the resale market. Want to sell an Avenger you were given a decade ago? You can get an instant appraisal via your digital wallet. Looking to buy? Like consulting Carfax before purchasing a Toyota, you can easily check out the number of previous owners and repair history. In February, Breitling will let European owners buy, sell or trade timepieces online; it already allows customers to trade in old watches for store credit. It’s running tests in Switzerland to let customers quickly alert police to stolen goods via their digital wallet and is experimenting with blockchain-based warranty claims for lost watches.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Ethereum

KEY LEADER: Antonio Carriero, chief digital and technology officer

China Construction Bank

BEIJING, CHINA

The world’s second-largest bank, with $4.7 trillion in assets, has so far processed $141 billion worth of transactions on private blockchains for everything from supply-chain financing to cross-border payments. Among its more recent products is EasyPay, designed to make it simpler for corporations to send large, paperwork-intensive transactions with fewer errors and less need for audits. If a company in Guangxi wants to buy palm oil from Labuan, Malaysia, the counterparties can load their trade contract, receipts and waybills into the shared ledger. Local CCB branches can then process both halves of the trade in parallel, instead of sequentially. The result: Total settlement time is reduced from two days to about ten minutes. The platform now connects 14,000 bank locations.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Tianshu BaaS, CCB Chain, BC Trade 2.0

KEY LEADER: Lei Xing, senior manager at CCB Financial Technology Company

CME Group

CHICAGO

In October, the dollar value of Chicago Mercantile Exchange crypto futures reached $4.7 billion daily, temporarily making the CME the largest crypto derivatives exchange in the world. That same month the SEC approved the first U.S. bitcoin futures ETF, Proshares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO), which now has $1 billion in assets. CME has launched crypto futures contracts for ethereum, as well as “micro” bitcoin and “micro” ethereum futures, tailored for those who want to invest $150,000 or less.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum

KEY LEADER: Tim McCourt, global head of equity index and alternative investments

Coinbase

SAN FRANCISCO

The largest crypto exchange in the U.S. went public in April 2021, and its market value soared as high as $94 billion before settling to a recent $40 billion. In the third quarter of 2021, Coinbase logged more revenue ($1.3 billion) and net profit ($406 million) than in all of 2020, while its customer base swelled from 43 million to 73 million in the first nine months of the year. Next: diversification. Its “Coinbase Cloud” software aims to help developers build crypto applications, and in October, it announced an NFT marketplace to compete with OpenSea. A month later, CEO Brian Armstrong told investors Coinbase NFT could become “as big or bigger” than its trading business.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum and dozens of others

KEY LEADER: Brian Armstrong, CEO

De Beers

LONDON

The $5.1 billion (12-month sales) diamond producer has registered more than 400,000 stones, worth some $2 billion, on its Tracr blockchain, up 50% since January 2021. The platform records a diamond’s cut, color, clarity and karat, then tracks it along the supply chain. Users can instantly verify the rock’s origin and authenticity with a simple scan as it’s mined, cut, polished and sold—eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming mail-in verification. Tracr now has more than 30 industry participants, including Zales, Jared and Kay Jewelers.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Tracr, Ethereum

KEY LEADER: Jason McIntosh, chief product officer, Tracr

Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation

JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

If you bought or sold a security in the U.S. last year, odds are that the clearing and settlement services were provided by DTCC, far and away the largest post-services firm in the world. In September DTCC, which processed $2.3 quadrillion in 2020 trades (total face value of the securities; trailing 12-month sales $2 billion), successfully completed a six-month test on a blockchain project that will reduce errors and cut settlement times from two days to less than one. DTCC’s main business remains publicly listed securities, but its new Digital Securities Management application is targeting pre-IPO companies with privately traded shares.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: ION, DSM, Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Rob Palatnick, managing director and global head of tech research

Digital Currency Group

STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT

Think of DCG as a crypto conglomerate. The firm owns five major crypto companies: trading platform Genesis, news site Coindesk, digital asset exchange and wallet Luno, bitcoin mining firm Foundry and Grayscale, the largest digital asset manager in the world, with more than 150 portfolio companies and $39.6 billion under management. In November, DCG raised $700 million in a private stock sale led by Softbank at a $10 billion valuation, bumping founder Barry Silbert’s net worth to $3.2 billion. DCG’s newest startup, Foundry, has taken advantage of crypto miners being banned from China in May to create the world’s largest bitcoin mining pool, providing 19% of the network’s total processing power.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and others

KEY LEADER: Barry Silbert, CEO

Fidelity

BOSTON

Fidelity started mining bitcoin in 2015 when it was trading below $500, making the $11.1 trillion asset administrator one of the first traditional institutions to dabble in crypto. But true to its conservative nature, the 401(k) giant (2020: $21 billion sales) steered retail customers clear of owning crypto directly. Its main crypto niche today is not retail but providing custodial services and research to institutional clients through its Fidelity Digital Assets unit. The number of these big clients doubled to nearly 200 in 2021. Next: overseas expansion. Last year, Fidelity launched a Canadian bitcoin ETF and secured a permanent crypto license from the U.K. financial regulator.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Bitcoin

KEY LEADER: Tom Jessop, head of Fidelity Digital Assets

FTX

NASSAU, THE BAHAMAS

Led by 29-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried, the world’s richest crypto billionaire (net worth: $26.5 billion), FTX dominates the hypercompetitive crypto exchange landscape. It handles some 10% of the $3.4 trillion face value of derivatives (mostly futures and options) traded by crypto investors each month. FTX pockets 0.02% of each of those trades on average, good for around $750 million in nearly risk-free revenue—and $350 million in profit. Additionally, the company hauled in a record $1.5 billion in private funding last year, rocketing its valuation from $1.2 billion to $25 billion. Eager to become a household name, FTX is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing, signing up a slew of celebrity brand ambassadors including Tom Brady, David Ortiz and Kevin O’Leary.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and dozens more

KEY LEADER: Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO

Fujitsu

TOKYO

The $32 billion (12-month sales) telecommunications and computer hardware company runs a blockchain innovation lab in Brussels with more than 40 clients— from a rice-trading startup to giant brewer Anheuser-Busch. The companies use the lab to test fresh ideas, backed by Fujitsu’s technical expertise. In November, for example, water purification firm Botanical Water Technologies started building a trading platform using Fujitsu’s in-house distributed ledger technology, which will allow sugar mills, distilleries and cola makers to sell or reuse the water they would normally discard during production. The platform, launching in April, will trace the water as it’s purified, sold and delivered, and give companies the option to donate a portion of their purified water to water-scarce communities.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Hyperledger Fabric, Besu and Cactus, plus Ethereum

KEY LEADERS: Frederik De Breuck, head of Enterprise Blockchain Solution Center; Shingo Fujimoto, manager of data and security laboratory, Fujitsu Research

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China

BEIJING

The largest bank on the planet ($5.6 trillion in assets) has 40 blockchain applications, which last year handled a total of more than $48 billion worth of transactions for local governments and industries including construction and transportation. Among its most innovative apps is Icago, which rewards users for making use of energy-efficient vehicles, whether trains, buses or electric cars. The bank’s blockchain connects wallets owned by ICBC customers to government transportation data. Carbon credits issued by the transit commission as nonfungible tokens can be redeemed for China’s new central-bank digital currency. In the future, securitized carbon emissions will be sold as bonds to companies looking to meet carbon reduction requirements. In Qingdao, a city known for its beer, the program removed 99,000 kilograms of carbon in 2021. This year, the program will expand to Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu and seven other cities.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Emperor Seal Chain

KEY LEADER: Chaowei Liu, principal manager

JPMorgan Chase

NEW YORK

JPMorgan’s Onyx Digital Assets network is making waves in the massive ($1.5 trillion a day, face value) repo market, the overnight government bond market that’s a steady source of profits for large financial institutions. By using smart contracts and JPM Coin, a digitized version of the U.S. dollar, Onyx repo trades settle in real time instead of overnight, reducing settlement risk and manual processing. The intraday repo application has so far facilitated the movement of $230 billion in trades, completing about $1 billion in transactions a day. In June, Goldman Sachs began using Onyx.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: ConsenSys Quorum

KEY LEADER: Umar Farooq, CEO of Onyx by JPMorgan

Kakao Corporation

Jeju-si, South Korea

South Korea’s dominant mobile messenger application, KakaoTalk, is used by nearly 90 percent of the country’s 52 million people, and as of May 2021 it has a marketplace for trading NFTs. Called KrafterSpace, the exchange is fully integrated with OpenSea, the San Francisco–based NFT bazaar that recently raised money at a $13.3 billion valuation. On KrafterSpace users can purchase tokenized artwork directly through Kakao’s messenger app with the accompanying digital wallet, called Klip Drops. Both KrafterSpace and Klip Drops are built on Kakao’s own blockchain, Klaytn, which has more than 800,000 active users. Separately, in August, Kakao launched a $515 million Klaytn Growth Fund to support developers willing to contribute to its blockchain’s ecosystem.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Klaytn

KEY LEADER: David Shin, head of Klaytn Global Adoption

LINE Corporation

TOKYO

Part of Z Holdings, the $36 billion (market cap) Japanese internet conglomerate that also owns Yahoo Japan and Japan’s PayPal competitor, LINE is the country’s largest messaging app, with 300 million users. The company has developed a proprietary blockchain, also called LINE, owned by Softbank Group and South Korean internet conglomerate NAVER Corporation. Its services include a cryptocurrency exchange, an NFT marketplace and a digital wallet with more than 254,000 registered accounts. The associated cryptocurrency, LINK, is a big hit, attracting nearly a million miners. As of late January it had a market cap of $669 million.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: LINE Blockchain

KEY LEADERS: Woosuk Kim, CEO of Unblock and LINE Tech Plus; Keun Koo, head of blockchain development at Unchain

Marathon Digital Holdings

LAS VEGAS

Five years ago, Marathon was mostly known as patent troll, filing a raft of lawsuits (most settled out of court) against corporate giants like Apple, Amazon, Dell, Yahoo, Pinterest and Twitter. In 2017 the operation had annual revenues of less than a $1 million and a market cap of less than $10 million. It aggressively pivoted toward bitcoin mining in 2017, and the Nasdaq-traded company now has a market cap of $2 billion on revenue of less than $100 million. A big beneficiary of China’s bitcoin-mining ban, Marathon currently holds at least 8,133 bitcoin worth $300 million. The company intends to put to work 70,000 more servers in early 2022, increasing its computers devoted to crypto mining to 199,000, good for approximately 1.2% of total global bitcoin mining activity.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Bitcoin

KEY LEADER: Fred Thiel, CEO

Mastercard

PURCHASE, NEW YORK

Twenty-four crypto cards, including Gemini, Uphold, CoinJar and BitPay, have been launched by Mastercard, letting customers spend their digital assets at 80 million vendors around the world. In October, the credit card giant partnered with Bakkt, a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the New York Stock Exchange), which will provide technology to allow even more Mastercard issuers the ability to accommodate cryptocurrency transactions. Mastercard also runs a blockchain incubator called “Start Path,” which has so far assisted 12 crypto startups, giving them direct access to the multinational company’s products, customers, workshops and mentoring.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Terra, Rootstock, Monero, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Avalanche

KEY LEADERS: Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president of digital assets and blockchain products and partnerships

MicroStrategy

TYSONS, VIRGINIA

Enterprise software provider MicroStrategy and its crypto-Kool-Aid-guzzling CEO, Michael Saylor, are corporate America’s biggest bitcoin owners. The D.C.-area firm, which nominally makes boring back-office business software, has transformed itself during the pandemic into a crypto trading powerhouse. MicroStrategy now holds 124,391 coins worth $4.6 billion at today’s prices and has booked nearly $846 million in crypto trading profits since August 2020.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Bitcoin

KEY LEADER: Michael Saylor, CEO

National Basketball Association

NEW YORK

The NBA’s Top Shot platform has transformed the sports memorabilia business, bringing NFTs to the average fan. Powered by Vancouver, British Columbia–based Dapper Labs’ “Flow” blockchain, users can buy, sell and collect “moments,” akin to digital trading cards—such as a LeBron James dunk that recently sold for a record-setting $230,023. Its popularity isn’t slowing, either. Since November 2020, 1.3 million people created Top Shot accounts, and total sales have soared from $2.5 million to $992 million. Top Shot’s outsize success has generated broader curiosity about crypto within the league. The NBA formed a blockchain subcommittee to evaluate future opportunities, launched a WNBA version of Top Shot and entered a multiyear partnership with crypto exchange Coinbase.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Flow

KEY LEADER: Adrienne O’Keeffe, vice president of global partnerships and media

NCR

ATLANTA

The 141-year-old maker of cash registers and ATMs wants to create a massive global network of 1.5 million locations that will allow passersby to buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In January it bought Boston-based LibertyX, a bitcoin ATM company that has 30,000 machines scattered across America. In June, NCR spent $2.5 billion to buy Cardtronics, a Houston company with 285,000 ATMs at Circle Ks, CVSs and Krogers in the U.S. and nine other countries. Bitcoin, ethereum and a few other cryptocurrencies should be available on these machines by the end of the summer.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Bitcoin

KEY LEADER: Tim Vanderham, CTO

Nornickel

MOSCOW

Through its Swiss Global Palladium Fund, the world’s largest producer of palladium and refined nickel ($17.7 billion, 12-month sales) has issued $1.3 billion worth of tokenized contracts for its precious and base metals, including gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper and nickel. The contracts, stored on the Atomyze blockchain, help industrial firms like Umicore, Traxys and Glencore track the origin and environmental bona fides of their metals and make it easier to adjust inventory levels.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADERS: Marco Grossi, CEO, Atomyze AG; Alexander Stoyanov, CEO, Global Palladium Fund

Oracle

AUSTIN, TEXAS

By 2030, some 40% of all new cars will be electric. Demand for cobalt, used in EV batteries, is soaring. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s cobalt supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a war-torn country where child labor and other human rights abuses are common. Oracle and British startup Circulor, a raw-materials supply-chain tracking company, have built a blockchain-enabled platform to trace the provenance of high-risk, conflict-area raw materials such as cobalt. Many of the world’s largest EV manufacturers, including Volvo, Mercedes-Benz and Polestar, have signed on for the service, which is built on Oracle’s blockchain.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Wei Hu, senior vice president, high availability technologies

Paradigm

SAN FRANCISCO

Started in 2018 by Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam and former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Huang, Paradigm has quickly become one of the most prominent crypto VC firms. Investments ranging from $1 million to over $100 million include FTX, Coinbase, Chainalysis, Uniswap and Sky Mavis. Sixteen are already valued at $1 billion or more. In November, Paradigm announced a new $2.5 billion fund, the largest crypto-centric venture capital fund ever.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum and others

KEY LEADERS: Fred Ehrsam and Matt Huang, cofounders

PayPal

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

In October 2020, PayPal launched a crypto brokerage service as part of its grand plan to become a one-stop financial super app. Crypto users engage with the app twice as much as regular clients, and its offering of crypto rewards through the Venmo credit card has been a big hit with younger users. Although the company now lets U.S. customers purchase up to $100,000 in crypto per week, most transactions are much smaller; daily trading volume is estimated to be under $50 million. Looking ahead, the company wants to expand its crypto offerings beyond the U.S. and U.K. and is exploring the launch of its own stablecoin.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin

KEY LEADERS: Dan Schulman, president and CEO; Jose Fernandez da Ponte, SVP and general manager for blockchain, crypto and digital currencies

Ping An (OneConnect)

SHENZHEN, CHINA

Through its subsidiary OneConnect’s blockchain financing platform, the sixth-largest company in the world has made more than $12 billion in loans to a million small and medium-sized businesses in China’s Guangdong province since January 2020. OneConnect’s software uses government data to analyze a borrower’s risk profile for banks, cutting transaction processing to as little as 10 minutes—a massive money saver for its 788 client financial institutions, including $5.6 trillion powerhouse ICBC. In November, a OneConnect subsidiary partnered with the People’s Bank of China to use blockchain to track and process the financing of imports and exports from mainland China and Hong Kong.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: FiMAX

KEY LEADER: Li An, associate director of product

Providence

RENTON, WASHINGTON

In 2019, Providence, a not-for-profit Catholic health system, acquired Seattle health-tech startup Lumedic. The prize? Lumedic’s blockchain, which helps solve time-consuming administrative problems like “prior authorization”—when a doctor needs to check with a patient’s insurer to ensure certain surgeries or medications will be covered. In 2021, 16 of Providence’s hospitals and four clinics across Washington, Montana and Oregon were using its shared ledger to speed up prior authorization processing time from days to hours. Last year, more than 40,000 treatments were processed on Lumedic’s blockchain.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Corda

KEY LEADERS: Kimberly Sullivan, chief revenue cycle officer, Providence; Mike Nash, CEO, Lumedic (acquired)

Renault

BOULOGNE-BILLANCOURT, FRANCE

In response to European regulators’ ever-growing technical requirements, the French automaker ($53 billion 12-month sales) launched blockchain platform Xceed in April to track thousands of car parts going into every vehicle manufactured in 16 factories across Europe. If any characteristics—such as the size of a screw or a headrest’s positioning—aren’t up to standard, the manufacturer is automatically alerted and can then notify suppliers with the push of a button, saving weeks of time on audits. Partners include top suppliers like Faurecia, one of the world’s largest makers of automotive interiors, with $18 billion in annual revenue. By 2024, Renault hopes to enlist 3,500 suppliers in a bid to track every one of its 6,000-plus regulated car parts and features. Renault has also started 20 other in-house blockchain initiatives tackling everything from car-buying transactions to supply-chain traceability.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Odile Panciatici, blockchain VP

Samsung Group

SUWON, SOUTH KOREA

Most Americans know Samsung for TVs and other electronics, but those are just one aspect of the largest ($220 billion 12-month sales) chaebol (conglomerate) in South Korea. It also makes ships, runs theme parks, sells life insurance—and, since 2020, has been using a blockchain-based loan platform to make it easier for small and midsize enterprises to request government loans. Previously, such a request required documents from three parties—the government, the credit guarantor and the bank—which would take three weeks on average to process. The platform reduces paperwork, cutting processing time to 12 days and saving about 13,000 working hours a year.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Nexledger

KEY LEADER: Jihwan Rhie, head of Blockchain Business Planning

Signature Bank

NEW YORK

In 2015, Signature became one of the first banks to accept crypto customers. It was a prescient move: Total crypto deposits have surpassed $22 billion, and the bank has processed more than $200 billion worth of payments on its ethereum blockchain–based proprietary network, Signet. This year the company began offering bitcoin-backed loans. It has also partnered with stablecoin issuer TrueUSD to allow clients to mint and send instantaneous payments using the dollar-denominated asset. The market is a fan: Over the last 12 months, Signature’s stock has almost doubled.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Signet, Ethereum

KEY LEADER: Frank Santora, chief payments officer

Société Générale

PARIS

Last year France’s third-largest bank released Cast Framework through its Forge subsidiary. The software lets both mainstream financial firms and crypto startups create regulatory-compliant digital securities on a blockchain. A recent application was helping Banque du France refinance $45 million in securities backed by some of the bank’s home-mortgage portfolio, tracked on a blockchain. Using the blockchain reduced transaction time and saved on auditing costs. SocGen is also developing a so-called “smart contract” library of reusable code specific to financial services and has applied for a French regulatory license that will allow them to manage digital assets for clients.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: MakerDAO

KEY LEADER: Jonathan Benichou, chief financial officer, SG Forge

Sotheby’s

NEW YORK

The 278-year-old art auctioneer, known for selling Picassos, van Goghs and Warhols, is now gleefully hawking cartoon primates and pixelated cyberpunks. In April 2021, Sotheby’s held its first NFT sale, moving a body of work by digital artist Pak for $16.8 million. That was only the start: In all Sotheby’s did more than $100 million in NFT sales last year, contributing to the auction house’s record-breaking gross sales of $7.3 billion. In September, cashing in on the craze for unique NFT profile pictures on social media, Sotheby’s sold 101 images of monkeys, part of the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of 10,000 animal avatars, for $24.4 million. The auction house now accepts bids in fiat currency and cryptocurrency.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Bitcoin, Ethereum

KEY LEADERS: Stefan Pepe, CTO, Sotheby’s; Sebastian Fahey, managing director, EMEA, and executive lead for Sotheby’s Metavers

Stone Ridge Holdings Group

NEW YORK

In 2017, the financial firm that already owned a $13 billion asset manager, launched New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG), a subsidiary aimed at helping institutional investors buy and hold crypto. Stone Ridge has since bought and held some 20,000 bitcoin (worth $740 million at current prices) and last December NYDIG raised $1 billion from nine VCs including WestCap and Bessemer Venture Partners at a $7 billion valuation. Institutional clients include JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley; last year it cemented partnerships with banking software giants FIS and Fiserv.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin,Bitcoin Cash

KEY LEADERS: Ross Stevens, executive chairman; Robby Gutmann, CEO

Tech Mahindra

PUNE, INDIA

The technology arm of Indian conglomerate Mahindra Group (2021 revenue: $5.1 billion) has developed more than 60 blockchain-based products spanning telecom, media and entertainment, manufacturing, retail and energy. One of the most interesting: VaccineLedger, which was developed in collaboration with a startup funded by Unicef and Gavi, the vaccine alliance that oversees a worldwide Covid-19 vaccine database with the World Health Organization. The blockchain helps prevent counterfeiting and reduces the number of vaccines that go to waste by tracing the shots from manufacturer to recipient. It records data related to custody, temperature, location and purchase orders for each vial. VaccineLedger already operates in two states in India, with plans to expand globally.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Rajesh Dhuddu, global practice leader of blockchain and cybersecurity

Tencent

SHENZHEN, CHINA

Over the past decade, Tencent has built a Chinese “super app,” used by more than 1 billion people for everything from gaming and social media to messaging and shopping. Now it’s developing a one-stop blockchain platform, Tencent Cloud Blockchain. Ten provinces and cities including Hainan, Guangdong and Beijing already use it to issue electronic bills for things like health care and transportation. As August 2021, Tencent’s blockchain had processed more than 15 million transactions in one city alone.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: ChainMaker, Hyperledger Fabric, FISCO BCOS

KEY LEADER: Powell Li, general manager of Tencent Cloud

Twitter

SAN FRANCISCO

Crypto’s town square, where Elon Musk shamelessly pumps canine coins and where millions of tiny traders try to send their latest purchases to the moon in 280 characters or less. There were 220 million tweets about NFTs in 2021 and an additional 60 million in January 2022 alone. And just because its crypto-obsessed CEO, Jack Dorsey, left in November to devote all his time to Block (see page 68) doesn’t mean corporate Twitter is forsaking its claim to the decentralized future. Twitter is doubling down on creator tools, like tipping other tweeters with bitcoin and letting users display their NFT collections as profile pictures—for a fee.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum

KEY LEADER: Parag Agrawal, CEO

Visa

SAN FRANCISCO

The credit card giant has partnered with more than 60 crypto platforms including FTX, BlockFi, Coinbase and Binance to make it easy for people to spend digital currency through crypto-linked cards. All 80 million of Visa’s merchants now effectively accept crypto as payment, with the funds automatically converted to fiat currency before they receive it. While crypto transactions can be expensive, Visa leaves that headache to its partners, which charge as much as 2.5% in Coinbase’s case. Consumers have spent more than $6 billion using Visa crypto cards since October 2020.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum

KEY LEADER: Terry Angelos, SVP and global head of fintech

Walmart

BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS

After hundreds of listeria, salmonella and E. coli infections last year, and millions of pounds of recalled food, the FDA finally seems to be getting serious about food safety. It announced in September 2020 that manufacturers and retailers will henceforth be responsible for tracking more than a dozen types of risky foods such as romaine lettuce, soft cheeses and fish at every point along the supply chain in order to identify and toss contaminated items more rapidly. The retailer is already tracking 1,500 items on the blockchain, triple that of a year ago. Its food safety initiatives are becoming more visible to shoppers: A recent Sam’s Club pilot in China let shoppers scan a QR code to gain information about where the produce was grown and when it was harvested.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Hyperledger Fabric, Walmart Blockchain

KEY LEADERS: Archana Sristy, senior director, blockchain, Walmart Global Tech; Tejas Bhatt, senior director, global food safety innovation

WeBank

SHENZHEN, CHINA

One of WeBank’s latest blockchain apps encourages sustainable living by rewarding users for doing things like walking, taking the bus or recycling clothing. The Chinese digital bank, which is 30% owned by Tencent, issues Green Bud Points via a mini-app on WeChat that can later be exchanged for vouchers and gifts. All records are stored on its blockchain to ensure transparency and traceability. The platform already has 1 million daily active users and reports that it recorded a reduction of more than 2,500 tons of carbon emissions over 2021. Overall, WeBank has more than 70,000 coders working on its proprietary “FISCO BCOS” blockchain.

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: FISCO BCOS

KEY LEADER: Henry Ma, executive vice president and chief information officer

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Tagged : All News / Blockchain / Crypto & Blockchain / Daily Cover / Editors' Pick / Investing / Money

Will Cryptocurrencies Shatter The Monopoly Governments Have On The Creation Of Money?

by ForbesFebruary 8, 2022

If you want to see the future of cryptocurrencies, look at Turkey. Its currency, the lira, is plunging in value, down 40% against the dollar since September. The official inflation rate—which the Turks don’t trust—is 36% and rising. That’s why desperate people there are diving into cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is highly volatile and has taken a hit recently, but Turkish buyers feel its long-term value is upward, as it has been since its inception.

People walk past a Bitcoin symbol displayed at the front of a Bitcoin Exchange office in Istanbul’s famous Grand Bazaar on October 19, 2021 in Istanbul, Turkey. The number of cryptocurrency exchanges have increased across Istanbul as cryptocurrency investing continues to boom in Turkey. Many investors see cryptocurrency’s growth as a shelter against inflation and the depreciating Lira. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Getty Images

What’s really interesting—and what should give central bankers everywhere pause—is that the favorite crypto in Turkey currently is Tether. Why? Because Tether is a “stablecoin,” a class of crypto that’s tied to a specific asset—in Tether’s case, the U.S. dollar.

A stablecoin, properly structured and transparent about the actual assets backing it up, will become an alternative to government money. Its very stability makes it usable for commercial transactions, especially ones involving long-term contracts.

Sensing just such a threat, Turkey’s government last year banned cryptocurrencies as a form of payment. But such prohibitions will ultimately fail. The attraction of cryptos is precisely that they avoid traditional banking and financial payment systems. People prize their speed and the privacy they offer from greedy governments.

When people don’t trust their domestic currencies, they find more trustworthy substitutes. That’s why the dollar, for all its troubles, is still preferred around the world to local junk currencies. Over half of all dollars in circulation are being used outside the United States.

The situation in Turkey is particularly instructive. Strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s central bank has been printing too many lira. The basic money supply in Turkey has increased 50% in the past year. Instead of cooling off the printing presses, Erdoğan has scapegoated food vendors, evil foreigners and others, while demanding that the Turkish central bank lower interest rates. Similar to governments for thousands of years, Turkey’s is attacking the symptoms, not the real causes, of its inflationary problems.

It’s no wonder that two-thirds of bank deposits in Turkey are denominated in foreign currencies, primarily the dollar and the euro. The fear is that a desperate government may seize those deposits and replace them with Turkish lira.

To shore up the beleaguered lira, Turkey this past December introduced a scheme whereby in special lira savings accounts the government would guarantee to make up any depreciation of the lira against the dollar. But again, Turks are increasingly skeptical of such government promises. Hence the growing move into cryptocurrencies.

Turkey is an extreme example regarding inflation. But the U.S. and other countries are also moving—albeit more slowly—in the wrong direction.

The process of stable cryptos challenging governments’ monopoly of money is just beginning.

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Tagged : All News / Analysis / Business / Crypto & Blockchain / Money / Policy

How Far Does Your Electron Travel?

by ForbesFebruary 8, 2022

Can blockchain solve one of the most problematic issues in renewable energy?

24 May 2020, Thuringia, Henneberg: Opponents of the planned “Südlink” power line are demonstrating … [+] at the former border crossing between Bavaria and Thuringia. Photo: Michael Reichel/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa (Photo by Michael Reichel/picture alliance via Getty Images)

dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images

In recent months one of the biggest themes in energy has been the understanding that 100 percent renewable or carbon free energy is a very different proposition to 24/7.

First to cotton on to this were the big data tech giants like Google and Microsoft. They comprehended with total clarity the problems in the US of buying certificates to cover the total volume of energy consumed within a year, without consideration of time and place, and how it could destabilise the grid by sending wrong or even perverse incentives, and market signals.

Data giants arguably were in a better place than most to understand 24/7 and manage their power in a more nuanced way. With plenty of energy intensive operations that could be moved at choice, across the day and night, they could even do some useful load shifting.

But outside of this elite band with their deep pockets, it has been interesting to watch the less technocratic but similarly determined manufacturing sector change and evolve, starting their own journey to greater sustainability.

One such example is Mercedes, which, for a number of years has been asking how to become more genuinely green. Patrick Koch, Head of Origination in Germany at Statkraft, has developed the Mercedes concept for Germany together with Klaas Bauermann and the two are at the forefront of this transformation.

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“Like everyone else, Mercedes is on a journey and they are plotting their own way to get to a place that you can really call sustainable quality” Says Bauermann.

A robot mounts a cockpit into a Mercedes-Benz S-Class car on the assembly line at a plant of the … [+] Stuttgart-based luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz in Sindelfingen, southwestern Germany. Photo credit THOMAS KIENZLE/AFP via Getty Images

AFP via Getty Images

Helping the car marque on this journey has involved careful coordination of all of the electrical resources of different shapes and sizes to create solid daily intake, hour by hour, painstakingly ensuring every kilowatt hour is accounted for once and once only.

For German plants, there is the solar park near Ingolstadt and twenty-four wind farms, which according to Elke Pußkeiler, Head of Supply Chain at Mercedes, the company is keen to increase. But when the wind and sun aren’t producing enough energy to meet demand, the company needed to find a solution to the variability of its renewable energy sources. To overcome this they worked with energy supplier, Enovos, and the Norwegian energy producer and retailer, Statkraft.

Norwegian Hydro kicks in when the load outstrips the local renewable supply and every single hour is produced physically and accounted for by a Guarantee of Origin (GoO), which proves the renewable origin of the electricity. This, as well as the synchronicity of production and consumption, are independently certified by the German TÜV (the Technical Inspection Association).

Says Bauermann, “The complexity surprised us as we started to address the challenges of bringing in high-quality energy. But the mission itself was established with a very clear brief: Firstly, source for Mercedes the cleanest energy, for every hour of operation and secondly maximize, the share of local physical production (PPA) PPA , which are like a physical PPA, while minimizing the share of unbundled GoOs”.

“We start with the requirements from Mercedes and, to an increasing extent, many of their supply chain companies. The tyres, gearboxes and all the component parts that go into the car, and start building out the variable energy contributions.

“Green baseload and peak load contracts from Germany lay the foundation of supply. We then add as much wind and solar as possible, taking care not to significantly exceed the demand in any few hours. The last part is delivered from flexible hydropower in Norway, and our green battery that we use to make sure we cover Mercedes’s demand for every single hour. So it all adds up exactly.”

Predictably there is no nuclear on the Mercedes energy charts, which places the whole operation on a different footing from say Google who use nuclear, or ‘carbon free energy’ as Clean Energy Buyers Association likes to call it, as a flexible baseload.

Germany is less than a thousand kilometers from the huge hydropower stations of Norway and has barely 11 percent nuclear, so hydropower was never in question for this part of the task.

The Scandinavian hydropower gets sent, in high voltage direct current form (HVDC), by a newly built undersea connection that has only just been finished in March of this year.

19 June 2019, Schleswig-Holstein, Büsum: The end of a 516 kilometre long submarine cable is pulled … [+] ashore by a cable-laying ship in the mud flats under the dike. (Photo by Carsten Rehder/picture alliance via Getty Images)

picture alliance via Getty Images

NordLink, the new subsea interconnector between Norway and Germany, became operational with its 1,400MW link and there’s no doubt that it plays a crucial role for Mercedes.

It does raise an issue, although the power is delivered to the north of Germany, the passage through to the rest of the country is more theoretical and less physical in nature.

The importance of place

Sure, there is a national grid in Germany, but the level of electrical congestion in the north is one of the reasons for the building of a national interconnector, called Suedlink, between North Germany and South Germany. This part of an electron’s journey is a less happy story and remains far from complete: Suedlink is still under construction, with an uncertain future. The €16.7 billion price tag will push up electricity prices in Germany, despite the country already having the most expensive electricity prices in the world. While laying cable undersea is relatively easy, laying it two metres underground is a more expensive proposition. And none of the residents between Schleswig Holstein and Baden Württemberg want to see more power lines crossing their countryside, so tunnelling it remains the only, if most expensive option.

Clearly bringing the energy from north to south Germany has its issues. And while many energy commentators are unconcerned about this congestion issue, and see the process as electrons coming into and out of a big and somewhat theoretical lake, others are less certain about this view.

One seasoned investor with twenty years experience, and as many successful renewables projects under his belt, disagrees with the ‘lake’ notion, and says that the place of entry of electricity is vital. “From a financial, and market point of view, there is a clear right way to do it and also a very clear wrong way too.”

“The right way is to start with the interconnector and say how can we get our power to this point the cheapest way. The wrong way is to say where the wind is strongest and leave the rest to chance.”

(Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Getty Images

“There is naivete about some developers and even some investors who expect the grid to be constructed to meet their needs, and are sorely disappointed when they find themselves having to curtail the energy coming from their much heralded project.”

It’s also possible that when the interconnectors are all built, there remain monopolistic control issues that prevent interconnectors being used to the full extent.

Certainly solving the congestion problems may turn out in the coming years to be a non-trivial issue.

In that eventuality, the importance of local energy markets, trading with blockchain enabled systems could be a solution. After all, an energy trading platform enabled by blockchain would allow for fast, secure and seamless energy trades to help solve congestion issues.

It’s too soon to say whether the trade of renewable energy will continue to scale internationally or more locally, but you can see both trends in the market.

Ultimately it will depend on what the companies that are ordering it want to achieve and are willing to pay for. Today, place appears to be of secondary importance for most companies. Tomorrow it may be a different story.

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Tagged : All News / Analysis / Crypto & Blockchain / Energy / Innovation / Investing / Money / Sustainability

What’s Next For Bitcoin Prices After They Reached Their Highest In A Month?

by ForbesFebruary 8, 2022

Market experts provide technical analysis and other input.

getty

Bitcoin prices climbed today, reaching their highest value since January 5 as the sentiment of investors grew more robust.

The world’s largest digital currency by total market value climbed to more than $44,500 this afternoon, CoinDesk figures reveal.

This figure compared to an intraday low of less than $42,300 close to 4:30 a.m. EST, additional CoinDesk data shows.

After rising to a more-than one-month high, bitcoin prices pulled back, experiencing some rather modest declines and dropping close to $43,500 this evening.

At the time of this writing, the digital asset was trading close to $44,000.

[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]

Following bitcoin’s recent price movements, several market observers highlighted key technical levels, as well as other important factors, when emphasizing what traders need to know.

Mark Elenowitz, co-founder of Ethereum-powered exchange Upstream, offered some insight on the situation.

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“The next point of resistance, I suspect, is around $46,000. If that is broken, then we could very easily swing past $50,000.”

“But if that isn’t broken in the coming days, then support seems to be hovering at around $38,000. And if the latter plays out, then we could be in for a few weeks of range-bound price action.”

Ben Armstrong, founder of BitBoy Crypto, also weighed in on the matter.

“Right now many crypto analysts are warning about a possible Bitcoin bull trap. The sentiment in crypto has turned very quickly and many investors are hopeful for a renewed bull run,” he noted.

“The number to watch for here is $46k-$47k. Many people have been targeting this range for a relief rally before further downward action and possibly a retest of the $29k level,” said Armstrong.

“We should be looking for Bitcoin to hold the $40,000 level as support to fend off a larger downswing.”

Katie Stockton, the founder and managing partner of Fairlead Strategies, LLC, also offered some insight in her daily note.

“If today’s breakout holds tomorrow, a bullish short- term bias would be dictated with next resistance near $46.7K based on a Fibonacci retracement level,” she stated.

Her note offered further detail on the crypto markets:

“From an intermediate-term perspective, we are moving from bearish to neutral, noting there is a weekly oversold upturn and a more pronounced loss of downside momentum.”

“That said, we see risk of additional corrective price action in the equity market that could be a drag on risk assets, in general,” said Stockton.

“Bitcoin shares a loss of long-term momentum with the equity market, suggesting a wide trading range has unfolded in which shorter-term views will shift.”

Disclosure: I own some bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, ether, EOS and sol.

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Tagged : All News / Analysis / Bitcoin / Crypto & Blockchain / Investing / Markets / Money

Crypto Price Prediction: What’s In Store For Bitcoin And Ethereum In 2022 As XRP, Dogecoin And Shiba Inu Suddenly Soar

by ForbesFebruary 7, 2022

Bitcoin, ethereum and other major cryptocurrencies have bounced back after a lackluster start to 2022.

Subscribe now to Forbes’ CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor and discover hot new NFT and crypto blockbusters poised for 1,000% gains

The bitcoin price is now up around 10% since early January with the ethereum price climbing even further—despite dire warnings. However, smaller cryptocurrencies, including Ripple’s XRP, the meme-based dogecoin and its biggest rival shiba inu have suddenly surged, leaving bitcoin and ethereum in the dust.

Now, analysts at crypto research company FSInsight, led by JPMorgan’s former chief equity strategist Tom Lee, have issued a huge 2022 bitcoin and ethereum price prediction—forecasting this year will see another wave of crypto investors.

Sign up now for the free CryptoCodex—A daily newsletter for the crypto-curious. Helping you understand the world of bitcoin and crypto, every weekday

MORE FROM FORBESCongress Introduces A Radical Crypto Bill To ‘Unleash Innovation’ As The Price Of Bitcoin And Ethereum Suddenly SoarBy Billy Bambrough

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The bitcoin price has suddenly surged higher in the last few days, breaking the crypto bear market … [+] that had weighed heavily on ethereum and other major cryptocurrencies.

SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

“This is much different from in 2018 where tech stocks were still doing well but bitcoin sold off along with the rest of the crypto market cap,” FSInsight’s Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy, wrote in a note first reported by Coindesk, adding the predicted rally will come due to the “legacy market capital entering the fold.”

Financial institutions and Wall Street giants have shown a lot of interest in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies of the last year, with some now offering trading services to clients.

Farrell predicts that the bitcoin price could climb as high as $200,000 per bitcoin in the second half of 2022, despite bitcoin’s rough start to the year. Bitcoin crashed around 50% from its all-time highs during the two months to January, falling to around $32,000 per bitcoin.

Farrell also predicted the ethereum price could soar to $12,000 per ether thanks to the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other Web 3 applications, adding ethereum is undervalued relative to cloud platforms.

Bitcoin, ethereum and most other major cryptocurrencies fell sharply through the final months of last year and into 2022 as investors fretted over looming interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, causing surging stock markets to stall.

CryptoCodex—A free, daily newsletter for the crypto-curious

MORE FROM FORBES‘Risk-Reward Model’ And NFTs Reveal The Price One CEO Is Looking To Buy Bitcoin And Ethereum ‘Very, Very Aggressively’By Billy Bambrough

The bitcoin price has swung wildly over the last year with bitcoin, ethereum and other major … [+] cryptocurrencies struggling through January 2022.

Coinbase

However, Farrell warned that stronger-than-expected action from the Fed could cause crypto and stock markets to move sharply lower in the short-term, with policymakers now eyeing this week’s inflation data, due Thursday.

“All assets can sell off and drop another 50% if the Fed hikes 4% … next month,” he said during a webinar last week. “But right now, as things stand, the upside to both bitcoin and ethereum is much larger than the downside.”

Meanwhile, other bitcoin and crypto market watchers are also feeling upbeat as sentiment turns positive.

“While inflation remains a big consideration for investors, rotating funds back into supposedly risky assets like bitcoin is fast becoming an attractive proposition to many,” Alexander Mamasidikov, co-founder of mobile digital bank MinePlex, said in emailed comments.

“Bitcoin investors are also attempting to decouple from the mainstream stock market, a move that will prevent any serious plunge even as tech stocks continue to take a beating based on the anticipation of a tighter monetary policy from the Feds.”

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Tagged : All News / Bitcoin / Crypto & Blockchain / Dogecoin / Ethereum / Europe / Money / Ripple

Bitcoin Prices Reach Highest Since Early January As Adoption Bolsters Sentiment

by ForbesFebruary 7, 2022

Bitcoin prices reached their highest in a month today.

getty

Bitcoin prices rallied today, rising to their loftiest value in more than a month as the latest signs of institutional adoption helped strengthen the optimism of market participants.

The world’s most prominent digital currency reached $44,508 around 2:30 p.m. EST, CoinDesk data shows.

At this point, the cryptocurrency was trading at its highest since January 5, additional CoinDesk figures reveal.

Further, the digital asset was up more than 30% from the recent low of roughly $33,000 it hit late last month.

[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]

Institutional Adoption

When explaining these latest price movements, multiple analysts pointed to recent signs that organizations are embracing bitcoin.

Earlier today, KPMG Canada, the Toronto-based branch of professional services firm KPMG, announced that it had purchased some bitcoin, as well as its digital sibling ether, CoinDesk reported.

Further, automaker Tesla Inc. revealed in a recently filed 10-K that it held almost $2 billion in bitcoin at the end of last year.

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“Tesla’s 10K SEC filing update was released yesterday, reaffirming notions that Tesla held onto their BTC holdings amidst declines in Bitcoin’s price to the lower 30 thousands,” said John Iadeluca, founder & CEO of multi-strategy fund Banz Capital.

“Combined with the news of KPMG Canada adding Bitcoin onto its balance sheet, encouraged a sharp rise in positive Bitcoin price sentiment,” he stated.

Joe DiPasquale, CEO of cryptocurrency hedge fund manager BitBull Capital, offered similar input.

“The bounce from low 30 thousands gave the market confidence and we saw sentiment improving over the last few days,” he noted.

“Today news of Tesla maintaining its BTC holdings and KPMG Canada adding BTC to its balance sheet have also bolstered sentiment,” emphasized DiPasquale.

Josh Olszewicz, head of research at Valkyrie Investments, also spoke to these developments, noting how they are simply the latest sign of progress for cryptocurrencies.

“KPMG Canada, a big four accounting firm, announced today they will be holding BTC and ETH in their corporate treasury. The new allocation represents a growing list of significant institutional adoption and maturation of an emerging asset class.”

Lawmakers Embrace Bitcoin

Andrew Rossow, an internet and technology attorney, also spoke to adoption, but took a different angle, focusing on the actions of U.S. government officials.

“From a legal perspective, I believe a huge source of credit comes from Congress, with many members of the U.S. Senate speaking favorably on Bitcoin,” he stated.

“On Friday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz disclosed that he invested in $50K worth of bitcoin during its dip back in Jan., which lended additional favor to Texas’s journey towards becoming a notable bitcoin mining hub,” said Rossow.

“This cannot be overlooked, regardless of your political affiliations.”

Market Dynamics

In an effort to shed further light on current market conditions, as well as provide some clarity on what might come next, Olszewicz highlighted some important key factors.

“Crypto derivative funding rates still lean negative, even with rising price and open interest, suggestive of on-going short interest,” he stated.

“Price may continue upward momentum so long as shorts continue to get squeezed and are forced to cover positions or become liquidated.”

Further, he spoke to the relationship between the price movements of digital currencies and the values of major indices like the S&P 500.

“Crypto also continued to decouple from traditional finance indices, such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, throughout the day,” said Olszewicz.

“Strong correlations between crypto and these indices held through the month of January, but began to break after the non-farm payroll numbers were released on Friday. A decorrelation between the two sectors could be suggestive of returning risk-on sentiment in Crypto.”

Disclosure: I own some bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, ether, EOS and sol.

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Tagged : All News / Bitcoin / Crypto & Blockchain / Investing / Money

Polygon Joins Arms Race To Become ‘The AWS Of Web 3’ With $450 Million In Fresh Funding

by ForbesFebruary 7, 2022

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal

Polygon

Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development platform Polygon has raised $450 million in its first major financing round led by Sequoia Capital India.

More than 40 venture capital firms, including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive and Tiger Global, among others, have participated in a private sale of Polygon’s native MATIC token (Market cap as of February 7 is $14.4 billion).

“Our goal is to become the AWS of Web 3,” Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal told Forbes. “We want to provide the entire suite of solutions to the developers.”

Launched in 2017 as Matic Network, Polygon is one of the major so-called Layer-2 chains that are attempting to take the load off Ethereum’s heavily congested network. It hosts more than 7,000 applications and to date has processed over 1.3 billion transactions between 100 million unique wallets.

“Polygon has become what we see as a platform of choice for folks who are trying to build and scale low-cost applications that we think could actually get adoption,” says Shailesh Lakhani, managing director at Sequoia India. “Probably 70-80% of the startups that we run into in crypto are using Polygon today.”

According to Nailwal, the funds will help the firm build products including Polygon PoS, Polygon Edge and Polygon Avail that are similar to Amazon Web Services’ offerings for Web 2 developers. Polygon is also heavily investing in zero knowledge (ZK) technology, which allows individuals and entities to verify data such as transactions and personal information or identification without handing over control of the information. In August, the project’s team committed $1 billion to ZK-related efforts.

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Tagged : All News / Crypto & Blockchain / Editors' Pick / Money

Topline

Key Facts

Tangent

Crucial Quote

Key Background

What To Watch For

Further Reading

Meta

Menlo Park, California

Blockchain platforms: Diem

Key leader: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO

Twitter

San Francisco, California

Blockchain platforms: Bitcoin, Ethereum

Key leader: Parag Agrawal, CEO

Tencent

Shenzhen, China

Blockchain platforms: ChainMaker, Hyperledger Fabric, FISCO BCOS

Key leader: Bing Shao, head of Tencent Cloud’s blockchain business

LINE Corporation

Tokyo, Japan

Blockchain platform: LINE Blockchain

Key leaders: Woosuk Kim, CEO of Unblock & LINE Tech Plus; Keun Koo, blockchain development lead at Unchain

Kakao Corporation

Jeju-si, South Korea

Blockchain platform: Klaytn

Key leader: David Shin, Head of Klaytn Global Adoption

OLAF CARLSON-WEE rode 2017’s “initial coin offering” craze to become one of crypto’s top venture investors. Now he’s raking in hundreds of millions, from a blockchain rage called DeFi, which promotes the fantasy of democratized financial services.

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Cryptocurrencies hog the spotlight, but blockchain’s biggest innovations are below the surface, saving billons each year for the world’s largest companies.

Adobe

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Ethereum

KEY LEADER: Will Allen, VP at Adobe overseeing its Content Authenticity Initiative

Allianz

MUNICH, GERMANY

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Hyperledger Fabric, Corda

KEY LEADER: Bob Crozier, chief architect of Allianz Technology and global head of blockchain for Allianz Group

Andreessen Horowitz

MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Flow, Celo, Near, Arweave and others

KEY LEADER: Chris Dixon, general partner and leader of a16z Crypto

Ant Group

HANGZHOU, CHINA

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: AntChain

KEY LEADER: Geoff Jiang, president of Intelligent Technology Business Group, Ant Group

Anthem

INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Rajeev Ronanki, Anthem’s president of digital platforms

Aon

DUBLIN, IRELAND

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Corda

KEY LEADERS: Christa Davies, CFO

A.P. Moller—Maersk

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: TradeLens, Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Christian Hammer, chief technology officer, TradeLens

Baidu

BEIJING, CHINA

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: XuperChain

KEY LEADER: Xiao Wei, chief manager of Baidu Blockchain

BHP

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: MineHub, Hyperledger Fabric

KEY LEADER: Michiel Hovers, group sales and marketing officer

Block

SAN FRANCISCO

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: Bitcoin

KEY LEADER: Jack Dorsey, CEO

BNY Mellon

New York

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Bitcoin, Ethereum

KEY LEADERS: Roman Regelman, CEO of asset servicing and head of digital; Mike Demissie, head of digital assets; Ben Slavin, global head of ETFs

Boeing

CHICAGO

BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORMS: Go Direct, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy

KEY LEADER: Charles S. Sullivan, president, Boeing Canada Operations

Breitling

GRENCHEN, SWITZERLAND