● Over 1400 international firms join Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin Webinar
● GrayScale Loads up on Ethereum before CME Futures Launch
As always, thanks again for joining this edition of Overbit Insights.
We'd like to jump right into our first story of the day, which focuses on one of the newest yet biggest names in the cryptocurrency space - Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy. Saylor began to make headlines at the end of 2020 when he publicly invested hundreds and millions of his company's treasury into Bitcoin. As if this wasn't a big enough investment, he famously raised more than a billion dollars in a debt-offering around to double down on his initial Bitcoin investment.
Since then, Saylor has taken on the role of the evangeliser, spreading the word about Bitcoin through any platform he's found - Twitter, podcasts and even mainstream media. This past week, Saylor took his evangelisation to the next level, this time hosting an online webinar dedicated to Bitcoin investment, designed for businesses and investment firms across the world.
The webinar aimed to introduce these professionals into the world of Bitcoin investing, something that is still completely new and foreign for most of the world. Saylor made a simple case for the webinar, honing in on central banks and their currently untenable monetary policy. "If your company has money on its balance sheets and it's sitting in fiat currencies like euros and dollars, they are losing about 15% of their purchasing power each year," Saylor said. On top of the informational webinar, Saylor offered to share his company's 'playbook' for purchasing Bitcoin, offering these companies a straightforward way to begin converting their fiat.
Another speaker at the conference was Ross Stevens, CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, as well as executive chairman of NYDIG, a financial firm for Bitcoin services. His speeches echoed the same tone as Saylor's emphasizing how important capital allocation will be over the coming years.
The webinar attendees included a wide range of diverse companies from 16 different countries like Brazil, Iceland, Ireland and Italy, to name a few, highlighting the international interest in the new asset class. For something many called a bubble just three years ago, it seems clear that the international finance community is slowly circling in on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole.
In a shocking fashion, CME Ethereum futures contracts are set to launch on Monday, February 8, and Ethereum whales are on a buying spree as they capitalise on the bull run. This comes as Grayscale, the digital asset investment company, reopened the trust last Monday, allowing new investors to come while increasing their ETH holdings with over $4 billion in assets by January 29.
Ethereum billed as the world's supercomputer has been massively accumulated, by addresses holding between 100,000 and 10 million ETH. As more and more are built on Ethereum, the protocol might turn into one of the worlds' most valuable "companies" of all time, and as of right now it stands to have a market cap of approximately $191 Billion.
What once started as a 19-year-old software engineer's project to improve and build on top of Bitcoin's success and introduce smart contracts into the world, Ethereum has grown into one of the world's most used protocols. With the network effect and Metcalfe's law in mind, we could see Ethereum reach meteoric heights of upwards of $20,000 an ETH at the same rate Bitcoin did.
With all this being known, it might be time to start thinking of accumulating more Ethereum, possibly as much as you can, but as always, DYOR! Thanks as always for reading from the Overbit.com team.