Canada approves Bitcoin ETF, options market without $ 100K BTC pricing

Editor’s note: Welcome to the year of the Ox. Blockchain Bites will not be published on President’s Day, Monday, February 15th.

The first bitcoin traded fund in North America has been approved by the Canadian securities regulator, a move that some commentators see as an opening for the U.S. to follow. The United States government hesitated to approve a bitcoin ETF product, which tracks the price of bitcoin and is traded on a stock exchange, due to the supposed liquidity of bitcoin and the risks that the asset may be manipulated.

Bitcoin miners set a record $ 4.06 million in just 60 minutes yesterday, according to Glassnode data. Most of that revenue came from the bitcoin subsidy – 6.25 BTC issued approximately every 10 minutes – although about $ 47,000 was collected in network fees.

The Bitcoin options market sees a 12% probability of prices rising above $ 100,000 in late December, according to a mathematical metric called the Black Scholes formula. It analyzes exercise prices, call option prices, real assets and US Treasury bills to determine the fair price of an option contract.

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said the payments giant intends to become a CBDC distributor if a central bank digital currency is launched. “Do you think about how many [digital wallets] we will have in the next two, three or five years, and we are a perfect complement for central banks and governments to distribute these digitized forms of currency, ”said Schulman on the day of the company’s investor.

Wall Street lawsuits are putting pressure on employers to adopt encryption, according to CNBC. In response to internal questions, JPMorgan Chase co-chairman Daniel Pinto said the bank would consider bitcoin trading if customer demand “was there”, which “I am sure it will be at some point”.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez everything fluctuated, from a municipal treasure of bitcoins to the payment of employees in cryptography. Yesterday, however, city commissioners put the brakes on these ambitious plans to study their impact first. Commissioners voted to launch educational campaigns in English, Spanish and Creole to inform people about cryptography.

Figure Technologies, a blockchain loan startup, is preparing to open a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), also known as a “blank check” company. The company, Figure Acquisition Corp. I, will raise $ 250 million to go public for a competitive startup.

Securities and Exchange Commission of Nigeria The (SEC) announced on Thursday that it had put plans to regulate cryptocurrencies on hold in light of the central bank’s decision to ban them, according to a report by Guardian Nigeria. This follows a meeting yesterday at which the Senate of Nigeria called the country’s top financial regulators to speak about the bill, which was met with public resistance.

India will give cryptographers a window of three to six months to withdraw, if a proposed cryptocurrency ban is approved. The Cryptocurrency and Regulation of the Official Digital Currency Act, launched this year, aims to limit private currencies in the country and establish a structure for a national digital currency.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Friday that it will partner with rapper Jay-Z and donate 500 bitcoin (~ $ 23.6 million) to establish a new grant fund to support Africa and India. Separately, Dorsey donated $ 1 million to the Coin Center cryptocurrency policy study center, announced on Wednesday.

Popping bubbles?
Former CFTC President Christopher Giancarlo cleared the record for the commodity regulator’s role in bursting the 2017 bitcoin bull market this morning on CoinDesk TV.

CoinDesk previously reported that the Trump administration acted to pierce the 2017 bubble, paving the way for future products.

“We saw a bubble forming and we thought the best way to approach it was to allow the market to interact with it,” said Giancarlo in late 2019. He said that the launch of bitcoin futures “would have the impact of bursting the bubble. bitcoin. And it worked. “

These comments have led to a conspiracy that US regulators are antagonistic to the growth of the cryptocurrency industry. Similar questions emerged earlier this week after the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched the country’s first regulated ether (ETH) futures.

Giancarlo eased those fears this morning. Adding that securities and commodity regulators have neither the authority nor the capacity to exercise such a heavy hand in the capital markets.

The story is a little more complicated. Derivatives, Giancarlo, argued that they are an essential part of any mature market.

“The ability to short trade in a market is an essential maturation point in the development of any market,” he said, adding that asset prices in the most modern market are not fixed in spot markets, but at an orderly financial level. higher. “Bitcoin’s institutional role has made it a true investment-grade asset.”

As bitcoin futures emptied the bubble, it was just a matter of discovering the good old capitalist price.

“[Derivatives] brought the price of bitcoin back in correlation with its fundamental cost of production, ”said Giancarlo. “In 2017, bitcoin broke with these fundamentals.”

So, what does Giancarlo think about today’s sparkling markets? He did not address the issue directly, but we can return to the market itself.

As Omkar Godbole, a market reporter at CoinDesk, noted, derivatives traders see a low likelihood that the market will inflate more than six digits by the end of the year.

“With the extreme volatility of the past two months, the market is not showing much conviction about how bitcoin will trade for the rest of the year,” said Sui Chung, CEO of CF Benchmarks, Godbole.