1. Mining firms are benefiting from the market rally. California’s $441 billion public pension fund increased its stake in bitcoin miner Riot Blockchain (RIOT) nearly sevenfold while Ethereum miners are cranking out record revenue.
2. Industry experts are eyeing two bullish signs for crypto. First, balances of dai (DAI) and USD coin (USDC) on exchanges have hit lifetime highs, according to data from Glassnode. Meanwhile, Guggenheim research is placing $600,000 as a price target for bitcoin.
3. Trad meets crypto: Visa is working with crypto bank Anchorage to allow customers at traditional banks to “buy and sell digital assets such as bitcoin.” This will come through a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) for banks to plug and play into the crypto ecosystem.
The macro strategy
More than 15% of the total bitcoin circulating supply has been moved to “accumulation addresses,” according to the latest accounting by data firm Glassnode. This figure is often cited to show how holders are bracing for the long term.
Standing at a 3.5-year high, some 80,000 BTC have been moved to these addresses. Accumulation addresses is an industry term for wallets with at least two non-trivial incoming transactions that have never spent funds, according to CoinDesk markets reporter Omkar Godbole.
This latest milestone comes as bitcoin continues to leave exchanges. As CoinDesk has reported before, coin inflows onto exchanges typically indicates a looming sell-off.
“The continued locking up of bitcoin has been creating a sell-side liquidity shortage led by increased institutional buyers and has aided the recent bull run,” Godbole wrote.
Indeed, major market players are accumulating bitcoin. In December, Grayscale added 72,950 BTC to its assets under management, far outstripping the 28,112 BTC mined during that same period. (Grayscale and CoinDesk are wholly owned by Digital Currency Group.)
Meanwhile, MicroStrategy, an intelligence firm that made a name for itself in 2020 for going all-in on bitcoin, continues to flesh out its bitcoin treasury. According to Bitcoin Treasuries, the publicly traded firm now holds a total 71,079 BTC, worth over $2.9 billion.
The company’s CEO, Michael Saylor, has become an industry advocate and has argued that corporations should invest their cash holdings in the hard-capped cryptocurrency. He famously called fiat a “melting ice cube.”
Today, MicroStrategy is hosting a conference where Saylor intends to pitch his cohorts on the value of bitcoin investing. Saylor said he plans to go over his “playbook,” including accounting and legal guidance. CoinDesk’s Danny Nelson will be covering the event.
“We’re going to have thousands of executives, officers and directors and advisers of corporations coming together in the first week of February and they all want to figure out how to plug bitcoin into their balance sheet, their PnL,” Saylor told CNBC’s “Power Lunch” in January.
“This conference could drive interest in bitcoin further, and even if that does not translate to immediate price gains it will definitely have a positive, long-term effect,” Joe DiPasquale, the chief executive of San Francisco-based bitcoin and cryptocurrency hedge fund BitBull Capital, told Forbes.
Indeed, if Saylor’s pitch is successful, the industry could see a number of new entrants from institutional money. It’s a future that Guggenheim Chief Investment Officer Scott Minerd, among others, has predicted.
As others have pointed out, bitcoin is rapidly approaching a moment when no more coins will be minted (estimated in 2140). Casa CTO Jameson Lopp put it as such: “The final bitcoin will be minted incrementally over a period of 40 years.”
The rush is on.