Number of BTC HODLers at a Record High

May 26, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• The number of long-term BTC holders hit a record high

• SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said “crypto may force [the SEC] to do that modernization faster than we otherwise would do.”

• 1confirmation, a crypto VC firm, raised $125 million for its third fund (stay tuned for a podcast on this next week)

• GameStop is building out an NFT platform on Ethereum

• Galaxy Digital announced the acquisition of asset management firm Vision Hill Group

• Wall Street Bets Redditors are turning their attention to crypto 

• Dfinity Foundation to give $220 million in funds to attract developers to the Internet Computer, an Ethereum competitor

• JPMorgan rates Coinbase as overweight; sets price target at $371

• China’s Inner Mongolia proposed eight new measures to shut down crypto mining

• Issuance of a CBDC by the Federal Reserve would “most likely require additional authority,” according to Vice Chairman for Supervision Randal Quarles on behalf of the Fed.

What Do You Meme?

In addition to Quarles’s comments on the Federal Reserve’s authority to issue a CBDC, he also confirmed the Fed, OCC, FDIC are commencing a cryptocurrency policy “sprint,” just as Michael Hsu, acting head of the OCC, proposed they would last week.

Sean Tuffy, head of market and regulatory intelligence at Citi, offered up his analysis on what such a “sprint” would look like:

*Bonus content featuring crypto’s favorite interviewer, Lily*

What’s Poppin’?

Layer 2 solutions are poppin’.

Yesterday, Shark Tank “shark,” Mavericks owner, and billionaire investor Mark Cuban confirmed his investment in Polygon to CoinDesk. Polygon, formerly known as Matic, is a layer 2 protocol built on Ethereum with the intention to bundle multiple scaling solutions into one full-stack application. Polygon describes itself as “Ethereum’s Internet of Blockchains.”

One of the significant issues plaguing Ethereum at the moment is the idea of scaling. Currently, Ethereum can only handle around 15 transactions per second. For context, Visa handles approximately 2,000 transactions per second. Network bottlenecks resulting from Ethereum users demanding more block space than is available has resulted in high ETH gas fees for users.

Polygon and its token (MATIC) are just one of many solutions to scaling Ethereum (read here, here, and here for a more in-depth breakdown of layers 2s, sharding, and roll-ups).

If you had invested $100 in MATIC just one month ago, you would now be the proud owner of roughly $372 — which would be good enough for a 372% gain while the rest of the market dipped around 10% over the same time period.

Recommended Reads

• 5 new NFT use cases that may pique your interest:

• An academic’s perspective on EIP-1559 (an absolute MUST read IMO):

• Vitalik on blockchain voting:

On The Pod…

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians