Amidst the lingering macro uncertainty due to US-China trade wars and Brexit, BTC has recorded a ~35% price appreciation since the beginning of this year, outperforming all other asset classes. BTC prices breached the psychological $10k mark over the weekend. We expect BTC prices to continue their upwards trend in the coming months, on the back of, among other things, the $175 billion liquidity injection by China and the potential FOMO around the impending halvening in May.

Reproducing some great data that points to the overall bullishness in the market by @lawmaster from twitter.

After materially underperforming BTC in 2019, altcoins have seen a massive run-up so far in 2020. Bucking the previous bull trends in which BTC’s price rose upwards and altcoins traded sideways, altcoins have outperformed BTC over the past month or so. Moreover, BTC dominance fell below the 63% mark for the first time since Sep’19.  Despite the current rally, a majority of altcoins are still 60-80% off their all-time highs in late 2017 and early 2018. Among altcoins, privacy coins such as XMR, DASH, and ZEC have outperformed BTC by >50%. 

Privacy coins had materially underperformed BTC over the past 18 months due to the lack of a truly viable privacy-focused value proposition, increased regulatory scrutiny, and BTC’s growing stature as the preferred SoV and MoE for crypto transactions. Barring the near transactional anonymity offered by privacy coins, BTC outperforms privacy coins in almost all other aspects such as developer funding, institutional interest and mindshare. That being said, the US Fed chairman recently commented on the importance of privacy and how private crypto transactions will aid in global crypto adoption, sparking a bullish sentiment for privacy coins.   

Voyager has acquired the retail-focused Circle Invest app from Circle, the companies announced Wednesday. Voyager is in the process of converting accounts to its own platform, with the process expected to conclude by the end of March (though New York residents may be on a different timeline). Voyager is promising commission-free trading, on-chain access and lock-up free interest yield. Voyager also acquired a U.S. Financial Institute Regulatory Authority (FINRA) broker-dealer and listed a series of stablecoins as part of its expansion.

A bill seeking to exempt personal cryptocurrency transactions from taxation for capital gains has been reintroduced in the Congress of the United States. Called “The Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act of 2020,” the bill would establish an exemption for virtual currency expenditures that qualify as personal transactions. Users would then not have to report instances when they spent crypto whose valued had changed relative to the U.S. dollar on day-to-day expenses. Existing tax law struggles to cope with cryptocurrencies, as they sometimes behave as investments, sometimes commodities, and sometimes just like other currencies. It is to this last type of transaction that the bill looks to simplify for crypto traders and users. 

Bux, the Amsterdam-based fintech that wants to make investing more accessible, has acquired the European “social” cryptocurrency investment platform Blockport. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although Bux says the move paves the way for the company to launch its own branded cryptocurrency investment app. Dubbed “BUX Crypto,” it will be available in the nine countries in which Bux operates, and is planned to go live in Q1 this year. In addition, we are told the founders and core team members of Blockport will join Bux and “take ownership” of the Bux cryptocurrency offering.

Chainalysis announced the news of the deployment in a press release issued on Wednesday. With the Chainalysis KYT tool, Tether hopes to gain full-cycle monitoring capability of its stablecoin tokens from the moment of issuance to the point of redemption. The KYT tool can also potentially provide data on the risk profile of USDT token holders. Thus, Tether will be able to monitor suspicious USDT movements across the different blockchain platforms that support the stablecoin. With transaction monitoring tools often comes the possibility of user-privacy violations. According to Ardoino, Tether’s drive to ensure robust AML compliance will not come at the expense of exposing vital user information.

The Dream of the 90’s is Alive in Cryptocurrencies by Kate Sills

How Blockchain is Transforming Cross-Border Payments with Michael Dunworth

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