How high can Bitcoin go? Is Doge coin looking less like a joke and more like a serious currency? And what’s behind XRP’s latest price jump? Find out in our cryptocurrency update.
Crypto update
Bitcoin soars into space but volatility restricts its ride
No update on the world of crypto is complete without mentioning a crypto price rise. A new all-time high was established last week, with BTC smashing through $59,000. It has subsequently come back down to earth, slipping below $48,000, before again climbing back to around $51,000 at the time of writing.
Volatility is never far away from Bitcoin. The cycle so far this year is BTC records a new all-time high, then falls back with a bump, gains some ground and stability for a couple of weeks, then the fun and games begin anew.
As we reported last week, institutional support for BTC is going from strength to strength, which may help control prices, but will likely keep sending them soaring instead. Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, BNY Mellon, and ARK Management are all implementing bitcoin platforms and services to their offers.
Tesla has also allegedly made over a $1bn in profit from Bitcoin sales in 2021 so far. That’s more than Elon Musk’s carmaker made from selling cars in 2020. Maybe Tesla is in the wrong busines? You can now buy a new Tesla vehicle with BTC too.
For all of 2020, Bitcoin was up 308%. Institutional support levels, plus the attention of the richest man in the world, appears to be driving prices up. MicroStrategy is particularly BTC-hungry, announcing it had raised more than $1bn of debt to fund even more crypto purchases.
Dogecoin barks but who’s the leader of the pack?
This is getting silly now.
Joke crypto Dogecoin’s trajectory seems to be matching the career of Robin Williams: starting off purely as something hilarious but maturing into something more serious.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that a single account controls 28% of all Dogecoins, worth a $2bn at market prices, after a deep dive into the Dogecoin blockchain. The most expensive joke in history?
The dogecoin blockchain address in question currently holds around 36.8 billion dogecoin tokens, received through 705 transactions.
Rock stars, billionaires, and celebs keep piling onto the meme. It’s usually the case when these things happen, the joke starts to wear thin. When memes go mainstream, they tend to be flavours of the month, or week, or day (Bernie inauguration memes anyone?), but when there’s real sums of cash at play, maybe the stakes are higher than those pushing the joke forward realise. People stand to make actual capital losses should the memery cease and Dogecoin prices fall away.
So, who owns this Doge-stuffed wallet? We don’t actually know, but WSJ reports indicate found the wallet has received 28.061971 dogecoin tokens on multiple occasions – including June 28th, the birthday of noted engineer/billionaire/living meme Elon Musk.
Could he really be behind this, and the recent price rises pushing Dogecoin ever higher? Musk, in another piece of Internet Japery, was elected Dogecoin CEO in a 2019 twitter poll. He’s voiced support for the currency before, but mostly, he claims, as a joke.
But the dogecoin experience can tell us two things: 1) the power of the internet and memes is huge when it comes to propagating ideas and advice, and 2) Dogecoin isn’t that funny anymore, as its valuations pushing the crypto across the line from cosmic prank to major market.
XRP makes big stride
XRP prices jumped 25% when Asian trading opened on Monday 22nd February, pushing its total market cap to $28bn.
Apparently, the jump in price has been enough to cover all of XRP’s losses accrued following the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple in December 2020.
Ripple is currently facing the lawsuit filed by the SEC in December 2020 over the alleged sale of unlicensed securities in the form of XRP. Earlier this month, Ripple and the SEC said that a settlement is unlikely ahead of the expected trial.
Ripple officially submitted its response to the SEC’s lawsuit against the company in January 2021, and CEO Brad Garlinghouse mentioned that the company is ready to work with the new administration for clear cryptocurrency regulations in the country.
In an interview she gave to Fortune, former SEC Chair Mary Jo White, that the commission was “dead wrong” against Ripple, legally and factually.
The price of XRP is up 180% across the course of 2021 so far. Earlier in February, prices jumped as investors from Reddit floated the idea of pumping XRP. Will it rise? It still has to clear the lawsuit proceedings, but continued legitimacy continues to build.
For instance, Ripple has now registered as a business in Wyoming. According to the latest records of the Wyoming Secretary of State, Ripple Markets WY LLC is an active company in the region.
XRP is trading at just below $0.60, and its total market cap is an estimated $58.8bn.
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