1.PayPal (PYPL) is allowing customers – some 346 million active accounts – to buy bitcoin. The person-to-person payments network announced Oct. 21 it would let customers buy, sell and hold bitcoin. According to the company, the cryptocurrency will become a “funding source for purchases at its 26 million merchants worldwide.”
2.Wall Street analysts have made positive comments over the past few days. AllianceBernstein, a $631 billion money manager, published a report saying the post-pandemic economic environment could create a role for bitcoin in investors’ asset allocation, CoinDesk reported Monday. Inigo Fraser Jenkins, co-head of the portfolio strategy team at Bernstein Research, wrote that when it comes to a role in hedging against inflation, “the driver of bitcoin is similar to that as for gold.”
3.Well-known hedge fund managers are increasingly calling bitcoin a long-term investment. Legendary managers, including Paul Tudor Jones II and Stanley Druckenmiller, have recently said the cryptocurrency’s price, as denominated in U.S. dollars, could rise as the Federal Reserve prints money to help finance the government’s coronavirus-related emergency stimulus bills. The central bank has thus far created more than $3 trillion of new money in 2020, or more than three quarters of the entire amount created during its prior 107-year history.