The week of 25/01 in a nutshell - The news about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is in constant turmoil. Sometimes vital information gets lost in the daily information feed and you miss the important points.
This format is there to fix it. We return to the news of last week in theCrypto Hebdo to keep you informed about the current situation of cryptocurrencies.
The unmissable corner
For this week's unmissable we find Thibaud looking back on the evolution of banks, until the creation of Bitcoin and the emergence of Bitcoin banks.
The gold standard and its evolutions
Under theGolden Standard,banking institutions that lent to companies wishing to borrow were forced to keep sufficient quantities of gold in reserve in order to meet the withdrawal needs of their custodian clients. The monetary issue was therefore naturally controlled by the scarcity of the underlying convenience: that of gold. A little later, in the 17th century,English bankers began to generalize a highly profitable practice of lending more gold than they had in reserve.
A few centuries later, some major problems appeared in this system inherited to this day. The gold conversation warehouses have been abandoned for companies specialized in money creation,now commonly referred to as "central banks". One of the oldest institutions of its kind is none other than "The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street", the Bank of England, which was established in 1694 to support government borrowing and later served as a lender of last resort to commercial banks.
With a new power, states have armed central banks with a fundamentally irresistible power: that of manipulating money to finance large-scale national programs without being sensitive to the budgetary constraints usually present in a company.
The birth of a free currency
Over the past 10 years,the global monetary base, consisting of the total amount of fiduciary currencies in circulation such as the euro, the US dollar and the yen, has thus expanded considerably under the impetus of quantitative easing andliquidity injection programmes. These various programs have been put in place by governments concerned about economic recovery. Like an arsonist who is trying to put out the forest fire he has started himself, these measures tend to create the problems they are working to solve.
With the appearance of the genesis block on January 3, 2009,the Bitcoin protocol was a new discovery with the introduction of a fixed-quantity currency of 21 million units ("BTC"), themselves divisible into 100 million sub-units ("satoshis" or "sats"), for a total of 2.1 trillion sats in circulation. The timing of Bitcoin's supply is therefore predictable with an "unfalsifiable cost" of production. This 12-year-old project calls into question the role of a central bank in currency management, and tends to redefine the place of a commercial bank on the peripheries of the Bitcoinnetwork.
Don't hesitate to check out the article in its entirety for details: Bitcoin Bank: Impossible or... inevitable?
The news in a nutshell
▶ Aave explodes his ATH, the DeFi protocol is unstoppable. For their part, the DEXs are breaking all records with $40 billion in volume in January.
▶ Endowment funds from U.S. universities are betting on Bitcoin. For example, a source close to the matter revealed that several funds such as Yale or Harward had been buying BTC for at least a year.
▶ The Bank of England persists and signs. According to its governor, "current digital currencies are not sustainable" and these will have no impact on finance.
▶ Circle strengthens its ties with the banking world. Thus, the company has just unveiled a feature to send USDC directly to a bank account... and vice versa, to go from the dollar to the DeFi of Ethereum in an instant!
▶ Elon Musk remakes his own and ignites the crypto. The latter simply changed his Twitter biography to "#Bitcoin" and the course ignited by... 20%. Soon Elon's "Coins of the Day"? 😉
▶ Rogzy's new video in which he shows us the difference between Bitcoin savings and trading!
📊 The 5 metrics of the week
$10 millionis the new amount microStrategy has just invested in Bitcoin. These repeated investments in the BTC have clearly pleased the company's shareholders, as its shares have appreciated by 350% since Q3 in 2020.
1,200 eurosis the new record that the price of the Aether reached at the beginning of the week. The price has since fallen back to around 1,100 euros.
$638,400is the amount that has been allocated by the Libra community for a fee reimbursement program on Ethereum. Thus, Balancer wishes to respond in its own way to the delusional costs currently encountered.
$90 billionis the exorbitant amount that the Coinbase platform owns and manages on behalf of its customers. A statistic that portends a bright future for the company's IPO... that won't be long!
73,882is the number of active validators on the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain. A total of 2.3 million ETHs were deposited on the deposit contract.
✉️ The tweet of the week
The tweet of the week goes to Joseph Delong and his humorous tweet that aims to compare the balances of each one's portfolios, on the various testnet of Ethereum.
Far from the usual have you seen me social networks, here we highlight fictitious amounts generated for free on testnets.