![[IT큐레이션] Will Bitcoin, Digital Assets Spring Day Come?](https://cdn.econovill.com/news/thumbnail/202101/513004_416189_5543_v150.jpg "[IT큐레이션] Will Bitcoin, Digital Assets Spring Day Come?")
[이코노믹리뷰=최진홍 기자] Bitcoin price is going up and down around 38 million won. As of 10 a.m. on the 4th, it is moving sideways at the level of 36 million won, but it is showing off its terrifying power that the price has risen by up to 50% over the last two weeks. Among these, the prospects for the overall blockchain and digital assets are mixed, attracting attention.
Why is Bitcoin rising?
At the time of 2017, the rise of Bitcoin was led by individuals. Thanks to this, a trend that was not understood as a complete market principle continued, and the industry responded that’I don’t know why the price is rising’.
As a result, the value of digital assets such as bitcoin suddenly plummeted, and the entire industry had to experience a sudden drop from heaven to hell.
The rise of bitcoin from the second half of 2020 to January of this year is quite different from 2017. This is because there are clear benefits such as the introduction of PayPal’s bitcoin payment service.
PayPal, the world’s largest simple payment provider, used by 350 million people, announced the addition of a digital asset buying and selling function to its PayPal wallet, and support for digital asset payment in online merchants. It is now possible to trade or pay at 26 million PayPal merchants.
In the future, related services will expand to 350 million PayPal members worldwide, as well as support the use of multiple PayPal affiliates, predicting that it will have an impact on the everyday use of digital asset payments. It can be seen as a signal of the Bitcoin bull market.
The aggressive quantitative easing of each country is also fueling the rise of Bitcoin. While the Federal Open Market Commission (FOMC) is expected to maintain zero interest rates for the time being, as the Corona 19 incident continues, each country prints money indiscriminately, and the rich liquidity flows into the digital asset market, leading to the rise of bitcoin, the boss. It is an analysis that it is making.
Above all, institutional investors eagerly enter the market and explore various possibilities.
American life insurance company’Mass Mutual’ and hedge fund’Skybridge Capital’ recently announced that they had bought bitcoin with huge funds. CNBC cited a report from Chainalysis on the 18th of last month (local time), citing a report from Chainalysis, saying that institutions are emerging as a new big hand in the bitcoin market, and reported that only bitcoins that they bought since September amounted to $11.5 billion. .
While Blackrock and Goldman Sachs began to explore the Chinese cryptocurrency market, JP Morgan, who had been pessimistic about cryptocurrency so far, also turned to favorable reviews in October of last year over the growth potential of Bitcoin.
It is also eye-catching that institutions have begun to withdraw bitcoins in large quantities out of exchanges in order to hold them for the long term. “In order for the price of bitcoin to go down, the bitcoin on the exchange must be sold, but the sell-side liquidity crunch is intensifying.” “This trend is accelerating as institutions buy large amounts of bitcoin from mid-mid, and we expect the exchange’s bitcoin holdings to continue to decline in 2021.”
CEO Kim explained that the recent bitcoin futures trading volume on the Chicago Merchandise Exchange (CME) beat OKEx, the traditional cryptocurrency futures exchange powerhouse, and became number one. In addition, it is evaluated that the purchase of bitcoin by listed companies such as MicroStrategy is also having a great influence on the market uptrend.
On the other hand, individual market participation is rather low. The Global Big Data Research Center lasts 39 months from September 2017 to November 2020 blog, cafe, community, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Kakao Story, intellectuals, government, public, corporations, organizations, etc. 11 As a result of surveying the amount of information per month using the keyword’Bitcoin’ targeting 210,000 sites in each channel, it was confirmed that the online interest rate was significantly low.
In February and March, when bitcoin, which had fallen to the $3,000 mark in the first quarter of this year, began to show signs of rebound, interest increased and showed 97756 cases in February, 119895 cases in March, and then turned down again in September this year. The lowest point based on the monthly amount of information was recorded at 41,867 cases.
Eventually, it is analyzed that the flow of the plate is entering the institution-led’predictable institutional sphere’ as the institution leads and the individual retreats.
Some analysts say that the bitcoin half-life in May is leading to an increase in the market price. In addition, it is said that the growing atmosphere of recognizing digital assets as safe assets due to the increase in global economic uncertainty caused by Corona 19 is also helping to increase the bitcoin market price.
As the dollar continues to weaken, the value of investments such as bitcoin is increasing. Furthermore, it is evaluated that the recent failure of’gold’, which is the top priority for safe assets, to play its role is also affecting the focus of Bitcoin.
On the other hand, it seems that the likelihood of a rise in the market price of altcoins other than Bitcoin is low. This is because the current uptrend is mainly focused on Bitcoin.
While it is said that traditional ripple will be difficult for the time being, advice comes out that it is worth paying attention to Ethereum. Hashed CEO Seo-joon Kim interpreted “Ethereum 2.0 is slow, but is steadily achieving development milestones,” and “It is a very positive sign that not only individuals but also institutions participated in Ethereum staking.”
CEO Kim said, “Financial institutions are not only looking at investment and research in Ethereum as a means for asset allocation, but as an infrastructure that can innovatively improve the overall financial system by using smart contracts and tokens.” said.
In fact, Ethereum, one of the representative altcoins, is also being incorporated into the institutional sphere. The Chicago Merchandise Exchange (CME) group plans to launch an Ethereum futures product in February, which is considered the second cryptocurrency incorporation after Bitcoin.
On the other hand, if such an uptrend continues, we cannot rule out the possibility that exchanges will cover the boulders.
According to a domestic virtual asset exchange visitor traffic report for November 2020, released by marketing company EtherLab on the 24th of last month, Upbit, which averaged 4,471,000 visitors over the past three months, ranked first, and visitor traffic of Bithumb Exchange, which did not miss the No. This declined, ranking second with 3,725,000. Coinone 1,776,000, ProBit 1,050,000, Poblegate 919,647, followed by an increase of 313,600, 168,567 and 263,447 from the previous month. Coinbit ranked 6th with a decrease of 224,472 from the previous month.
It is an atmosphere in which the phenomenon of the rich and the poor is fixed. In this situation, the scene where only exchanges where people and capital are concentrated, and those that are not, disappear can be produced. All of these situations are closely related to the rising bitcoin price.
However, some counterarguments are raised that it is dangerous to impart unconditional faith to the future of cryptocurrency-centered digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. David Rosenberg, president of Rosenberg Research, affirmed that “the bitcoin market is bubble” on the 3rd (local time) and ordered the market’s courtesy.
“In the case of investment markets that are moving differently from the real economy around the world, active liquidity released to the market is on the rise due to the economic stimulus measures of each country, including the United States, and the US central bank continues to freeze interest rates to lower interest rates. The news that it will maintain the stance has affected the continued uptrend of bitcoin and the stock market.” “He said.
The counterattack of the institutional powers still remains. This is because, while issues such as hacking are still widespread, the existing’rule makers’ are still feeling uncomfortable.
According to foreign media such as Reuters, the governor of central banks in seven major countries (G7) re-emphasized the need to regulate digital currency, that is, cryptocurrency on the 7th of last month. They said in a joint statement that “digital currency can be used for malicious targets and illegal activities,” and “strongly support the need for regulation.” Furthermore, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz mentioned Facebook DM in a separate statement and said, “It will be impossible to enter the market.” It is not a statement aimed at Bitcoin, but it is a scene that shows that there is still a lot of distrust in cryptocurrency and digital assets in general in institutional finance.
Also pay attention to the blockchain industry
While the prospects for overall coins such as bitcoin are mixed, it is necessary to pay attention to the flow of the blockchain industry, which is the basis of these. Although a clear picture has not yet emerged, it is because a large number of players are working on precise assembly of the infrastructure while exploring various possibilities.
The industry’s interest in stablecoins is high. Following China, countries that are piloting CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) are expected to emerge, and the government’s presence in terms of digital currency is highly likely to increase.
In fact, China has shown ambition to introduce CBDC, and has conducted aggressive experiments in Suzhou following Shenzhen. While the industry interprets China’s large-scale digital renminbi experiment as’a flagship aiming at the position of a dollar-centered key currency’, it is also worth noting that it is a centralized digital currency where the People’s Bank and the government are the core, not a decentralized blockchain There is. In the end, China’s digital renminbi is the government’s direct replacement of the currency’s value with digital assets, unlike cryptocurrencies, which are countermines created to guard against the greed of central banks.
For that reason, if the Chinese government succeeds in circulating digital renminbi, it is expected that it will be able to seize strong hegemony in the era of digital assets.
Through this experiment, the Chinese government is further preparing for the cashless (cashless) era while trying to increase the presence of a powerful big brother who condemns citizens. The reason why the Suzhou experiment supports offline payments and improves versatility is due to the government’s will to closely monitor the flow of money. In that extension, it is expected that a number of countries with similar purposes to China will take the flow of the CBDC to further strengthen the government’s control, which has been strengthened since Corona 19.
However, CEO Seo-joon Kim said, “Since CBDC is implemented based on a private blockchain, integration and application to traditional financial institutions will be fast, but it will not be able to create innovative examples of integration by digging into the open developer ecosystem.” Ultimately, it can act as a driving force to further grow the stablecoin ecosystem circulated in the public blockchain.” It is interpreted that the government-led centralized power pattern that goes against the decentralization of the CBDC will rather undermine the potential of the CBDC, and eventually, the CBDC will only affect the spread of stablecoins, which is the means.
Decentralized finance DeFi is also a key keyword that penetrated the blockchain industry last year. Upbit’s Dunamu also paid attention to Decentralized Finance (DeFi) by selecting the eight industry news last December. While showing the power of growing more than 10 times in half a year, it predicted the realization of a blockchain-based financial system that allows all financial transactions such as deposits, loans, settlements, and investments without the control of central institutions such as the government, banks, and securities companies. .
Yoo Ju-Yong, Chief Strategy Officer of Upbit DXM, said in a lecture at UDC 2020, “It is still small, but DeFi is showing explosive growth since last June, and it will evolve faster in the future as it utilizes what was provided in the existing financial industry.”
Hashed CEO Seo-joon Kim also commented on DeFi as “a monumental milestone that proved that the on-chain-based protocol economy can grow beyond the value storage function in a new asset class called digital gold (BTC), and can also grow into a complex financial field.” “There will be numerous incidents such as bugs and hacking, but the efforts of developers and projects that quickly overcome each problem will steadily and rapidly fill holes and grow the sector.” It is also expected that the market cap of mainnet tokens that do not have DeFi that operates at scale will be greatly pushed.
In addition, the rise of decentralized exchanges and stock tokens is another point to note. In addition, domestic banks are also actively entering the digital asset market, raising expectations from the industry. In fact, KB Kookmin Bank created a joint venture’Korea Digital Asset (KODA)’ with blockchain company Haachi Labs and blockchain investment company Hashed, and started a digital asset custody business.