MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin Bet Reaches Front Page of the Wall Street Journal

One of the biggest Bitcoin stories of the year was the news that MicroStrategy, a business services company, had deployed $425 million into BTC. The move garnered much attention within the cryptocurrency space, with many seeing this as validation of Bitcoin’s store of value properties.

But outside of crypto, few knew about this purchase. The move was widely covered by industry media like NewsBTC, but coverage about this move by mainstream media was somewhat scarce. At least until recently.

Bitcoin Hits Front Page of the WSJ

On Friday morning, the Wall Street Journal published an article covering MicroStrategy’s half-a-billion Bitcoin bet and about the space as a whole. As noted by Su Zhu, CIO of Three Arrows Capital, the story about the investment hit the front page of the Wall Street Journal’s online edition.

front page of WSJ$BTC https://t.co/zsUIcAMsc2

— Su Zhu (@zhusu) October 30, 2020

While the article was somewhat critical of this move, basing this sentiment around the stagnation of MicroStrategy’s share pre-Bitcoin, many see this as validation of the space. There were likely many Wall Street investors that saw this, along with mainstream investors with subscriptions to the WSJ. It is unclear if this story was printed in the print version of the paper.

This article comes as this space has seen a strong uptick in mainstream media coverage.

CNBC, for instance, has hosted at least four separate TV segments on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies over the past two weeks. For most of the year, this space barely got a peep on the outlet.

Retail Involvement to Drive BTC Above $20,000

Despite this coverage, retail involvement in the Bitcoin space remains minimal. Hans Hague, head of quantitative strategy at Ikigai, recently shared the chart below. It shows that Bitcoin interest as per Google Trends remains at lows, far from the highs seen in 2017’s bull market.

Do you see how it's different this time? This is not the top of a bubble-induced mania, it's orderly and quiet. The next peak in Google Trends will make the last one look like nothing, because it was. #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/hDsxXiPEC5

— Hans HODL (@hansthered) October 31, 2020

Analysts say that once retail investors enter the space en-masse as they did during the last cycle, prices will shoot past $20,000 easily. How soon this happens, though, remains to be seen.

But with increased coverage and increased institutional interest, it is likely to play out over the coming months or year.

Comments

DeFi isn’t dead, it just needs to fix these 3 critical problems

It’s been a rough year for DeFi, and it may not get any better until projects focus more on security, regulation and usability. The persistent challenges decentralized finance face have been well documented by a handful of analysts and the recent collapse of the Terra ecosystem re-enforced the fact that something is critically wrong with DeFi. I think DeFi today is completely broken for 99% of the population. The promise of a more transparent financial system has been overtaken by greed. UST/LUNA is just the latest in a string of bad developments: — Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 11, 2022 Let's take a look at what experts say DeFi needs to do in order to have another revival. Improved usability To date, the promise of open and uncensored access to a global decentralized financial system has been largely hampered by the complicated interface, confusing multi-step staking processes and lack of clarity surrounding the yields on various tokens. What do you thi...

ENS DAO delegates offer perspective on DAO governance and decentralized identity

AlphaWallet CEO and Spruce co-founder talk about their roles as contributors to the Ethereum Name Service following the project's recent airdrop. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for the ENS community. Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who applied for the opportunity to represent the community and stay involved in the decision making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, a decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers. Zhang spoke about his experience as an external contributor to ENS and an early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially sought to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool for resolving .eth names and cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Essentially, if a user inputs an .eth name in the AlphaWallet, it will show the wallet address, and vice versa using reverse resolution. Alpha...

Institutional demand for crypto isn’t subsiding, but impact will be gradual

As another $2-trillion stimulus package looms in the U.S., institutions will continue to look at BTC as a hedge against inflation. For example, just last week, when the currency was hovering around the $30,000 threshold, a whole host of pundits was warning investors to brace for impact, suggesting that the premier crypto asset was on the verge of a correction and could once again dip to around the $20,000 region. However, in just one day, Bitcoin was once again playing with the bulls, retesting the $38,500 limit, only to witness a selloff and eventually settle around the $33,500 region. While for most crypto veterans that might have been another day at the office, others branded the upsurge as “Elon’s Candle,” which relates to Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who included “Bitcoin” in his Twitter bio as well as sent out the following cryptic message “in retrospect, it was inevitable” to his 40 million-odd followers online. Regardless of the cause, has the recent price volatility sca...

Crypto Coin Search

Search This Blog