Author: Forbes
Ever since Satoshi Nakamoto outlined a vision in 2008 for what is now the world’s largest cryptocurrency, followers and fanatics across the digital asset realm have billed Bitcoin as the ideal store of value in times of rising prices. With no government backing and a limited supply of 21 million coins, its value cannot be subject to devaluing the same way that, say, the U.S. dollar could if the Federal Reserve elected to flood the market with supply. Ultimately, it’s a form of digital gold—or so the pitch goes. And yet, with inflation now raging in the U.S. and proving to be anything but transitory,…
It has long been taken for granted that there are risky assets and safe hedges. But what if the risky assets are the safest hedges? As Fortune wrote previously, Bitcoin’s volatile last few months has called into question its usefulness as a hedge against inflation, particularly due to the fact that it remains primarily tied to speculative trading, which makes it a highly volatile asset, as Boston College finance professor Leonard Kostovetsky told Fortune. There have been 13 days in 2021 alone where the price of Bitcoin has moved more than 10% in one direction, Kostovetsky says. “So it seems strange to think that a person…
Payments evolve. Consumers adjust and quickly. We are in a growth window that should and will open up new opportunities over the next five years. Before any of our modern systems, there was the gold standard, where all money produced was backed by an equivalent amount of gold in our federal reserves. As a fun bit of history, most people refer to 1971 as the time The United States left that system. Actually, it was FDR, backed by Congress in 1933, that created a joint resolution where creditors could no longer demand payment in gold. Nixon’s move in 1971 simply stopped…
This year we watched society adopt blockchain technologies and embrace cryptocurrency like never before, driving the price of bitcoin to an all-time high of nearly 69,000 and taking much of the rest the industry with it. To celebrate the major industry moments, we compiled a list of our best-performing content of 2021. For our cover story in October, we spoke with one of crypto’s youngest billionaires, Sam Bankman Fried, who is determined to build his fortune just to give it all away. For our cover story in April, the Winklevoss brothers gave us their predictions for social media and the metaverse. We witnessed the…
SEBA Bank is launching a digital token that allows investors to take ownership of physical gold stored in Swiss vaults – all through the Ethereum blockchain. The Swiss bank’s new product exists as an ERC-20 token, meaning it’s custodied and traded on the world’s second largest blockchain. This differs from traditional digital gold products which are not stored on a blockchain and therefore merely serve as IOUs from an issuer. Blockchains like Ethereum unlock a higher degree of investment security as they don’t require a trusted third party to authenticate ownership of digital assets. Instead, they use a decentralized ledger…
Imagine sending cryptocurrency as easily and safely as sending a text to a friend. That’s precisely what new startup Coincast recently launched to do, and just in time as well: Facebook is just starting to bring its Novi digital wallet technology to WhatsApp in the U.S., enabling no-fee simple crypto transactions via the USDP stablecoin. But this isn’t just stablecoins. Coincast allows you to send mainline cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum to people who don’t even have a digital wallet yet. “We are making it … as simple as sending a text message,” CEO Albert Renshaw, who just closed a series A round of…
Elon Musk, the Tesla TSLA -5% billionaire who’s helped the “joke” bitcoin rival dogecoin become a major cryptocurrency this year, has outlined exactly why he supports the memecoin over the likes of bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin price has fallen sharply over the last month, losing around 25% of its value and hitting the price of ethereum and most other major cryptocurrencies—including the meme-based dogecoin. Musk, speaking to Time magazine after it named him Time’s 2021 Person of the Year, said he thinks dogecoin is better suited for transactions than bitcoin and has a “much higher potential.” “Bitcoin is an interesting example and the prime mover on this,” Musk…
By now everyone’s heard of Bitcoin. It introduced the world to blockchain or distributed ledger technology and as a crypto asset, it is the center of the universe. But bitcoin is hardly alone. In fact, an entire galaxy of crypto assets has been created to support a wide range of use cases and applications focused on verticals such as identity management, data storage, gaming, banking, lending, social media and streaming. Because Bitcoin started the industry, virtually every other crypto asset is called an alt-coin. Alt-coins can be categorized in a few different ways. Protocol Tokens Protocol tokens, also referred to as…
Elena Nadolinski grew up playing on the shells of abandoned tanks and decommissioned battleships in Volgograd, Russia, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. When she returned there on a recent trip from her new home in Silicon Valley, she says she was struck by how Russia’s growing authoritarian surveillance continues to impact the very nature of innovation. “Lack of privacy, and having this expectation that I am surveilled, and I need to hide what I have, because I don’t actually have privacy guarantees,” says Nadolinski, speaking from her offices in San Francisco. “Has evolved the culture in a way…