VCs invest record $6.5 billion in crypto as demand keeps growing
Data from CryptoCompare shows that the price of Bitcoin started last week at around $62,000 and slowly dropped to retest the $60,000 mark, from which it bounced off to now trade at $66,000 – close to its near $67,000 all-time high.
Ethereum’s Ether – the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation – hit a new all-time high this week above $4,700 as it keeps on moving up. Last week, ETH had hit a new high, with its price being driven by new upgrades to the network.
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have been making headlines in the cryptocurrency space, with several organisations betting in the cryptocurrency space as demand keeps on growing. Global venture capital funding in the cryptocurrency space has reportedly reached a new high of $6.5 billion in the third quarter of this year, surpassing the second quarter’s record of $5.2 billion.
For the quarter, there were 286 cryptocurrency deals recorded, down from 291 in the second quarter of the year. In the first nine months of 2021, venture capitalists invested $15 billion in the cryptocurrency space. The figure shows a 384% rise from 2020’s full-year total of $3.1 billion.
Similarly, Microstrategy, a Nasdaq-listed business intelligence firm, has added nearly 9,000 BTC to its corporate balance sheet last quarter, bringing the company’s total BTC holdings to 114,042 coins, worth more than $7 billion.
According to the firm’s Q3 financial results, the firm spent a total of $3.16 billion purchasing the BTC it owns at an average price of approximately $27,713 per coin. It first started investing in Bitcoin last year with a $425 million purchase.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has also revealed he is looking to receive his entire paycheck in the flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Suarez is a well-known Bitcoin bull who has been taking steps to integrate BTC into the city’s operations.
While institutional investors and US politicians are embracing Bitcoin, Ethereum’s Ether has been making headlines because of its improving fundamentals. The amount of Ether being burned on a daily basis has been setting new records, with more than 30,000 ETH being burned per day.
The Ethereum burns result from the implementation of EIP-1559, which changed the network’s monetary policy by burning part of the transaction fees in every new block that previously belonged to Ethereum miners to alleviate the fees for network users.
A total of 800,000 ETH worth more than $3.7 billion has been burned so far. Demand for the network has been such that, as a result, the daily net emission of ETH has been negative for a few days already.
That same demand has also seen the average transaction fee on Ethereum soar past the $50 mark – an increase of more than 2,300% since late June. Fees on Ethereum rise when there’s more demand on the network to process transactions. Part of the excitement is related to Ethereum’s Altair upgrade, which is designed to facilitate the network’s transition from a proof-of-work consensus algorithm to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm.
Legal experts warn against ‘dangerous’ crypto amendment
Legal experts have warned that a section in the US Infrastructure Bill, which has been passed, amends part of the tax code and fails to report a cryptocurrency transaction by both businesses and individuals.
According to University of Virginia School of Law lecturer Abraham Sutherland, this is a separate provision to the controversial one that did not properly define the term “broker”. The bill, Sutherland said, is especially bad for decentralised finance, as it imposes reporting requirements that “given the way DeFi works, would make it impossible to comply”.
The eight-word amendment in the new bill would include “any digital asset” in the definition of “cash”. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said the amendment “seems like a disaster” that “could freeze a lot of healthy crypto behaviour”.
While the US Congress has passed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill with a 228-206 vote, some lawmakers in the US have sent a bipartisan letter to the Chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, questioning why the agency denied the approval of a Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) while approving a Bitcoin futures ETF.
A spot ETF would see the fund hold actual BTC, while a futures ETF holds contracts to buy and sell the cryptocurrency at a future date at a specific price.
Outside the US, El Salvador has announced a new public project which is going to be funded using surplus from the country’s Bitcoin fund. In a press conference, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele revealed plans for the country’s first 20 “Bitcoin schools”.
Thailand’s oldest bank, Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), has acquired a 51% stake in Thai cryptocurrency exchange Bitkub for 17.85 million baht ($536.6 million). The transaction is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2022.
Featured image via Unsplash.
Francisco Memoria is a content creator at CryptoCompare who’s in love with technology and focuses on helping people see the value digital currencies have. His work has been published in numerous reputable industry publications. Francisco holds various cryptocurrencies.