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MARCH MADNESS IN CRYPTOS DISGUISED BY UNCERTAIN PRICE ACTION. Crypto price action over the past six weeks has been down, up, and mainly sideways.
But the seeming “volatile malaise” in token prices may not be a true indicator of where cryptos are as a sector in a very uncertain world economy.
Data shows March 2022 was actually the third highest all-time month on record for crypto venture investment inflows.
It underscores that blockchain technologies and projects are continuing to attract significant interest, despite spotty price performance.
3.5 billion in venture capital funding was spread among more than 225 crypto companies, according to theblockcrypto.com.
This increased the first quarter investment total to roughly $12.5 billion.
Crypto Investment Funds Benefitting
In addition to venture capital inflows, mainline crypto investment funds attracted more money.
The Eurozone has seen some of the greatest benefit, according to YahooFinance. The majority of the inflows from late March to early April went to European based funds, with the remainder going to funds situated in the Americas.
ETC Group has been a recent winner, $87 million in recent investment. The company, which oversees close to a billion dollars in assets under management, had the world’s first centrally cleared Bitcoin exchange traded product on Deutsche Börse XETRA, the largest ETF trading venue in Europe.
Unsurprisingly, the largest cryptos, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Cardano, have been targets of investors.
Still, the crypto sector continues to be affected by a downbeat current economic picture, regulation uncertainties, and crypto focused sanctions involving the Russia – Ukraine conflict.
For many, dwindling relative income in an inflationary environment is clearly going to core items like food, rent and fuel.
QUANT ADDS POLYGON TO ITS INTEROPERABILITY SOLUTION. Quant (QNT), a project focused on enabling distributed ledgers to “talk” to each other, announced the inclusion of the Polygon blockchain in its Overledger technology.
The addition means Polygon assets and data can now flow to and from other blockchains (and non-blockchain DLTs) supported by Quant’s Overledger.
A 4 April press release by Quant noted:
“Overledger 2.2.3 provides new access to Polygon mainnet and increases API support for Polygon Mumbai testnet. It also introduces new APIs for tier-two QRC-20 smart contract functions to issue payments and easily retrieve a list of supported tokens from Overledger.”
The update means the Quant Overledger now includes extended ERC-20 token support for the top five tokens on Polygon mainnet, including, Wrapped Ether (WETH), USD Coin (USDC), Tether USD (USDT), Wrapped Matic (WMATIC) and Dai Stablecoin (DAI).
Quant has use cases for central banks (including CBDC creation and functionality), enterprises, crypto exchanges, and businesses that want to create apps that transact with different crypto and fiat currencies.
According to the company, via “patented cross-DLT technology, available via REST API, Overledger provides a range of powerful cross-DLT transaction types. This allows applications to easily access, update and move data and assets held on all the DLTs and blockchains our customers use to operate their businesses.”
The Trends Journal has covered the emerging importance of blockchain interoperability in other articles such as “WEB3 WILL FORCE CHANGE IN THE ENTERPRISE” (8 Mar 2022) and “FED MOVES A STEP CLOSER TO CBDC FUNCTIONALITY” (5 Oct 2021).
BITCOIN TO THE MAX. It’s unsurprising that Bitcoin maximalists had a lot to say at the Bitcoin 2022 Conference in Miami this past week.
Bitcoin maximalists see much virtue in the original crypto, and very little value in other projects. The Trends Journal has talked about the subject in articles including “WHY BITCOIN MAXIMALISM GETS IT WRONG” (18 Jan 2022).
But downtalking “shitcoins” aside, several celebrity and industry speakers did reaffirm what many who are drawn to the king of cryptos see in the project.
Ark Invest CEO, Cathie Wood commented during the conference:
“I think the most interesting thing that’s happened… I’m seeing the politics around Bitcoin changing radically. Because it has become THE single issue that some people are voting on, and this is bipartisan.”
Strike CEO Jack Mallers had some choice words for legacy financial system powers in his talk, according to stockhead.com.au:
“[Bitcoin] is not issued by a government, it’s not a company, BofA [Bank of America] didn’t found it and rebrand it.”
“In reality, payment networks have not innovated in over 50 years. That’s insane…”
“Bitcoin can change the world, but the world cannot change Bitcoin…”
“If the boomers want to come on, they can come on. It’s for everybody.”
Ricardo Salinas, one of Mexico’s richest businessmen, said he holds more than half of his wealth in bitcoin, and added: “We’ve been victims of the fiat fraud for the whole century… I have orange-pilled a lot of our friends.”