Crypto News Today – Cathie Wood predicts Bitcoin to $1 million by 2030.
Ark Investment’s Cathie Wood says Bitcoin ($BTC) will hit $1 million by the year 2030.
Cryptocurrency had a rocky 2022 but Cathie Wood say it was primarily due to centralized institutions.
“Last year was a terrible year for everything crypto, but if you think about what happened, it was the centralized opaque players who went bankrupt. FTX, Celsius, 3-Hours Capital, and what did we see from Bitcoin? Bitcoin is completely decentralized and transparent. It started because of 08′-09′, the lack of transparency in the traditional financial services ecosystem.
“This is a rules based digital monetary system and its global. And there’s no human intervention. It’s very disciplined, it’s mathematically metered to top out at 21 million units.”
“We’re seeing riots and protests all over the place. Where do these people go for an insurance policy against an implosion in their purchasing power and wealth. It is in something like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an insurance policy,” said Cathie Wood.
Market News: FTX sued Voyager Digital to regain $445.8 million.
(Reuters) Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX sued crypto lender Voyager Digital on Monday, seeking to claw back $445.8 million in loan repayments that FTX made before collapsing into bankruptcy in November 2022.
FTX and Voyager both filed for bankruptcy amid a 2022 collapse in cryptocurrency markets, but Voyager’s bankruptcy preceded FTX’s filing by four months.
After Voyager filed in July, it demanded repayment of all outstanding loans to FTX and its affiliate hedge fund Alameda Research.
FTX said in a court filing that on Alameda’s behalf, it paid Voyager $248.8 million in September and $193.9 million in October.
FTX also made a $3.2 million interest payment in August, according to its court filings.
Because those loan payments were made so close to FTX’s own bankruptcy filing, they are eligible to be clawed back and potentially used to repay other FTX creditors, according to FTX’s complaint.
FTX, once among the world’s top crypto exchanges, shook the sector in November by filing for bankruptcy, leaving an estimated 9 million customers and other investors facing losses in the billions of dollars.
Its founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been indicted on fraud charges, and several top executives, including Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, have pleaded guilty to fraud.
Bankman-Fried has denied wrongdoing and is scheduled for trial in October.
FTX initially appeared to weather the storm that brought down Voyager and other crypto firms in summer 2022, presenting itself as a “white knight” that could stabilize reeling crypto markets.
FTX offered to buy Voyager’s platform in a bankruptcy auction, but the proposed acquisition fell apart when FTX imploded in November.
In its Monday court filing, FTX acknowledged the allegations that Alameda raided FTX customer assets to cover its risky borrowing and lending.
But it said Voyager and other crypto lenders were complicit in Alameda’s conduct, “knowingly or recklessly” pushing their clients’ assets toward Alameda.
“Voyager’s business model was that of a feeder fund,” FTX said. “It solicited retail investors and invested their money with little or no due diligence in cryptocurrency investment funds like Alameda and Three Arrows Capital.”
Three Arrows Capital also went bankrupt in 2022, and its founders have refused to cooperate with court-appointed liquidators who are trying to recover assets for Three Arrows customers.
FTX opposes new bankruptcy investigations at it probes Sam Bankman-Fried connections.
(Reuters)FTX has objected to a U.S. Department of Justice request for an independent investigation into the once-prominent crypto exchange’s collapse, saying it is already conducting a wide-ranging probe that includes family members of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
FTX said in a court filing in Wilmington, Delaware, late on Wednesday that the DOJ’s proposed review would only add cost and delay to its bankruptcy case.
FTX acknowledged “fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, mismanagement, and irregularity” in its past conduct, but said that its previous wrongdoing is already being probed by the company’s new management, its creditors and law enforcement agencies.
As part of its own investigation, FTX asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey, who is overseeing its Chapter 11 proceedings, to help it secure documents from Bankman-Fried, members of his family and other insiders with information about FTX transactions that used “misappropriated and stolen” funds.
These transactions, it said, include a $16.7 million Bahamian real estate purchase under the name of Bankman-Fried’s parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried.
FTX is also seeking information about political donations connected to Bankman-Fried, asking wide-ranging questions about Mind the Gap, a political action committee founded by Barbara Fried, and Guarding Against Pandemics, an advocacy organization founded by Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried.
FTX said Guarding Against Pandemics’ multimillion-dollar Washington, D.C., headquarters was purchased with misappropriated funds.
A spokesperson for Mind the Gap said it did not receive direct contributions from Sam Bankman-Fried, although Bankman-Fried made donations to some political causes it recommended to its donor network.
FTX, once among the world’s top crypto exchanges, shook the sector in November by filing for bankruptcy, leaving an estimated 9 million customers and other investors facing total losses in the billions of dollars.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s bankruptcy watchdog has called for an independent investigation into its collapse, a request that received backing from a bipartisan group of U.S. senators.
FTX’s new CEO, John Ray, who worked with court-appointed examiners while leading Enron Corp and Residential Capital through bankruptcy, is prepared to testify that examiners in those two cases cost a combined $150 million and provided “minimal” benefits to creditors, FTX said.
FTX’s official committee of creditors joined the company in opposing the appointment of an examiner.
FTX also on Wednesday night filed a new list of creditors in bankruptcy court, which included financial watchdogs and government agencies from the United States, Japan and Switzerland, as well as companies including Airbnb Inc and crypto giant Binance.
Sam Bankman-Fried, who has been accused of stealing billions of dollars from FTX customers to pay debts incurred by his crypto-focused hedge fund, has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges. He is scheduled to face trial in October.
It is because institutional investors have been showing interest.
The leading institutions have decided to step into the Defi and the Web3 ecosystem.
This further impacts the Crypto Ecosystem positively.
Reports say that these institutions invested $9.3b in the Crypto market in 2021.
It marks a complete technological shift as the Crypto market increased to around 36%.
Now, one of the major reasons that triggered the change is attributed to a shift in technology called Merge.
Ethereum, the second largest Cryptocurrency, undertook a major shift from the Proof of Work to the Proof of Stake.
Now investors and institutions have their own expectations. Let’s seep deep into the study to have a better understanding.
What Is Ethereum Merge?
Ethereum, the world’s second-largest Cryptocurrency, shifted from energy-intensive technology offering sustainability systems to play.
They are calling it “Merge.”
The community built a new engine and a hardened hull.
They shifted from the Proof work system to proof-of-stake.
Proof of work involves a wide network of computers.
Under the system, if investors are to mine crypto, they must solve puzzles to mine crypto.
The level of the puzzles increases with mining.
This complex and energy-intensive technology was used to add new blocks to the system.
The Proof of Stake mechanism is an alternative technology that consumes less energy and computing power.
According to findings, POS consumes one-tenth of the energy to mine Ethereum.
Here one needs not to devote less energy and fuel consumption to run the illustrious computer systems.
What Institutions And Investors Should Expect
With a major technological shift, Ethereum has attained a paradigm shift, at least in terms of adoption-friendly technology.
They attained an advantage against Bitcoin, their rival and the largest Cryptocurrency in terms of market value.
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Now this change will bring in positive into the business ecosystem.
The institutions and the investors now have different expectations of the change. The section focuses mainly on the changes.
1. Reduced Carbon Footprint
As discussed above, POS technology consumes a 99.5% decrease in energy consumption.
Now, the reduction of Carbon foot printing has a significant impact on institutions.
Our world is grappling with a carbon footprint, and its rapid increase in power negatively affects the environment.
You might have heard about the Paris 2015 environment summit, where it was found out the stakeholder had constructive planning, including the Net Zero programs, to stop the rise of the sea water level.
Now, with the Proof of stake, the stakeholders can mine Cryptocurrency with lesser power consumption, which syncs with the Net Zero targets of individual nations.
Hence the step provokes to be helpful for institutions, government, and the environment.
With this major technological high long jump, the companies are able to obtain their own sustainability goals and objectives.
2. Improved Security
Economic and trading democratization has always been the need of the hour.
The business entities investing heavily in Cryptocurrency needs are all driven by energy security and sustainable development.
They are always looking for alternative energy to increase their business opportunities.
But the traditional system economy, centralized in nature, stopped them from this.
With Cryptocurrency, they were able to get the technological shift.
With Proof of stake, the use of Blockchain became more common.
We all know that the Blockchain is an advanced data maintenance system storing data in a decentralized network.
Once the information is entered, it is entered forever. It can’t be manipulated.
Another reason for the improved technology is that the cost of attacking networks has dramatically increased.
Presently more than 45000 Ethereum have been staked so far.
Even 51% of the attacks would cost over $11B.
With improved security, more new investors are expected to join the system and gain growth in this ecosystem.
Closing The Discussion
The Ethereum merger has more for the investors and the institutions.
Now with the merger, cross-team economic collaborations have increased. It is good for increasing business opportunities.
This produces an ecosystem for business growth and stability.
The induction of POS has enabled client diversity and interoperability. They are important steps toward the growth of Cryptocurrency.
These are the advantages the institutions and investors are going to get with the help of the Merge.
Crypto News Weekly: AVAX vs SOL | Avalanche vs Solana.
The central part of the crypto community’s attention has been focused on Ethereum and Bitcoin lately.
Ethereum has been the center of the smart contract industry since its migration to PoS, while investors follow Bitcoin closely to predict the next move the market will make.
That being said, some of the more recent blockchain protocols, like Solana and Avalanche, also have a lot to offer, even in this bear market.
In this article, we analyze these projects and compare AVAX vs Solana to see whether one has the edge over the other.
To achieve this, we will provide some fundamental analysis of each of these tokens and gather some price predictions from experts around the internet.
This should give you a good idea of which is better: Avalanche or Solana.
What Do We Know About Avalanche?
Crypto News Weekly: Avalanche vs Solana.
Avalanche is an open-source smart contract protocol released in 2020, just before the major part of the bull market of that period.
This allowed it to experience some very strong upside price action right after launch.
More importantly, we should note that Avalanche gained a lot of popularity in the smart contract industry by providing a much more scalable network than Ethereum.
This allowed users to launch DeFi dApps that were cheap to use and extremely fast.
To reach this high scalability, Avalanche uses PoS and a triumvirate of chains:
The exchange chain, which serves to transfer assets.
The contract chain, which runs the smart contracts.
The platform chain, which coordinates the validators and staking mechanisms.
By handling a portion of the computational strain, these chains allow Avalanche to achieve 50k+ transactions per second and conserve very low gas fees.
AVAX Price Prediction
The AVAX token was one of the high-performers of the bull market in 2021, reaching as high as $146 per token.
That said, the bearish conditions have pushed the price much lower now, around $16.
Even so, analytic websites are still very much hoping that the token will grow in value in the upcoming years.
Digitalcoinprice.com provides a target of $28.99 for 2023 and goes as high as $91.97 for 2030.
Priceprediction.net is a lot more bullish, with a forecast of $28.44 for 2023, and a target of a staggering $405.84 for 2030.
Consequently, this might be a great opportunity for purchasing this token on exchanges like Godex.
Key Facts About Solana
Crypto News Weekly: Solana (SOL) news.
Solana is one of the most highly praised blockchains of the past couple of years.
This ultra-scalable chain uses Proof of History in tandem with PoS to achieve 100k transactions per second, which makes it one of the fastest smart contract networks on the market.
This has allowed the chain to gather thousands of developers deploying various dApps on the chain, in all categories.
Consequently, it has become one of the main rivals to Ethereum and managed to enter the top 10 cryptos by market cap.
SOL Price Forecast
Like AVAX, the SOL token performed admirably in the bull market.
From a median price of $0.5 in 2020, SOL reached as high as $260 at the peak of the bull market.
It has currently retraced around $28 per token.
Priceprediction.net hopes to see SOL reach $52.58 by 2023.
For 2030, their forecast targets the $605.14 mark.
Digitalcoinprice.com is less enthusiastic, with targets of $51.43 for 2023 and only $165.52 for 2030.
Avalanche and Solana have similar use cases, although their architectures are vastly different.
Solana remains faster and cheaper than Avalanche, while the latter has the advantage of being EVM-compatible.
In all fairness, both blockchains have their benefits and drawbacks, and from an investor’s point of view, they are equally interesting to have in your portfolio.
1.8 million people have now added SHIB to their watchlist on CoinMarketCap beating Dogecoing (DOGE) by more than 200,000.
SHIB is currently trending on Twitter as SHIB news was released that developers had launched an updated version of their ecosystem website today.
The Shiba Inu community has now grown to an astonishing 3.6 million on Twitter.
The community had achieved its first million milestone in October of 2021 when SHIB reached its second all-time high.
Some of the biggest SHIB news leading to the new year included the cryptocurrency getting listed on Kraken and eventually trading on Robinhood.
Today, the SHIB community is waiting for the next major gainer during the next bull run.
Here’s what’s happening with SHIB.
SHIB Army Expansion
The SHIB army continues to expand, sharing its uniqueness with other likeminded communities.
PlaySide Studios has partnered with Shiba Inu Games in such an early phase of the cryptocurrency and gaming development.
PlaySide said it continues to collaborate with strategic partners to develop games using the latest trends that are shaping the future of the gaming industry.
“With booming global trends such as the metaverse and the growing popularity of new technologies including cryptocurrencies, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and blockchain gaming; new opportunities in games continue to emerge.”
Gaming seems to be a big niche where blockchain technology is headed to grow the industry.
Companies such as GameStop have now begun to dive into this process through their NFT Marketplace.
SHIB Price Changes in the Last 24hrs
SHIB price chart today.
Shiba Inu coin is currently up 3.20%.
Its market cap is up 3.25%, with trading volume at 109 million.
The ‘meme token’ currently ranks at #15 on CoinMarketCap and #12 on Coinbase.
Are you holding SHIB?
If so, how many millions?
What are you most excited for the community in 2023?
Leave a comment down below.
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Market News: Finimize reports only 1% of retail investors plan to sell in 2023.
Only 1% of retail traders plan to sell off their investments in 2023, according to a survey from Finimize, while 65% will continue investing and 29% plan to add to their portfolios.
The survey of over 2,000 retail investors across Europe, Asia and the U.S., found that over 80% think the worst of the stock market rout will be over within six months, says CNBC.
The majority (72%) of the traders plan to back individual stocks next year, with 64% favoring Big Tech names like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta.
Even the AMC and GameStop communities continue to stay bullish on these companies.
In 2023, most individual investors plan to invest the same amount or more despite the cost-of-living crisis, according to a new survey from London-based investing insights platform Finimize.
“This data is proof that even in the current market environment, the majority are seeing volatility simply as part of the economic cycle thanks to access to information and growing experience with investing,” said Max Rofagha, Finimize’s CEO, in a press statement Wednesday.
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Retail Investors Aren’t Planning on Selling
A very big portion of retail investors aren’t phased by this year’s bear market and plan to grow their holding leading into 2023.
The survey done by Finimize shows 38% of retail investors also plan to invest in crypto, even amid the fallout from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX.
About 56% of traders believe that bitcoin will be higher, vs. 44% who think it will trade lower.
The retail investment community is set to account for 61% of all assets under management globally by 2030, up from 52% in 2021, according to wealth management strategy consulting firm Indefi.
But Finimize believes retail investors won’t have the influence they did during the ‘meme stock’ frenzy in 2021.
Finimize on ‘Meme Stocks’ in 2023.
But being part of this incredible community made up of millions of investors buying AMC and GameStop, I’m not sure I agree with Finimize.
These retail investors are looking to replicate the events that occurred in 2021 when AMC and GameStop both reached all-time highs.
Will You Be Buying, Holding, or Selling in 2023?
Only 1% of Retail Investors plan to sell in 2023 according to a report by Finimize.
Will you buy buying stocks, holding, or selling in 2023?
I’m curious to know your sentiment on the markets for next year.
Leave your thoughts in the comment section down below.
Market News: Short sellers used FTX to manipulate AMC stock price.
On Dec. 4, 2022, a report details that FTX-based synthetic stocks may have been used to manipulate the value of AMC shares.
In May 2021, FTX offered 36 tokenized stocks, but speculators believe it’s questionable whether or not the firm actually held the real stocks in the first place.
FTX has been under the microscope ever since the exchange collapsed during the first week of November 2022.
Since then, there’s been a lot of information to process, and new information released.
On Sunday, a report details that tokenized stocks listed on FTX may have been used to “manipulate the price of AMC shares.”
The publication thechainsaw.com and its report show that while FTX’s terms of service said the firm’s synthetic stocks were backed 1:1, that may not have been the case.
“FTX listed wrapped AMC token[s] for trading on its synthetic derivatives trading platform,” The Chainsaw said on Twitter.
Additionally, thechainsaw.com published another report that details that Gamestop and Tesla shares could have been manipulated as well.
Furthermore, the researchers note that the leaked FTX balance sheet disclosed by the Financial Times (FT) shows the company only holds Robinhood (HOOD) shares.
There’s no documentation (as of right now) that’s been made public that shows FTX actually owned any of the 36 tokenized stocks it listed.
Market News: Ken Griffin speaks out on FTX and retail investors.
Billionaire investor Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of multinational hedge fund Citadel, warned that the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX could weaken confidence in financial markets at large and hurt the ability of younger investors to save for retirement.
Ken Griffin told Fox Business, “FTX is one of these absolute travesties in the history of financial markets.”
The firm’s bankruptcy may affect up to 1 million creditors and comes amid reports that at least $1 billion in client funds disappeared.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that ex-CEO Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300 million during a $420 million raise from several investors last year for personal use.
Sam Bankman-Fried is now facing a class-action lawsuit that was filed on November 11th, 2022.
Celebrities named in the lawsuit include Steph Curry, Shaquille O’Neal, Shohei Ohtani, Naomi Osaka, Larry David, and Kevin O’Leary who allegedly helped Bankman-Fried promote the exchange.
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Citadel’s Ken Griffin Says Retail Investors May Likely Ditch the Markets
Griffin expressed concern that losses sustained by younger investors who lost money due to FTX may make them less likely to invest their savings in capital markets, including traditional instruments like stocks and bonds.
“The confidence, though, of a generation in financial markets has also been shaken. That’s really awful because the 20-some-year-olds to 40-year-olds who are so engaged in crypto — they’ve got to save for their retirement, and if they don’t believe or trust in financial markets, this is a huge problem. They need to own stocks, they need to own corporate debt, they need to partake in our global capital markets,” Griffin said.
Citadel is currently partnering with Virtu, Schwab, Paradigm, Sequoia, and other Wall Street giants to form EDXM Crypto Exchange.
A cryptocurrency exchange that is supposed to provide transparency and lower transaction costs through the use of high liquidity and tight spreads.
But concerns are growing within the retail investor community as Citadel enters the crypto space, calling it an outrage due to the hedge funds’ long history of abuse of power.
“The bottom line is American investors have really gotten hurt here to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in decline in market cap in crypto over the last two years. I mean that really strikes at the entire core essence of what investor protection is all about,” Griffin said.
Leave your thoughts below.