Just about three weeks after Credit Agricole became a minority shareholder in blockchain startup SETL, Citi is investing in the company, too, Coindesk reported. SETL seeks to make exchanges of cash and other assets easier with its ledger. Other investors include Computershare, Deloitte and banking company S2iEM.
And an anonymous investor has placed a big bet on bitcoin with a nearly $400 million buy, MarketWatch reported on Monday (Feb. 19). The purchases came over a time span stretching from Feb. 9 to Feb. 12. The transaction brought the investor’s bitcoin balance to 96,000 coins, up from 55,000 previously.
In stock market news, Long Blockchain could be delisted from the Nasdaq in the future, CoinDesk reported. The company’s price skyrocketed in December to almost $7 a share after it announced a pivot to crypto. But now the company’s stock is below $4 with a market cap of $33.01 million, which is a little below the exchange’s minimum market cap of $35 million for listed firms.
In other news, the man who invented Ethereum – and became very wealthy because of it – is warning investors against going all in when making cryptocurrency investments, Metro reported. “Cryptocurrencies are still a new and hyper-volatile asset class, and could drop to near-zero at any time,” Vitalik Buterin wrote on Twitter. “If you’re trying to figure out where to store your life savings, traditional assets are still your safest bet.”
In regulatory news, pressure is mounting in the Senate and House to take up cryptocurrencies, Reuters reported. And even some free-market advocates agree on that. “There’s no question about the fact that there is a need for a regulatory framework,” Republican Senator Mike Rounds, a Senate Banking Committee member, told Reuters.
Bitcoin rises above $11,000 again, CNBC reported. The cryptocurrency reached $11,279.18 on Sunday (Feb. 18), which marks its highest price since Jan. 30. Overall, bitcoin has risen more than 80 percent after reaching just below $6,000 on Feb. 6.
And Benchmark’s Sarah Tavel isn’t crazy about initial coin offerings (ICOs), recode reported. “I don’t believe in the structure of ICOs,” Tavel told recode. “I don’t believe in a couple of engineers writing a white paper, trying to anticipate the inflation rate they want to have, all the incentives. It just seems like we’ve gone back to the ’80s, when you had waterfall development.”
In the U.K., Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said bitcoin doesn’t work as money in the traditional sense, Reuters reported. “It has pretty much failed thus far on … the traditional aspects of money. It is not a store of value because it is all over the map. Nobody uses it as a medium of exchange,” Carney said at an event held at Regent’s university in London. Still, he said the technology behind bitcoin could prove to be valuable as a way to verify decentralized transactions.
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