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From their inception, SMSFs have always attracted more than their fair share of criticism. Now it’s an ageing membership that’s being used to restrict their numbers.
Is this be the start of the next Bitcoin bull market?
Australian Blockchain Week 2022 is currently underway, showcasing the best of the Australian ecosystem, bringing together industry, academia, and government. NFTs (non-fungible tokens), DeFi (decentralised finance) and the Metaverse, which are all built on blockchain, are widely considered the future of economics, creative tech and value.
To date, however, 2022 hasn’t been an easy one for crypto investors. Bitcoin is down 21% year to date and 40% from its 52-week high, which is hard to digest when just about everything else is in the black.
So, what’s going on?
ETF Securities’ domestic partner 21Shares is optimistic on the sector saying, “Recovery is on track this week, with Bitcoin performing better by over 7% and Ethereum by 16% since last week. Avalanche is also up by a whopping 28.7%; a development that may be attributed to the increasing interest in the NFT ecosystem when gauging the 48% jump in the network’s NFT sales, as well as the excitement surrounding the expansion of Terra’s Anchor money-market protocol onto the AVAX network.”
Could this be the bottom for Bitcoin? 21Shares seems to think so, saying: “institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals could be capitalising on this US$38,000-$42,000 price level for withdrawing their BTC holdings into their cold storage for long-term holding; a precursor that usually occurs before a rally, as shown below in November of 2020, and September of 21.
“There are undoubtedly opportunistic inflows into commodities, including palladium and gold, which reached all-time highs in light of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, on the back of which capital likely came out of the equity market. As discussed previously, Bitcoin’s dominant use-case in the past couple of weeks has been to serve as a neutral and non-sovereign payment alternative to support the Ukrainian government,” says 21Shares.
2iShares thinks this could be the start of Bitcoin’s next bull-run, saying “It’s clearly time for Bitcoin to shine as a non-state, non-sovereign, and emerging store of value – and this decade has clearly been battle-testing this thesis.”
Weekly Returns
The returns of the top five crypto assets over the last week were as follows – BTC (4.4%), ETH (10.54%), BNB (6.7%), XRP (9.26%), and LUNA (8.05%).
Cryptocurrency has come to the rescue in times of despair. According to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), cryptocurrencies helped Afghans after sanctions placed on the country prevented bank transfers to and from the country. Similarly, 21Shares says: “Governments are less likely to use cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions for the reasons mentioned earlier in this newsletter. However, the real beneficiaries are and will always be the unarmed civilians living in war-stricken nations who have always paid the price.”
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