The Week Ahead – March 8, 2021

Topics this week:

• Market Moves (Biden’s Stimulus and Bitcoin)
• NFT’s on the Move
• Abra Product Updates
• Around the World (WAX and more NFT’s, Cardano, Ethereum, Doge!)
• Money Talks AMA Recap

Market Moves

Price action: Most of the top cryptocurrencies were up over the weekend. Some of this price movement is likely driven by the news that the US Senate approved (another) $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. Bitcoin (BTC +41% past month) is quickly becoming a hedge for today’s world of wacky monetary policy. Until the arrival of bitcoin, the world did not have a viable means of programmable money — money based on rules, code, and public ledgers. Instead, old paper money — the kind controlled by central banks with on and off switches for the paper printing machine — feels like play-Monopoly money now. If you need more Monopoly money you can just go to a department store and buy some!

Rant of the week:

To top off the stimulus discussion here is an amusing headline from the Washington Post: Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty and favoring individuals over businesses. This headline really sounds like something out of 1970’s Pravda.

The facts unfortunately do not support this Washington Post clickbait thesis.  Much of this stimulus is going to states and local governments who completely botched the lockdown and now are in dire straits. A complete mess. Quite simply inflation is way underreported right now and is probably more in the 8% range as non government studies are starting to show. Inflation negatively impacts the poor way more than it impacts the rich. The rich don’t care what gasoline, milk or food cost. The poor do. Additionally those who get the stimulus and don’t need it are just putting it in savings, not into the economy. The wealth gap is still increasing at the same rate as before the shutdowns. Well done big brother.

To the Moon: Meanwhile, like it or not, this all bodes very well for bitcoin which broke out of its short term consolidation pattern to the upside on Monday.  If it holds I believe $60k will be retested in March. The fact that bitcoin held $50k on relatively lower volume the past week or so is extremely bullish. This basically means that the sellers have all but disappeared and the market is waiting for additional buyers. Those buyers can only wait so long.

$2,500 feels like a magnet for Ethereum. Not sure what else to say except I’m certainly buying. Oh and we do NOT give investment advice. Sorry!

Abra product updates

Abra continues to pay an industry-leading 10% interest on USD deposits and up to 5% interest for crypto deposits. Here is more information on how the Abra Interest Account.

Abra is updating our US and PH bank deposit solutions. Look for updates in your Abra App. In the US you may be asked to relink your bank account again for security reasons. I promise it’s worth it.

Abra now supports unlimited wire deposits of any size into the Abra account from anywhere in the world. Just click on the Deposit button in the Abra App to get started.

Look for more cryptocurrencies to launch inside Abra in March. DeFi is a major focus of our team right now and we’re very excited at the prospect of helping support major DeFi efforts and tokens.

NFT’s on the Move!

Kings of Leon Launches Successful NFT Auction!

If you watched Abra’s Money Talks this weekend then you know that I’m very bullish on NFT’s.  If you’re not sure what an NFT is then rewatch Money Talks from Saturday and then you can watch this excellent NFT Beginner’s Guide by Crypto Casey.

Abra was involved in a major NFT auction this past weekend.  Stay tuned for the details on what we did, who we did it for and how we did it!

Around the World

Here are some highlights and interesting crypto stories we are tracking:

WAX (WAXP +342% past month)

Here’s something you probably didn’t know. Of the top 10 NFT sales by sales volume, 6 are based on Ethereum and the other 4 are based on WAX (WAXP is the token on Abra.) That’s right, 40% of the top 10 are WAX based! Not only that but of all the top 50 NFT’s almost all of the big sales gains in the past 24 hours have been via the WAX based NFT!  Wait what?? Well, what’s WAX you ask? WAX is a protocol especially designed for exactly this! The original idea was for in game items but in game items are basically the same thing as digital collectibles which is just another type of NFT. Hmmm. Why is WAX not getting more attention? I don’t know but I just bought some WAXP on Abra.

Cardano  (ADA +80% past month)

Cardano is on track to become a completely decentralized protocol by the end of March. Since the Shelley update back in July, Cardano has been moving from a federated system of approved validator nodes, to a system that relies on community nodes verifying the blockchain. Pushing the network live and then moving it from a very controlled and somewhat centralized model to a completely decentralized network is an interesting means of launching a technology like this.  It’s not my preferred mechanism but as long as users know what they’re getting then “caveat emptor” should rule the day. I’ve been mentioning Cardano on our daily Crypto Bites because its development and market moves recently have been super exciting to watch. (You can find the daily show on our YouTube channel).

Ethereum (ETH +14.86% past month)

CoinDesk put out an interesting analysis looking at the suitability of adding ETH to corporate balance sheets. In what seems like years ago, but was only really weeks ago, big corporations from outside of the crypto space, like MicroStrategy and Tesla, started adding bitcoin to their balance sheets. Since then there has been a lot in the news about the role of bitcoin on corporate books — and it seems like every blue chip CEO interview now has some kind of question related to bitcoin. But the CoinDesk piece is interesting because it asks whether it’s a good move for companies to hold Ethereum too. The short version is that while ETH does not pass the store of value test in the same way that Bitcoin does, it is becoming the protocol standard for the rapidly growing DeFi movement (not to mention NFTs, another hot topic recently). Or, according to the CoinDesk analysis: “…ETH is likely to also benefit from a growing recognition of its role as a consumable commodity.”

And in fact, we are already seeing this. This weekend news came out that the Chinese app maker, Meitu, made substantial buys of BTC and ETH into their corporate treasury.

Doge (DOGE +8% past month)

If it’s a dog-eat-dog world, then Doge will never die. Whether you love it, hate it, or don’t give a dog’s bone about it, Doge is a crypto project that has been around since the beginning, and really shows the impact of community-driven movements. And for some reason, it seems like the sports world in particular loves Doge (maybe it’s the love of the underdog), but we saw headlines this week from the Dallas Mavericks accepting Doge, and a Doge-sponsored NASCAR race car is returning to the track.