Sudan4tech

Watch This Episode On YouTube

Listen To This Episode:

Many Bitcoin enthusiasts tend to lean from a significantly libertarian perspective. Many take pride in routing around the government and relish in Bitcoin’s ability to just opt out completely.

Unfortunately for the Bitcoiners not interested in participating in politics, last week, a proposed version of a United States infrastructure bill introduced an existential crisis for Bitcoin and the more general cryptocurrency ecosystem. The bipartisan infrastructure bill, which is a hallmark part of the Biden administration’s first year in office, saw a few last-minute pages added which sought $38 billion in tax revenue by redefining “brokers” within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

On August 4, the precious metals firm Kitco Gold announced the launch of a gold-backed stablecoin which will leverage an audit process via Cohen & Company with monthly attestation reports. Kitco has partnered with Tradewind Markets, First Digital Trust, and Stably, an asset tokenization provider. The gold-backed ERC20 tokens called “kitco gold (KGLD)” “represent one true, troy ounce of fine gold,” according to Kitco.

Kitco Launches KGLD Token Backed by a Troy Ounce of .999 Gold

In the seventies, Bart Kitner started trading gold with funds he got from a loan and managed to expand his business into a massive precious metals company from a mere $700 investment. The global precious metals (PMs) market, Kitco, is considered an authority when it comes to PMs like gold, platinum, palladium, and silver. The Montreal-based PM company also runs a popular PM-focused website that offers financial news and PM market data.

Now the company is getting into cryptocurrency solutions as Kitco revealed it has partnered with the custodian First Digital Trust, the blockchain provider Tradewind Markets, and tokenization firm Stably. Kitco will launch a token called kitco gold (KGLD) which will translate into a single troy ounce of .9999 fine gold. The Kitco ERC20 tokens will be backed by gold reserves held in Directreserve vaults. The well-known CPA verification firm Cohen & Company will bolster the coin’s attestation process.

Because Kitco’s token is an ERC20, the firm believes the coin can be easily added to exchanges, wallet platforms, and defi ecosystems. The token’s value is recorded in real-time using the same market value of the spot gold price. John Dourekas, the chief business development officer of Kitco Digital Metals Group, explained on Wednesday that Kitco has been anticipating the release of KGLD.

“We’ve been looking forward to unveiling Kitco Gold, representing a digital receipt of physical gold ownership, which is digitally spendable,” Dourekas said in a statement. “Buyers will be able to access a secure and reliable gold token, the most robust asset class to date. Institutional investors will have a competitive alternative to traditional gold products such as gold ETFs, with the additional benefits of real-time trading and settlement enabled by blockchain technology.”

Gold Tokens Jump 30-Fold Since 2020, Kitco’s Gold Coin Will Face Competition

Kitco’s announcement follows the recent report published by Arcane Research which details that gold-pegged tokens have jumped in value 30x since the start of 2020. The PM dealer’s move also follows the largest increase in inflationary pressure since the 2008 financial crisis. Kitco has further indicated there’s been a trend of traditional financial institutions looking for stable hedges like PMs and crypto-assets.

“Trust and verification are hallmarks of a well-functioning market,” Tradewind Markets CEO Michael Albanese said during Kitco’s gold-backed token launch announcement. “We are pleased to be applying best practices from other asset markets to make gold as an investment asset more secure, accessible, and cost-efficient.”

Kitco’s KGLD creation will face gold token competitors as there are tokenized versions of both troy ounce measurements of gold and grams as well. KGLD will face projects like Tether Gold (XAUT), Digixglobal (DGX), PAX Gold (PAXG), Perth Mint Gold Token (PMGT), Gold Coin (GLC), and many more. In 2020, on a few occasions reports had shown gold-backed tokens were fetching premiums.

What do you think about Kitco’s gold-backed ERC20 token launch announcement? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

Almost two thousand years before the early 1920s Weimar Germany hyperinflation, there was the great currency debasement of the Roman Empire.

At the turn of the second century, the Roman Empire controlled all of Western Europe, parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Some estimate up to 65-100 million people lived under Roman rule, with 55–65 million as the most accepted range. — approximately 20% of the world population.

On-chain data shows that shortly after crypto exchange Binance observed Bitcoin inflow of around 12k BTC, price fell by almost 5%.

Huge Bitcoin Inflow To Binance

As pointed out by a CryptoQuant post, inflow of around 12k BTC was seen on Binance, the largest crypto exchange by market volume.

The Bitcoin inflow is an indicator that shows the total amount of BTC transferred to a crypto exchange from a personal wallet.

As investors usually send their crypto to exchange wallets for cashing out, altcoin purchasing, etc., the indicator’s value going up would imply there is some selling pressure in the market.

A strong increase in the inflow metric can have direct effects on the price, which usually shows as a drop just a few hours later.

Related Reading | Fear And Greed: Sentiment Turns Neutral As Bitcoin Stagnates, What To Do?

Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the value of the BTC inflow for Binance:

The BTC inflow for Binance shot up earlier today | Source: CryptoQuant

As the above graph shows, there was a sharp spike in the Bitcoin inflow for the crypto exchange Binance. This inflow’s value was around 12k BTC, worth around $470.6 million at the current rate.

The chart also displays the curve for  BTC’s price. It looks like just a few hours after this spike occurred, the crypto dropped in value by about 5%.

Related Reading | How A Hammer & The Golden Ratio Could Mean 6 More Months Of Bullish Bitcoin

And it makes sense as movement of 12k BTC is quite significant, and a spike like this might mean there is some short-term selling pressure in the market.

While this inflow was quite significant, another indicator, the Bitcoin all exchanges netflow, shows that there was outflow of about 19k BTC from all exchanges. This more than makes up for the inflow to Binance, hence the exchange reserve overall still looks to be down.

After plummeting, the Bitcoin exchange reserve continues to be down | Source: CryptoQuant

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $k, down % in the last 7 days. Over the past month, the cryptocurrency has amassed % in gains.

Below is a chart that shows the trend in the price of the coin over the last 6 months.

BTC's price zig-zags below the $40k resistance level | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

After enjoying a refreshing period of prolonged uptrend, Bitcoin’s price fell down after peaking at $42k. Now, it seems to be range bound below the $40k mark as the coin can’t seem to break it again.

It’s unclear where the price will head from here. It could either continue to be stuck in this range bound environment below the $40k level, or perhaps it will have a breakthrough soon, and a bull run will ensue as hinted by the Bitcoin bullish crossover.

Bitcoin miner Bitfarms has announced updates on its mining operations, including production and energy mix usage, as well as the company’s HODL strategy for bitcoin. The company has mined around 13 BTC per day with 99% clean energy.

Bitfarms mined 391 new bitcoin during July 2021, the company’s most significant production rate in the year and approximately 96% more than its mining production in January 2021. The miner estimates it is mining between 12.5 and 13.5 BTC per day.

In the first seven months of 2021, the company has mined an aggregated total of 1,748 bitcoin. Bitfarms also shared that it has deposited 1,678 BTC into custody through August 1, 2021, a figure that represents around 96% of the firm’s bitcoin production during this year. Based on the monthly closing price of July, the company has put $69.8 million in bitcoin on its balance sheet.

Paris-based Melanion Capital, a derivatives and computer-driven fund manager, has reportedly received regulatory approval to launch an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks Bitcoin-related stocks for investors across the European Union (EU). However, the fund will not be a bitcoin ETF since it won’t invest in or hold BTC directly.

According to the Financial Times, Melanion’s ETF proposal received approval from French regulators who ruled that it meets key EU standards, known as Ucits, meaning it will be available in all of the union’s 27 member states. The Paris-based firm’s ETF has become one of the first bitcoin-related funds to receive the Ucits rating.

Rentible.io, a next-generation proptech platform aiming to advance the move towards a decentralized sharing-economy and making blockchain use-cases in its respective sector more mainstream-accessible, has passed yet another milestone with the release of its novel deposit smart contract.

The platform, aimed to be launched in Q4 and which will make it possible for tenants and landlords to conveniently send and receive rent payments in different cryptocurrencies with increased privacy protection while optimizing outdated market verticals via the deployment of DeFi principles and trustless smart contracts, puts additional emphasis on protecting market participants from online “let-and-run” fraud, reducing costs through disintermediation, and serving as a gateway for both blockchain enthusiasts and less-savvy users.

As part of its recent milestone checkmarks, Rentible was recently whitelisted by Bancor with a co-investment of 100K BNT (approx 350.000$) by Bancor DAO, as well as listed on Bittrex Global – a top 20 CoinMarketCap exchange, both quite rare achievements for a young and still under-the-radar project, further demonstrating Rentible’s long-term potential as a nextgen accommodation dapp operating on a global scale.

“In a similar way to how sharing-economies like Uber, Lyft, or Airbnb reshaped industries and consumer behaviour in the previous decade, we are now witnessing a core transformation of IT foundations via the growing mainstream adoption of new economic doctrines and concepts based on decentralized characteristics, laying the groundwork for the next evolutionary step of IT implementations in general and of community-based or decentralized sharing-economies in particular, which will constitute an integral part of the sharing-economy reaching $335B in 2025 projection.

If you’re a landlord renting out a property, had you received your rent payments in Bitcoin rather than in Fiat throughout 2020, your actual yield would have quadrupled if not more in 2021. This sounds obvious to crypto savvy enthusiasts, yet we need to remember that most landlords and homeowners worldwide, many of whom are actually very interested to venture into crypto and receive rent in BTC, ETH or other cryptocurrencies, don’t know even how to open a wallet, and this is something Rentible aims to help them with and be a facilitator of”, – Lupu Dror, CEO at Rentible.io.

Founded by a team of seasoned Proptech entrepreneurs and experienced developers, and built upon the award-winning Lakotarsak platform and its partnering site RoomMatesUK, the vision of an autonomous, transparent, intuitive platform that will inject the industry-disruptive capabilities of blockchain technology into Proptech is the compass guiding Rentible’s trajectory as it sets to assume the position of a first-mover in the highly energetic sector of mid-to-long-term online rentals, paving the way for other nextgen ventures to follow its footsteps into this massive yet untapped multi-trillion space.