The Bitcoin Mail #5 - Looking Beyond Bitcoin
In The Bitcoin Mail #5, we close our series about Bitcoin and try to look at what's next.
Hello and welcome to the fifth and last edition of The Bitcoin Mail.
With this newsletter, I wanted to keep people up-to-date with what was happening in the space, while going through some basic topics about Bitcoin. I think I've covered the core basics of it, and hope to have helped you in your journey to understand Bitcoin.
Obviously, there is more to the Bitcoin story than what we talked about here, and you can learn more about it on River Financial's Learning Center.
In The Bitcoin Mail #5, we close our series about Bitcoin and try to see what lies beyond. Enjoy!
Latest News in Crypto
Cryptomarket Overview
During the last two weeks, bitcoin's price rose to reach close to its previous ATH of $58,000. It is hovering right below in the $52,000-$57,000 area.
Bitcoin dominance didn't change much since early February and is still around 62%, with the biggest digital currency in capitalisation clearly leading the cryptocurrency market.
Aker Group Entering the Bitcoin Industry
The oil and gas family group from Norway launched a new entity, Seetee, with the goal of investing in Bitcoin and its ecosystem.
They bought 1,170 BTC which they plan to keep, and are looking to start Bitcoin mining activities in various interesting locations.
It's very interesting to see a traditional player from the energy industry starting to focus on Bitcoin, specifically on energy-related mining activities. I'm eager to see what both industries coupled together can achieve.
Taurus Group AS integrates a decentralized lending and borrowing platform into its architecture
Taurus Group, a Swiss fintech, integrated the Aave protocol into its infrastructure. Aave is a decentralized lending and borrowing platform built on Ethereum.
This allow Taurus Group clients, including banks and brokers, to access the platform and start decentralized lending and borrowing activities.
This is another very good step towards the adoption of DeFi (decentralized finance) by institutions.
NFT Sells for $69.3M
On Thursday, an NFT, a piece of digital art, was sold for $69.3 million in Ether at a Christie's auction. The piece Everydays: the First 5,000 Days, from Beeple, is the collection of pieces of digital art the artist created daily, for 14 years.
This mark a new highest price for the sale of an NFT, and is more importantly the third most expensive art work to be sold by a living artist. It’s also an acknowledgement of the value of these NFTs, and the will of people to acquire and collect them.
You can read more about this story here.
Looking Beyond Bitcoin
Bitcoin introduced digital scarcity, digital ownership, and decentralized consensus to the world, actually creating the first scarce, decentralized digital currency. We discussed these core aspects in The Bitcoin Mail #2 and #3.
With its rise, Bitcoin laid the ground for the development other types of decentralized currencies and protocols serving different purposes.
Ethereum, for example, was created in 2015-2016 with the goal of being a "Smart Contract and Decentralized Applications Platform". As these protocols are decentralized and open-source, anyone on the planet with an internet connection and the will to participate has been able to participate in their developments. This allowed the ecosystem to grow at an insane pace, fostering all kinds of innovations along the way.
Even if, in the long-run, I think money is the single most important application of these technologies, it's incredibly interesting to see the other innovations happening in the space. Drawing from Bitcoin's breakthrough with digital scarcity and decentralization, two key sectors of crypto have caught people's attention recently: NFTs and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Here are two quick introductions.
DeFi
Once you have decentralized currency technologies, DeFi is the logical next step. It's an area of crypto where all kinds of financial products and infrastructures are being built in a decentralized way, often designed with some types of incentives to encourage using the protocols. By being decentralized and built on open-blockchains, these protocols could become a common financial infrastructure for everyone on the planet.
The most famous applications include decentralized exchanges (Uniswap), lending and borrowing platforms (Aave) and synthetic assets, while more complex ones are actively being built. You can read more about Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) in this article.
NFTs
NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are another equally interesting and disruptive application. Just think about NFTs as tokens representing digital ownership of any kind of data or digital content. Each NFT is unique, has specific properties, and can't be copied like a digital file could. As they are tokens, they are held on digital wallets and can be authenticated by looking up the blockchain.
The apple example from this article introduces the concept more clearly, but keep in mind that this is truly extraordinary. For the first time, data can be owned in a similar way than a physical object. Use cases today include digital art, in-game assets, digital collectibles, ticketing, assets authentication, but it could apply to many more industries and use cases.
As you should have understood by now, I believe the long-term impacts of what Bitcoin unlocked are still vastly underestimated. These two areas are additional examples of more ways how these decentralized currency technologies can be applied. Both DeFi and NFTs are incredibly promising and I think we've explored only a very small part of their potential.
The Next Step
With this in mind, I want to keep exploring these topics as much as possible.
I'll keep you posted about what's coming next, but rest assured that my interest in the space is not going anywhere, and that I plan to keep sharing it with other people in the future.
In the meantime, if you're looking into any of these technologies for any reason, don't hesitate to reach out. I'll be more than happy to talk about it with you and help you if I can!
If you want to learn more:
I hope you enjoyed this fifth and final edition of The Bitcoin Mail. If you have any suggestion about the newsletter or want to know more about these topics, don't hesitate to reach out on Twitter or Telegram @thecryptogus!
Have a good weekend and see you on the next project 👋🏼