GB Market Commentary 09/06/2021

By Frederick Williams

Top 5 cryptocurrencies to watch this week: BitCoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Cardano (ADA), Solana (SOL), and THETA.

Historic moment for Bitcoin: the President of El Salvador’s bill to make Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador passed Congress with a supermajority just before 6AM UTC. He said that accepting Bitcoin would be mandatory for all businesses. “They have to take it by law”. Paraguay may be next to court crypto businesses with the July bill.

Coinbase says it was not involved in the DOJ’s Bitcoin ransom seizure. Coinbase CSO Philip Martin took to Twitter yesterday, “Coinbase was not the target of the warrant and did not receive the ransom or any part of the ransom at any point. We also have no evidence that the funds went through a Coinbase account/wallet”. The official seizure resulted in government officials recovering 63.7 BTC, worth roughly $2.3 million.

Bitcoin hater Warren Buffett invests $500 million in digital a bank offering crypto products. Buffet has invested in the parent company of the privately-held digital bank Nubank, which offers cryptocurrency investment products to its users. Nubank is based in Brazil and was founded in 2013, roughly having 40 million customers. The $500 million investment is notable, as Buffett is a well known Bitcoin critic.

One of the largest law enforcement operations against encrypted criminal activities to date has seized millions in crypto and penetrated over 300 criminal syndicates. The operation is part of a three year investigation into criminal rings involving the surveillance of 27 million messages via an encrypted messaging platform. Since 2019, the U.S. FBI, in coordination with the Australian Federal Police, developed and conversely operated an encrypted device company called ANOM. The company grew to service more than 12,000 encrypted devices to over 300 criminal syndicates operating in more than 100 countries. More than 700 house searches saw the arrest of 800 persons from over 300 criminal rings.

Vitalik Buterin has now made $4.3M from his $25K investment in Dogecoin three years ago. But true to form, he gave it all away to charity. Buterin recalled being caught off-guard by the speculative frenzy that resulted from Elon Musk’s fascination with the meme-coin.

Tim Wu is a top antitrust expert at the White House, and a Bitcoin millionaire according to a personal financial disclosure he recently filed. According to reports, Wu holds between $1 and $5 million in Bitcoin and as much as $250,000 in the Chinese crypto storage platform Filecoin.