One of the biggest stories of the past quarter has definitely been crypto, reaching all time highs with Bitcoin reaching over $64K and Ethereum over $4K and then dropping 50-70% to where the market is today.
There is no doubt that the crypto markets remain highly volatile, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. However, it is interesting to note that more and more traditional investors are now allocating an exposure to the crypto market as part of a diversified portfolio.
The cryptoasset ecosystem is developing and growing rapidly. Mining and storage companies, global exchanges, payment, credit, financial and insurance companies show increasing involvement in crypto. To date this year there have been twice as many large-scale crypto VC deals compared to 2020, according to The Block Research.
eToro participated recently in the Miami Bitcoin 2021 conference. It was the largest Bitcoin event in the world, and the first major in-person crypto conference since the pandemic started. Fifty thousand visitors flocked to Miami during that week and 15,000 people participated in the event. The city of Miami is in the process of becoming a tech innovation and crypto hub, a mission led by its mayor.
Leaders of the crypto global community participated in a variety of discussions on stage, alongside celebrities, entrepreneurs and a diverse audience of viewers. An audience from around the world came to explore ways of embracing blockchain and crypto.
As crypto becomes increasingly mainstream, audiences are expanding and representatives of traditional financial institutions attended the Miami Bitcoin conference and will probably attend other crypto summits and events in the future.
As cryptoassets and the crypto ecosystem continue to evolve, diversification within the crypto portion of a portfolio is becoming substantial and investors are considering a diversified approach to crypto.
Recently, we introduced the new BitcoinWorldWide Smart Portfolio, designed to allow investors diversified exposure to the bitcoin ecosystem. It includes a wide range of publicly traded businesses that are involved in the bitcoin value chain and in addition, part of the portfolio is allocated directly to bitcoin.
As part of the expansion of our Crypto business various cryptoassets were recently added to the eToro platform, including Chainlink (LINK), Uniswap (UNI), Dogecoin (DOGE), Decentraland (MANA), Compound (COMP), Aave, YFI, Algorand (ALGO), Polygon (MATIC), Basic Attention Token (BAT).
One of the interesting moments of the Miami event was an announcement by the President of El Salvador about plans to introduce legislation to make El Salvador the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. According to estimations, some 70% of El Salvador’s people are unbanked. The total number of unbanked people in the world is 1.7 billion, according to estimates.
This brings us to GoodDollar, eToro’s corporate social responsibility initiative, announced it has partnered with BitMinutes, a company that is tokenizing mobile airtime minutes on blockchain. GoodDollar members will be able to exchange G$ tokens for BitMinutes mobile phone minutes.
Wealth inequality is one of the defining problems of our time. GoodDollar is on a mission to stop the wealth inequality gap from perpetuating in the new space of digital assets. I am excited about GoodDollar’s potential and the example it sets for crypto to do good.
Yoni Assia is the Co-Founder and CEO of eToro
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