PayPal has announced that UK customers will be able to trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from this week.
The announcement has helped boost an already-resurgent cryptocurrency market, with bitcoin rising above $50,000 on Monday to hit a three-month price high.
PayPal first opened up crypto services to US customers earlier this year and plans to continue rolling it out to more of its 403 million international customers this year.
When PayPal first announced plans to introduce crypto services last year, the price of bitcoin rose to a yearly high above $12,000, having been described as “a major step forward towards the mass adoption of digital currencies” by Nigel Green, CEO of financial advisory firm deVere Group.
It helped spark the record-breaking price rally that has since pushed the combined crypto market cap above $2 trillion, ranking it above the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet (Google) in terms of overall value.
PayPal has trailed its launch of crypto buying and selling in the UK for some time but has today announced its intention to allow UK-based users to buy and sell crypto tokens from this week. Users will be able to hold a basket of four cryptoassets – bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and bitcoin cash, but it is unclear as of yet whether the firm will allow users to make payments in said cryptos.
The price of BTC has been on a rapid rebound since late July in what has been a rollercoaster ride for the cryptoasset in 2021.
BTC began last week trading in the mid $46,000 range before trading down to $44,000 by Thursday. It has since staged another late-week surge, rising from a low of $44,177 to trading around $50,147 at the time of writing.
Ethereum had a similarly tumultuous week, slumping from just below $3,300 to below the $3,000 level midweek. It has since rallied however and is now trading around $3,325 – its highest level since late May this year.
Facebook says ready to launch digital wallet
Facebook’s much-trailed crypto development looks set to jump start with the launch of its ‘Novi’ digital wallet.
Facebook declined to give more details on the precise timing of a launch, and which coin or coins the wallet might hold, following reports that it is looking to work with a stablecoin other than Diem, a beleaguered digital currency initiative also spearheaded by the social media group.
Marcus, who currently heads up Facebook’s financial services arm F2, is one of the co-creators of Diem, a project announced in 2019 that initially sought to create a synthetic cryptocurrency backed by a basket of currencies. The project is backed by 26 businesses and non-profit organisations, including Facebook, which designed Novi to hold Diem coins.
Its stable coin, now named ‘Diem’ is still in the works. But the company’s chief of financial services David Marcus said the firm was poised to launch the accompanying digital wallet, dubbed ‘Novi’.
Wells Fargo Launches Passive Bitcoin Fund for Wealthy Clients
US banking giant Wells Fargo has registered its own bitcoin fund with regulators.
Per CoinDesk, the firm’s new fund is a passive bitcoin tracker, only available to high-net-worth clients. The revelation comes in the wake of the news that JPMorgan also filed with the SEC for a bitcoin fund on Thursday.
Major institutional players are now making clear steps into crypto. JPMorgan and Wells Fargo join Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon in expanding their crypto remits for clients.
The moves reflect a developing demand for crypto from a different kind of demographic to that of more tech-savvy online exchanges. Banks in the US were only given permission to hold cryptoassets in July 2020. The expansion since then of crypto operations among the big institutions seems to have begun to gather pace.
AUDIO Market Cap Surges Past $1B After TikTok-Audius Partnership News
Prices for AUDIO, the governance token of decentralized music streaming protocol Audius, nearly doubled in the 24 hours, pushing its market capitalization above $1 billion for the first time.
The price surge comes after Audius announced its partnership with popular video-sharing app TikTok.
At press time, AUDIO was changing hands at $3.10, up 86% in the past 24 hours, according to Messari.
Data from TradingView and FTX shows that AUDIO’s price started pumping around 16:00 UTC on Aug. 16 and reached a high at $4.04 at approximately 6:00 UTC on Aug. 17. News of the TikTok tie-up first emerged at 15:00 UTC on Aug. 16.
As CoinDesk reported, TikTok chose Audius to power its new “TikTok Sounds” library, the first of its kind for TikTok, with an aim to streamline the app’s music upload and selection process.
As the governance token of Audius, AUDIO is staked by users to secure the platform. In return, users receive a share of network fees, governance voting power as well as some value-added services like their favorite artists’ tokens and badges, according to Audius’ website.
While the token lives on the Ethereum blockchain, parts of the Audius platform run on the Solana blockchain.
The instant price pump also pushed the total market capitalization of AUDIO above $1 billion for the first time, according to CoinGecko, making it one of the 90 cryptocurrencies worth at least $1 billion. Its current market cap sits at $1.23 billion.
Audius, known as the “decentralized Spotify,” was founded in 2018 and is one of the largest decentralized consumer blockchain applications by monthly users.
AUDIO trading is mostly concentrated on centralized exchange Binance, according to CoinGecko. The exchange provides multiple AUDIO trading pairs including AUDIO/USDT, AUDIO/BUSD and AUDIO/BTC. The token is also available on decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap.
Cryptoassets are volatile instruments that can fluctuate widely in a very short timeframe and therefore are not appropriate for all investors. Other than via CFDs, trading cryptoassets is unregulated and therefore is not supervised by any EU regulatory framework. Your capital is at risk.