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Hackers:
Brian Armstrong, the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, made a public statement speculating that QuadrigaCX—the exchange that lost $135 million in customer funds—may have used its CEO’s death as cover for earlier mismanagement. Brian Armstrong took to Twitter on February 21st to share his perspective on what could have happened to QuadrigaCX. According to the CEO, it is possible that Quadriga used its founder’s death to obfuscate an earlier “multimillion dollar” loss of funds.
Brian Armstrong had his company do its “own internal research, including some blockchain analytics” to take a “best guess” at what really happened with Quadriga. Fair warning, Armstrong warns that his analysis is “pure speculation.” He first confirmed that clusters that look like Quadriga’s cold storage were controlled by a human, likely Cotten, manually. These balances were moved out by early 2018, said Armstrong.
Bullish Key Players:
According to Financial Survivalism, Bitcoin could “melt our faces off” with a rally soon that would make the price of Bitcoin go up as wildly as it did before. He affirms that the next bull run will be more than 16 times up (which was how much BTC went up when it went from $1,200 to $20,000 USD).
The crypto expert has affirmed that Bitcoin was more resilient now and that it would not be “illogical” for the crypto to be pumped at the price of $750,000 USD. If this happened, the market cap would reach at least $13 trillion USD and it would be one of the largest currencies in circulation ever.
One of the most incredible aspects is that Financial Survivalism is not alone in these over-positive predictions. Zhu Fa, the co-founder of Poolin, a mining group from China, has recently affirmed almost the same thing. According to him, the price of Bitcoin could surge to $740,000 USD. However, he did remain cautious as he noted that his predictions had a “substantial” margin of error and that the true value could be way lower than that.
Recently, Survivalism has also affirmed that Bitcoin will go down to around just over $1,000 USD, but it will soon embark on its next bull run and then the token will go up to $10,000 USD, which will bring in a lot of investors.
Banks & Institutions:
JP Morgan with $6 trillion daily transaction volume globally, became the first major US bank to announce the launch of new cryptocurrency, – but behind the scene, the case is quite different.
The latest report from Forbes media highlighted that the 40th largest bank in the United State, ‘Signature Bank’ had already begun ‘private Ethereum Platform’ in late December 2018. However, the JPM Coin’s launch on mainstream headlines appeared on Feb 14, 2019. With this information, it’s quite clear that ‘Signature Bank is the first bank to enter the era but the bank didn’t capture the much of media attention as JP Morgan does.
Nevertheless, in late 2018, the Signature bank had created Signet, a blockchain based payment ecosystem. It uses the digital dollar, Signet. As per the reports, the Signet platform is built on a private and permissioned form of Ethereum’s blockchain’. Unlike JPM Coin which set for trial for coming months, the Signature bank is already launched it on January 1st, 2019. Moreover, what sets it apart from JP Morgan coin is ‘it has already received regulatory approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services.
Adoption:
Samsung is, undoubtedly, one of the most well-known corporate names out there. The South Korean multinational conglomerate boasted the highest number of phones sold in Q1 of 2018 as reported by International Data Corporation (IDC).
The company is known to back crypto projects like CryptoKitties and AERGO. Also, they are building ASIC Crypto Mining Chips with Canadian-based mining company, Squire Mining. The Daily Hodl reported on February 20 that Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S10 will support Crypto private keys. By doing so, Samsung is spearheading the global blockchain adoption movement at the consumer level.
According to Mashable, Samsung sold over 30 million Galaxy S9s worldwide in the first quarter of 2018. Despite being the company’s lowest-selling phone since the Galaxy S III, the total number of Q1 consumers would be massive for the crypto and blockchain space. Imagine having 30 million more people exposed to cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
Here is something to bear in mind: according to Statista, the number of blockchain wallet users at the end of December 2018 is close to 32 million. At minimum, this number could double once the new Galaxy S10 is released.
