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German exchanges hosting the bitcoin ETF recorded volumes equivalent to many of its popular traditional exchange-traded funds.  Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Crypto (BTCE), Deutsche Börse ETF  is one such product currently in high demand and recorded an average daily trading volume of  €57m in the first 11 days of January, reported Financial Times.

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The Bitcoin ETF traded just short of the most popular ETF INRG which recorded a trading volume of only a million more than BTCE.

Bitcoin ETF is still a distant dream for US investors but it is legal in Europe, because of which many mainstream traditional exchanges list these bitcoin pegged products. Many believe US regulators might approve Bitcoin ETF owing to the growing market cap of nearly $100 billion and a great surge in institutional interest.

Stephan Kraus, head of Deutsche Börse’s ETF segment believed that the

“The structure of the BTCE exchange-traded note, which eased the regulatory concerns and counterparty risk involved in trading bitcoin, had increased the appeal of cryptocurrency investments for institutional investors that can trade without needing to set up specialized digital infrastructure or use an “unregulated crypto platform”.

Bitcoin-Pegged Exchange Products Would Become More Common With Regulatory Ease

The surge in demand for such Bitcoin pegged products has seen a significant bump suggesting rising institution interest in the top cryptocurrency. It also shows that institutions that have chosen gold as their hedge against the troubled financial times no more see it as the only store-of-value asset, bitcoin is slowly but surely eating away gold’s market.

Not just German Bitcoin ETP, even the surging volume of Grayscale who also offers a similar product that tracks the price of Bitcoin has recorded an average daily trading volume of near a billion US Dollars for the first two weeks of 2021, showing that institutions are betting big on bitcoin.

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Grayscale confirms that the institutions are here. pic.twitter.com/zdW9v7Eis4

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) January 14, 2021

The institutional inflow in crypto has just begun with the likes of MicroStrategy using Bitcoin as a Treasury asset, more use cases, and products would arise shortly as the regularity clampdowns are cut short.

The US regulators in the past have rejected several ETF applications citing the crypto market to be too small to handle the exchange-traded funds. However, that seems to have changed quite fast with the ongoing bull run.

To keep track of DeFi updates in real time, check out our DeFi news feed Here.

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Source: https://coingape.com/bitcoin-pegged-security-trading-volume-nears-traditional-etf-on-german-exchanges/

In our chaotic times, filled with partisan rancor and dueling versions of the truth, there’s one thing everyone can agree on: Facebook sucks.

Now, a fledgling blockchain project is one stop closer to taking down the internet Goliath and planting a flag for social networks that don’t control (or sell) user data.

Revolution Populi (RevPop, for short), a “layer-1 decentralized database with user controls,” has tapped Matic Network as a layer-2 solution, allowing developers on the RevPop chain to build their own decentralized applications.

And not just any Dapps, but social networks. “We’re developing a way in which a thousand social nets can be developed on top of this layer 1,” CEO Rob Rosenthal told Decrypt.

“If you use one, they change a rule, they do something you don’t like, you can instantly port your data from one to another, or back again, because you hold the keys,” he said. “All of that data belongs to you.”

While RevPop—which is due to launch a testnet in the coming months—is also building its own social network, it’s making the project open-source in what it’s calling the “Facebook killer kit” so that others can develop their own social networks on its blockchain.

“This will allow developers everywhere to reach into, and contribute to, the RevPop layer-1 database and be a part of an ecosystem designed to return data control back to users,” Matic Network COO Sandeep Nailwal said in a press release. “Users are hungry for this kind of self-sovereignty.”

“The newest and most active part of the internet has been colonized by a handful of companies who grab data from users and keep it, and profit by it,” Revolution Populi Chief Visionary Officer and Yale computer science professor Dr. David Gelernter told Decrypt. “Our Project aims to return digital rights and power to the people by means of a decentralized database built on blockchain, and a growing, decentralized world of social net and related apps along with it.”

This will be facilitated through the use of the forthcoming RevPop token—with users of the company’s own social network receiving the token directly from advertisers.

While that’s kind of like how Brave rewards users with BAT, Rosenthal, a former Goldman Sachs vice president with a background in securities, said the team envisions it become something of a utility token for the platform.

But other social networks built atop RevPop’s database can pursue alternate funding models due to the project’s open-source design. The result, believes RevPop, is an internet where Facebook and Twitter have more competition.

“It won’t be a monopoly anymore,” said Rosenthal. “It will be broken up through free market competition. I hope.”

The price of Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has moved back up to the $1,200 mark after falling below $1,000 earlier this week at a time in which outflows from cryptocurrency exchanges suggest demand could outstrip supply.

According to Nuggets News’ Alex Saunders, data shows that exchange reserves have fallen by 3 million ETH over the last two days, with 1 million ETH leaving crypto trading platforms on January 14, and 2 million leaving them the following day.

Saunders shared data from on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant and pointed out that at this rate exchanges could soon run out of ETH.

Price predictions for ETH have been extremely bullish – with former Goldman Sachs executive and Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal saying he believes Ethereum could go to $20,000 this cycle based on Metcalfe’s law – and as such Saunders believes HODLers will not be selling their funds between $1,000 and $2,000 per ETH.

Some other data providers seemingly show that Ethereum reserves on cryptocurrency exchanges have dropped by 42.5% since mid-May. The analyst interprets the data as suggesting an incoming bull run to a new all-time high for ether, as “we all know what happened when demand outstripped supply of BTC.”

The price of bitcoin surged from about $12,000 to a new all-time high near $42,000 after reserves on exchanges dropped by about 4.5% and corporate adoption surged as MassMutual, MicroStrategy, Square and others bought BTC as a hedge against inflation and currency debasement.

Rafael Schultze-Kraft, CTO at data firm Glassnode, countered Saunders saying his data was “nonsense,” saying that a sudden drop of over 2 million ETH from a cryptocurrency exchange weren’t withdrawals, and that “exchange flows are completely within their normal range.”

It’s believed the 2 million ETH were moved to a new Bitfinex cold wallet for Ethereum that cryptoQuant did not account for. That, however, does not explain the 1 million ETH outflows seen the day before.

It’s worth noting that the decentralized finance (DeFi) space has been booming, and more Ethereum users could simply be withdrawing their funds to interact with these protocols on-chain.

Featured image via Unsplash.