Proactive Investors - 8.35am: BlackRock (NYSE:BLK) head Larry Fink espouses virtues of bitcoin
Bitcoin fell 0.85% on Wednesday, marking the second day of declines in a row to hit the midnight bell at US$30,500.
This was the precise support line marked out by buyers in yesterday’s trading session, so naturally the BTC/USDT pair saw a bit of a lift in the following hours.
At the time of writing, the pair was around 0.7% higher at US$30,800, while buyers’ support, according to the Binance order book, appears to have slipped back to US$29,500.
For the most part, bitcoin has trended sideways between the 30k and 31k channel for the past two weeks, indicating a tentative atmosphere among traders.
Will bitcoin breakout or plateau?
Any breakout will likely be contingent on the pending outcome of BlackRock’s bitcoin spot ETF filing before the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The world’s largest asset manager’s first application was shot down in June due to the SEC’s fears that fraud and manipulation checks weren’t stringent enough.
But a recent refiling taking these issues into account has sparked optimism that the US’s first-ever spot bitcoin EFT would finally get the go ahead.
BlackRock head Larry Fink took to Box Business on Wednesday to espouse the virtues of bitcoin.
“We do believe that if we can create more tokenisation of assets and securities – that’s what bitcoin is – it could revolutionise finance,” he said.
Discussing bitcoin’s value as an inflation hedge, Fink stated: “Let’s be clear, bitcoin is an international asset, it’s not based on any one currency and so it can represent an asset that people can play as an alternative.”
On the ETF front, Fink said: “We hope that, like in the past, we could be working with our regulators and get the filing approved one day, and I have no idea what that one day will be, but we’ll see how that all plays out.”
Approval would be a huge boost to bitcoin, as it would open trillions of dollars of institutional wealth to the asset class.
It could, however, take a while, so for now, bitcoin remains rangebound.
Ethereum (ETH), the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency is decidedly more choppy than bitcoin.
The ETH/USDT pair dipped 1.3% on Wednesday before regaining 0.85% of lost ground this morning. At the time of writing, the pair was trading at US$1,925.
Global cryptocurrency market capitalisation currently stands at US$1.2tn, with bitcoin comprising 51.43% of the market.
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