CoinDesk Crypto

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said Monday that cryptocurrency is “certainly not suitable for retail investors” in response to a parliamentary question.

• Shanmugaratnam added that the crypto market in Singapore remains small when compared to shares and bonds. The combined peak daily trading volume of bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) and XRP (XRP) in 2020 was only 2% of the daily trading volume of securities on Singapore Exchange (SGX).
• The statement came days after Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was caught up in a token scam on blockchain social media platform BitClout.
• A profile appeared to have been set up using the Prime Minister’s name and photo without his knowledge or permission.
• According to a screenshot shared by Loong on Facebook last week, there were 27.3955 tokens created for the account priced at $357.85 each.
• One user had purchased $4.77 worth.
• Loong urged Singaporeans to “remain vigilant when dealing with cryptocurrency platforms” warning that they “won’t be protected by the laws administered by MAS” when dealing with unregulated firms.

See also: BitClout’s Alleged Leader Hit With Cease-and-Desist by Prominent Crypto Law Firm

• XRP Rises Above $1 for First Time Since March 2018, Despite SEC Shadow
• Grayscale Adds Chainlink to Its Digital Large Cap Fund
• Bitcoin Rangebound With Support Near $57,900
• Grayscale Files to Register Trust for Microsoft-Partnered Nahmii Project Token

Bitcoin (BTC) traded lower during Asia hours as buyers took profit near the $59,000 resistance zone. But selling pressure was limited near $57,900 support. Momentum signals are neutral over the short-term as BTC continues to consolidate.

• The relative strength index (RSI) on the hourly chart signaled overbought conditions yesterday. This preceded a near 3% selloff during Asia hours.
• Buyers continue to defend rising support levels from the April 3 price low around $56,500.
• For now, BTC continues to trade above its 50-period volume weighted moving average on the hourly chart, which helps to define support and resistance levels during intraday price swings.  
• BTC has retraced roughly half of its near 6% selloff from April 1, although price action has been rangebound over the past month.
• “A consolidation phase is underway as overbought conditions are absorbed,” wrote Katie Stockton, managing partner of Fairlead Strategies. “A breach of the 50-day moving average near $54,000 would be a reason to manage risk of a pullback given the first major support is uncomfortably far below near $42,000.”

• XRP Rises Above $1 for First Time Since March 2018, Despite SEC Shadow
• Grayscale Adds Chainlink to Its Digital Large Cap Fund
• Singapore’s Central Bank Warns Crypto ‘Certainly Not Suitable for Retail Investors’
• Grayscale Files to Register Trust for Microsoft-Partnered Nahmii Project Token

Grayscale Investments DID NOT FILE to register a new trust for Microsoft-partnered Ethereum scaling project Nahmi, a spokeswoman for the world’s largest digital asset manager said.

• The filing with the State of Delaware indicated that a company named “Grayscale” had filed for a trust in a way that was identical to how Grayscale Investments had done for multiple other trusts.
• “We did not make that filing,” the spokeswoman said.
• As such, the filing may have been an attempt to pump the price of the project’s native token NII.
• According to CoinGecko, the price of NII has more than doubled in the last 24 hours to $0.01, with a 24-hour trading volume of $20.2 million.
• It appears at least one other trust filing with the name “Grayscale” may also be fraudulent.
• Grayscale is owned by Digital Currency Group, the parent company of CoinDesk.
• A call is being placed with the State of Delaware.
• CoinDesk regrets any confusion caused by the previous report.

See also: Grayscale Says It’s ‘100% Committed to Converting GBTC Into an ETF’

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Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest digital asset manager, filed April 1 to register a new trust for Microsoft-partnered Ethereum scaling project Nahmii.

• The registration was made by the Delaware Trust Company, Grayscale’s statutory trustee for the state.
• Filed with the Delaware corporate registry April 1, the registration indicates Grayscale is considering a trust based on the Nahmii project’s token as a future offering.
• Nahmii is an Ethereum-based second layer blockchain scaling platform that partnered with Microsoft in 2019 thereby offering its solutions on Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure.
• According to CoinGecko, the price of Nahmii’s native token NII has almost doubled in the last 24 hours to $0.01 with a 24-hour trading volume of $15.3 million.
• Grayscale is owned by Digital Currency Group, the parent company of CoinDesk.

See also: Grayscale Says It’s ‘100% Committed to Converting GBTC Into an ETF’

• XRP Rises Above $1 for First Time Since March 2018, Despite SEC Shadow
• Grayscale Adds Chainlink to Its Digital Large Cap Fund
• Singapore’s Central Bank Warns Crypto ‘Certainly Not Suitable for Retail Investors’
• Bitcoin Rangebound With Support Near $57,900

Tether is set to go live on Polkadot following a launch on the network’s cousin, Kusama.

• The aim is for USDT to be the first-ever stablecoin on the Polkadot network, according to an announcement Tuesday.
• Polkadot is a network that supports various interconnected blockchains called parachains. It is set to go fully live later this year.
• Polkadot’s DOT token is currently the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to CoinGecko.
• Kusama launched in 2019 as a pre-production environment to Polkadot, known as a “canary network.”
• Tether is the world’s largest stablecoin with a market capitalization of over $40 billion.
• It recently launched on its eighth blockchain, Solana.

• XRP Rises Above $1 for First Time Since March 2018, Despite SEC Shadow
• Grayscale Adds Chainlink to Its Digital Large Cap Fund
• Singapore’s Central Bank Warns Crypto ‘Certainly Not Suitable for Retail Investors’
• Bitcoin Rangebound With Support Near $57,900

New research has found that cryptojacking, or the illegal use of someone else’s computing resources to mine cryptocurrencies, has quietly decreased for the first time since 2018.

Unit 42, the global threat intelligence team at Palo Alto Networks, which conducted and published the research as part of a larger “Cloud Threat Report,” first started tracking cryptojacking in 2018. 

The report focuses specifically on the illicit mining of privacy coin monero, given its popularity with hackers, the authors say. The research was conducted from September 2020 through February 2021. 

Related: XRP Rises Above $1 for First Time Since March 2018, Despite SEC Shadow

“Globally, 23% of organizations with cloud workloads experienced cryptojacking from July through September 2020, compared to only 17% from December 2020 through February 2021, according to our findings,” the report states.

According to Unit 42 researcher Nathaniel Quist, cryptojacking is both an issue and appealing to attackers for two reasons. 

First, the cloud has lots of CPUs and lots of virtual machines, said Quist, which can translate to big mining profits. Second, the cloud is hard to monitor. Quist said miners can run undetected for a long time, and without any detection mechanisms in place, they may run until the user finds an inflated cloud usage bill and realizes that something is wrong.

“There is currently a heightened awareness by cloud security teams towards the significance, impact and risks of cryptomining operations and we believe the initial steps are being taken to better secure cloud environments,” Quist said. 

Related: Grayscale Adds Chainlink to Its Digital Large Cap Fund

Researchers saw that the lowest number of network connections took place at the highest market price points, which may indicate that mining operators were performing the majority of their mining during bear markets before selling during high price runs.

While XMR is the most popular coin for cloud mining, Unit 42 also looked at the network  connections for ether, bitcoin, litecoin and dash. In each case, XMR mining connections significantly outperformed the other mining operations.

While cryptojacking itself was down, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an increase in other kinds of cybercrime associated with increased demand for cloud computing products. 

Looking from October 2019 to February 2021, Unit 42’s research indicates that cloud security incidents exploded by 188% in the second quarter of 2020 (April to June) as nationwide lockdowns went into effect. 

The team also found that while organizations and businesses were quickly able to move their workflow to the cloud, automated security measures lagged behind. 

And these kinds of security incidents didn’t discriminate by industry. The retail industry saw incidents increase by 402% while manufacturing and government increased by 230%, and 205%, respectively. 

It wasn’t just security incidents that increased either, but also the risk to sensitive data. 

Surprisingly, the Unit 42 research found that 35% of businesses globally let their cloud storage resources be publicly accessible from the internet. Thirty percent of those organizations exposed some form of sensitive data to the internet, making it potentially vulnerable. This data included personally identifiable information, intellectual property and healthcare and financial data. 

“This finding was shocking, given that anyone who knows the right URLs can access the data without passwords or other authentication,” the researchers wrote. 

There have been numerous instances of researchers and attackers accessing inadvertently exposed data in this way.

• Singapore’s Central Bank Warns Crypto ‘Certainly Not Suitable for Retail Investors’
• Bitcoin Rangebound With Support Near $57,900

Asset manager CoinShares has launched a new physically backed litecoin exchange-traded product (ETP) on the Swiss SIX exchange.

• Listed under the ticker LITE, each unit of the ETP will be backed with 0.20 LTC, according to an announcement Tuesday.
• The product has a base fee of 1.5% per annum.
• This is the third such product launch by CoinShares of 2021, following the announcement of ETPs backed by BTC and ETH in January and February respectively.
• About two thirds of CoinShares’ more than $4 billion in assets under management (AUM) is in bitcoin with an increasing amount held in ethereum.
• Litecoin is the world’s eighth largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $14.83 billion.
• CoinShares’ profits more than doubled in Q4 2020 compared to the year earlier according to results announced March 31.
• Jersey-based CoinShares describes itself as Europe’s largest digital asset investment house. The company is publicly listed on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market.

See also: CoinShares Partners With Canada’s 3iQ to Launch New Bitcoin ETF on TSX

• Tether’s USDT to Launch on Kusama With Polkadot to Follow
• Binance-Owned WazirX Launches India’s First NFT Platform
• Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players

India now has a marketplace for digital collectibles. 

On Monday, the Mumbai-based WazirX exchange, the largest in India, launched a non-fungible tokens (NFT) platform through which creators can auction their digital assets and earn royalties. 

“The development has paved the way for seamless exchange of digital assets and intellectual properties including art pieces, audio files, videos, programs, and even tweets apart from other digital goods and services,” the Binance-owned exchange said in a press release shared with CoinDesk in a Telegram chat.

Related: Tether’s USDT to Launch on Kusama With Polkadot to Follow

NFTs are a class of cryptocurrencies representing a wide range of unique tangible and intangible items, from collectible sports cards to virtual real estate and even digital sneakers, as discussed by CoinDesk last month.

In plain English, an NFT is not replaceable by any another item and acts as proof of ownership over a piece of a digital asset. 

“We are delighted to launch one of India’s first NFT marketplace,” Nischal Shetty, CEO of WazirX, said. “Both digital creators and collectors stand to benefit from the WazirX NFT marketplace.”

WazirX does not charge customers for creating and listing NFTs on its platform and is working toward making its marketplace more lucrative by eliminating costs associated with verifying NFT transactions on the blockchain, according to the press release. 

Related: CoinShares Launches Litecoin ETP

Since NFTs run on blockchain, most trading platforms charge users for the computing power required to process and validate transactions on the blockchain. 

Film actor/producer and advisor to NFT market place Vishakha Singh said she’s confident the launch will be a success and help “erase the myth of the starving artist”.

“From the creative industry perspective, we believe this is a great opportunity for artists and IPR owners to monetize their existing assets via a new revenue stream,” Singh said. “We are confident that this would be a beautiful marriage of arts, technology and commerce.”

WazirX’s foray into the NFT space comes at a time when India’s crypto industry is facing regulatory uncertainty. The government is planning to introduce a bill in the parliament seeking to ban private cryptocurrencies and facilitate development of the digital rupee to be issued by the Reserve Bank of India. However, the government’s anti-crypto stance has failed to deter India’s millennial from embracing bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, in general.

Also read: What Are NFTs and How Do They Work?

• Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players

The Sacramento Kings are set to become the first major sports franchise to offer a bitcoin payment option to all players and staff, team chairman Vivek Ranadivé said on Clubhouse on Monday.

CoinDesk confirmed with a fellow speaker on the Clubhouse program, which was hosted by Tim Draper, that Ranadivé had previewed his announcement scheduled for later this week. News of the announcement first circulated on Twitter.

The move would strengthen the Kings’ longstanding claim to being one of the most crypto-forward teams in professional sports. The California NBA team began selling everything from tickets to hot dogs for bitcoin in 2014 and in 2019 launched rewards token for fans.

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It was unclear at press time how the Kings will facilitate bitcoin payments to players and staff. It partnered with BitPay for the 2014 offering. BitPay did not immediately respond to CoinDesk.

NFL player Russell Okung made headlines late last year for becoming the first NFL player to convert some of his $13 million salary into bitcoin. Okung used Zap’s Strike product to convert dollars to BTC.

A representative for the Kings did not pick up the phone.

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For the first time in the country’s history, South Korean prosecutors have sold bitcoin confiscated from criminals, CoinDesk Korea reported. The sale turned a profit of around 12.3 billion won (around US$10.9 million), which has been transferred to the national treasury. 

On April 1, the Suwon District Prosecutors’ Office announced it had sold “191 bitcoin confiscated in April 2017 from the operator of the illegal pornography site, AVSNOOP, identified thus far as ‘Ahn’ (assumedly his surname) at around 64,260,000 won ($57,000) per coin.”

In South Korea, producing, selling and distributing pornography is prohibited by law.

Related: Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players

Authorities originally confiscated 216 BTC from Ahn, but only 191 were determined to be “of criminal origin” by the Korean Supreme Court in a ruling in May 2018. It was the first time a South Korean court acknowledged cryptocurrency as “intangible assets” and gave the authorities the right to confiscate crypto acquired through, or used for, illicit activity.  

While the U.S. government has been auctioning bitcoin since 2014, Korean prosecutors have held on to the confiscated bitcoin for the past four years due to legal ambiguity surrounding cryptocurrency. According to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, prosecutors moved to liquidate the confiscated bitcoin on March 25, the exact day when the country’s crypto legislation went into effect. The revised legislation classifies crypto as “virtual assets.”

When prosecutors confiscated Ahn’s bitcoin in April 2017, it was worth around 270 million won (around $240,000). The amount when sold on March 25 is over 45 times that. 

Ahn operated AVSNOOP from May 2014 to when he was arrested in April 2017. He served 18 months behind bars and was released in October 2018. It looks like he will receive the remaining 25 BTC determined to be legit. 

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When Paul Tudor Jones bet 1% to 2% of his assets on bitcoin in May 2020 it was unclear where the billionaire had bought his crypto, or how. The industry remained uncertain if his investment was direct. After all, his hedge fund had started flirting with bitcoin futures only days before. 

But in the year since, his firm, the $44.5 billion Tudor Investment Corporation, has indeed established rails for direct crypto ownership. It secured custodial ties with institutional powerhouses Coinbase and Bakkt, according to new filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Coinbase Custody Trust Company, Bakkt Trust Company and Tagomi Trading LLC (the institutional brokerage firm Coinbase bought in May 2020) all provide custodial services to Tudor Jones’ family-only hedge fund, the documents state.

Related: Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players

The filings provide a rare glimpse into the hush-hush world of institutional crypto dealmaking, where well-heeled clients pile into an asset class bankers once deemed absurd. Many, like Tudor Jones, see bitcoin as an inflation hedge, and their ranks are swelling in the pandemic economy.

They’re also playing a key role in the 2020-21 bull market. On-chain data shows whales bought over 500,000 BTC in the final months of 2020, according to Chainalysis. 

Against this backdrop are service providers like Coinbase who occasionally tout their institutional clients as they race to capture yet more hedge funders’ dollars. But Coinbase, which did not comment for this article, never revealed its links to Paul Tudor Jones.

Representatives for Tudor Group and Bakkt did not respond to CoinDesk’s requests for comment.

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For now, Tudor Jones appears to be restricting direct crypto exposure to a small corner of his clients. “Tudor Family Fund II,” which is open to relatives and close associates of the macro king, was the only one of Tudor Investment Corp.’s eight hedge funds to disclose crypto custodians on the firm’s annual Form ADV, filed March 31.

Not even the $27 billion Tudor BVI Global Fund, which last year presaged Tudor Jones’ bitcoin romance when it jumped into crypto futures in early May, has any industry tie-ups, according to similar SEC filings.

The Tudor Jones family fund was worth $1 billion at last check but the chances of all that being bitcoin are slim to none. The exclusive fund maintains a vast network of partners in the custodian and prime brokerage space – names like Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Credit Suisse – that suggest broad exposure to the global markets.

But a wider swath of Tudor clients nonetheless appears poised for direct crypto exposure, according to the asset manager’s latest regulatory risk brochure. It included an entire section on the risks of investing in crypto for the first time in its four-decade history.

“Certain Clients are permitted to enter into cryptocurrency transactions as described in the relevant Offering Materials,” the document states, through “direct investment on a spot basis or indirect investment” in crypto derivatives. Notably, the firm is not holding itself to crypto futures contracts.

The document does not specify what it means by “certain clients.” However, in a section describing what investment strategies are only available to “proprietary accounts” like the family fund, it does not list cryptocurrency transactions. 

Tudor Investment Corp. is not the first big-name asset manager to loudly tout its crypto bets while keeping its custody links more quiet. 

Britain’s Ruffer Investment pulled a similar strategy when it bought $745 million in bitcoin last November without revealing who was holding the coins. (CoinDesk later revealed Coinbase as the custodian.)

The soon-to-be-publicly-traded Coinbase has expanded well beyond its roots as a retail exchange. The firm has served headline-grabbing clients like Ruffer, Tesla and MicroStrategy. 

The acquisition of Tagomi, the keystone of Coinbase’s institutional offering, was announced in May 2020. The deal closed in August 2020.

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So far this year, publicly traded Marathon Patent Group (Nasdaq: MARA) has mined 196 BTC worth $11.5 million at current prices, and the firm plans to expand its bitcoin mining fleet to more than 100,000 ASICs by the end of January 2022.

The newly mined coins bring Marathon’s bitcoin treasury up to 5,134.2 BTC (roughly $300 million), per an announcement. Marathon’s stock jumped 7% on the news and closed at $56.56.

Also in Q1, Marathon received 10,300 top-of-the-line Bitmain s-19 Pros, which are more powerful than most other hardware on the market. 

Related: Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players

The Las Vegas-based firm will receive recurring shipments from Bitmain throughout the year with the goal of having over 100,000 ASICs online by the end of January 2022, giving Marathon’s operations an estimated hashrate of 10.3 exahashes per second (EH/s). These purchases come after the company raised hundreds of millions from stock offerings and other financing over the past year.

Marathon’s aggressive expansion is in step with the other big names in the mining industry. New machines are just now coming online after heavy demand dammed-up the ASIC supply chain, and Bitcoin’s mining difficulty recently hit an all-time high in response to the flood of hashrate. (Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is a self-correcting algorithm that makes mining bitcoin harder or easier depending on market conditions.)

Compass CEO Whit Gibbs previously told CoinDesk this trend shows no signs of stopping this year. Marathon’s mammoth ASIC orders gives proof to that.

“The pending flood of hashrate about to enter the market will only continue pushing bitcoin’s mining difficulty higher, which should track with bitcoin’s price,” Gibbs said.

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Stacks token (STX), the cryptocurrency of decentralized computing platform Blockstack, doubled in value in less than 24 hours, after it became available to trade on South Korea-based cryptocurrency exchange Upbit, reflecting increased interest in alternative cryptocurrencies from retail traders in the East Asian country.

• At press time, stacks’ changing hands at $2.19, up 88% in the past 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko.
• The total market capitalization of Stacks rose to around $2.4 billion.
• The latest price jump of Stacks came after it was listed on South Korea-based crypto exchange Upbit with a STX/KRW pair.
• There’s been an increased interest in so-called “alternative cryptocurrencies” (“altcoins”) in South Korea, after bitcoin’s price topped at $61,556.59 in mid-March.
• Arthur Cheong, founder and portfolio manager at DeFi-focused crypto fund DeFiance Capital, told CoinDesk that more “unsophisticated retail” traders, especially those in South Korea, are returning to the crypto market and looking at altcoins for their potential lucrative returns, evidenced by the spot trading volume of altcoins on South Korean crypto exchanges.
• Jason Lau, chief operating officer at San Francisco-based crypto exchange OKCoin, also noticed that the staking program offered at OKCoin for Stacks tokens has helped increase interest among investors in STX.
• OKCoin’s “STX holders are discovering and being comfortable with stacking – locking STX in order to earn bitcoin,” Lau said. “With bitcoin consistently charting new all time highs, the appeal of earning yield in bitcoin is alluring to many.”
• About 65% of Stacks token holders on OKCoin have locked up their STX for six months, according to Lau, a potentially bullish sign for Stacks token.
• The majority of the trading volume of stacks is on Binance, the biggest crypto exchange by trading volume.
• By press time, Binance did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s requests for comment on STX’s performance.

Read More: Latest ‘Altcoin Season’ Fueled by XRP, Tron, Stellar Pushes Crypto Market Value to $2T for First Time

• Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players
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The number of nodes on Bitcoin’s Lightning network has nearly doubled year over year, according to public data.

The Lightning Network – a layer atop the Bitcoin blockchain that uses its own special rules to facilitate cheaper, faster transactions – had about 5,335 public nodes in April 2020. Now that number sits at 10,348, a roughly 94% increase. This figure only includes nodes with public connections, however, and the real number is likely higher when factoring nodes with private connections.

As Bitcoin’s on-chain fees grow alongside bitcoin’s price, scaling technologies like Lightning offer users a cheaper and faster way to transact. If bitcoin will ever be used as a day-to-day currency, a scaling solution like Lightning is paramount, and avid bitcoiners even use the network today to purchase goods and services. 

Related: Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players

Consider this Iranian Lightning user who used bitcoin to buy a PlayStation Now pass that is otherwise restricted by sanctions:

With Bitcoin’s Lightning network seeing more activity than ever, the total number of payment channels on the network (the two-way payment avenues that power Lightning’s plumbing) is now over 45,000. The Lightning Network currently holds 1,185 BTC, worth some $69 million. 

Though introduced in 2017, the past two years have been critical for Lightning’s growth.

At the end of 2020, crypto exchange Kraken announced it would support the feature. Before Kraken, the only prominent exchanges to adopt Lightning were Bitfinex and the bitcoin-only River Financial. Exchange integrations make it cheaper for their customers to deposit and withdraw bitcoin, often paying cents in fees instead of the single or double-digit dollar amounts they may pay Bitcoin’s main network.

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Since Kraken’s announcement, the U.K.’s CoinCorner, Vietnam’s oldest exchange and OKCoin followed suit with their own Lightning integrations.

In addition, Jack Mallers’ Strike – a Venmo-esque payment app that uses Lightning to settle USD and other fiat balances – came out of beta this year and is forthcoming full rollouts in a number of markets.

With businesses adding Lightning, the network’s liquidity and routing capabilities are improving. User-friendly apps like Strike are also making it easier to onboard users to what has historically been an even more unwieldy technology for the uninitiated than Bitcoin.

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Crypto finance firm Amber Group has passed $1 billion in assets under management (AUM), according to an announcement shared exclusively with CoinDesk.

The platform boasts around 100,000 users, with numbers doubling between January and February 2021. The user count pales in comparison to the 43 million on industry titans like Coinbase but it does represent the growing interest among crypto-curious investors clicking their way down the rabbit hole.

The Hong Kong-based company now provides trading and asset management services to 500 institutional clients, including family offices, funds and high-net-worth individuals. On the retail side, the Amber app gained over $390 million in assets in the first two months of 2021.

Related: Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players

Amber Group offers customized investment products such as Yield Boost, an options contract that allows users to commit to buying dips or selling rallies with preferred parameters.

The platform enables trading of BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC as well as decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens such as UNI and SUSHI.

Amber Group partnered with BitGo’s custodial arm BitGo Trust in November 2020 to service its institutional traders and draw more high-net-worth investors in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.

Correction (April 6, 4:01 UTC): Amber’s entire slate of investment products has surpassed $1 billion in assets under management, not solely its retail app, as was previously reported.

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Crypto market maker Amber Group’s trading app has passed $1 billion in assets under management (AUM), according to an announcement shared exclusively with CoinDesk.

The retail investment app boasts around 100,000 users, with numbers doubling between January and February 2021. The user count pales in comparison to the 43 million on industry titans like Coinbase but it does represent the growing interest among crypto-curious investors clicking their way down the rabbit hole.

The Hong Kong-based company now provides trading and asset management services to 500 institutional clients, including family offices, funds and high-net-worth individuals. To be clear, the $1 billion milestone is for the retail app alone.

Related: Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players

Amber Group offers customized investment products such as Yield Boost, an options contract that allows users to commit to buying dips or selling rallies with preferred parameters.

The platform enables trading of BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC as well as decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens such as UNI and SUSHI.

Amber Group partnered with BitGo’s custodial arm BitGo Trust in November 2020 to service its institutional traders and draw more high-net-worth investors in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.

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• Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $59,002.29 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Climbing 1.75% over the previous 24 hours.
• Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $56,846.97-$59,243.04 (CoinDesk 20)
• BTC trades above its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a bullish signal for market technicians.

Bitcoin opened the week with another failed attempt to break through a key psychological level at $60,000, and has been trading steadily near $59,000.

Bitcoin’s spot trading volume on eight major crypto exchanges tracked by CoinDesk was around $2 billion on Monday, mostly unchanged from the prior day.

Meanwhile, bitcoin’s 30-day volatility has also dropped, to near 56%, a level not seen since the beginning of the year.

Related: Sacramento Kings to Offer Bitcoin Salary Option to All Players

The oldest cryptocurrency is now trading in “a consolidation phase,” as CoinDesk’s Damanick Dantes wrote earlier Monday, with initial support around $56,000.

Read More: Bitcoin Fails to Break $60K; Short-Term Support Near $56K

• Ether (ETH) trading around $2,105.07 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Climbing 2.05% over the previous 24 hours.
• Ether’s 24-hour range: $2,005.46-$2,124.70 (CoinDesk 20)
• Ether trades above its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a bullish signal for market technicians.

The market chatter Monday was on neither bitcoin nor ether, but on multiple alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins), where price rallies helped pushed the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies to $2 trillion.

Read More: Latest ‘Altcoin Season’ Fueled by XRP, Tron, Stellar Pushes Crypto Market Value to $2T for First Time

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Tokens including bittorrent (BTT), tron (TRX) and tezos (XTZ) have all logged double-digit percentage gains in the past 24 hours as investors and traders seek lucrative returns from small-cap tokens, along with the higher risks.

“Bitcoin’s price has stabilized between $55,000 and $60,000, creating a bullish market environment that encourages investors to explore other cryptocurrencies in the market,” Steve Ehrlich, CEO and co-founder of Voyager Digital, said. “This has coincided with the fall of bitcoin dominance, a leading trend indicator of what market cycle we are actively in.”

According to TradingView, bitcoin’s market dominance is down to around 57% from near 73% at the beginning of the year.

Digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly in green Monday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET): 

• xrp (XRP) + 35.42%
• orchid (OXT) + 28.13%
• tezos (XTZ) + 20.3%
• stellar (XLM) + 15.61%
• eos (EOS) + 13.05%

Notable loser:

• cosmos (ATOM) – 1.1%

Equities:

• Asia’s Nikkei 225 closed up by 0.79%.
• The FTSE 100 in Europe was closed on Easter Monday.
• The S&P 500 in the United States closed in the green 1.44%.

Commodities:

• Oil was down 4.34%. Price per barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude: $58.78.
• Gold was in the red 0.39% and at $1727.70 as of press time.

Treasurys:

• The 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield fell Monday dipping to 1.709%.

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Grayscale Bitcoin Trust shareholders now know they’re not going to be left behind in the bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) race, and that may help alleviate the discount at which GBTC has been trading for over a month, some analysts say. 

On Monday, Grayscale, which is owned by CoinDesk parent company Digital Currency Group, announced it would convert GBTC into an exchange-traded fund when the U.S. regulatory environment warms to bitcoin ETFs.

The conversion would mean GBTC shareholders would no longer have to put up with a six-month lockup or 2% annual management fee. The news could bring GBTC more in line with the net asset value (NAV) of bitcoin, or at the very least put a limit on how steep the discount might go, said James Seyffart, ETF research analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. (Currently, GBTC is trading at -5.64% to NAV, according to data from CoinDesk subsidiary TradeBlock.)

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Some analysts suspect that announcing the ETF conversion is a way to keep the fund, with $38.8 billion assets under management (AUM), liquid by making shareholders happy, especially investors who are coming to the end of their lockup period. 

“Once you go into, like, 14%, 15% discount, [there are] going to be people out there that are willing to buy the GBTC and hold it until it turns into an ETF,” Seyffart said. “At this point it’s not going to go to a 30%, 40% discount, like some people are talking about in hyperbole online.”

GBTC’s premium flipped to a discount around the end of February when Canadian bitcoin ETFs began to be approved by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), said Fundstrat lead digital asset strategist David Grider. 

“You compare [GBTC’s 2% annual fee] to the 44 basis points [0.44%] or whatever you’d get on an ETF and there should be a discount,” Grider said. “That’s the time value of the fee. … That’s also the market signaling it’s worried about the liquidity of GBTC, which doesn’t allow for redemptions.” 

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The top two verticals on which ETFs will compete in the future are fees and liquidity, Seyffart added. Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein said he wouldn’t make a prediction about GBTC’s liquidity at the time of conversion, but noted that it would be one of the most liquid commodity ETFs if it converted today. 

“If it were an ETF today, when compared to commodity-based ETFs, GBTC would be the largest in terms of assets under management, behind the SPDR Gold Trust,” Sonnenshein said. “It would be the third-largest in terms of notional trading volume with approximately $2.6 billion per week.” 

Grayscale plans to eventually convert all of its products to ETFs, Sonnenshein said. It’s unlikely the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will consider ETFs of other cryptocurrencies before 2022, Seyffart said. 

Currently, GBTC “trades on par with the top decile of ETFs,” Seyffart said, and Grayscale’s ETF success will also hinge on whether the SEC approves one bitcoin ETF at a time or a wave of ETFs at once. 

In addition to competing on fees and liquidity, ETFs will also compete on security, depending on how the bitcoin is stored and insurance policies for that bitcoin. Some ETF issuers may lend out the underlying bitcoin to create higher yields or they could do active trading with options or futures, Seyffart said.

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Bitcoin (BTC) drifted higher, changing hands around $59,000, as buyers awaited the next wave of institutional demand, according to Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda, a foreign exchange broker.

A brief price pop earlier Monday came after MicroStrategy, the Nasdaq-listed business intelligence firm, bought $15 million of BTC at an average price of $59,339 per coin, adding to its already substantial hoard.

The largest cryptocurrency by market cap has risen by about 36% over the past month. Oanda’s Moya told CoinDesk in an interview that the bullish sentiment stemmed at least partly fueled by excitement over the much-anticipated public stock listing of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

Related: Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Now Has 10K Active Nodes and $69M in Locked Value

Now, the focus shifts back to institutional players with deep pockets, which could support the next leg higher above $60,000 in BTC.

• “We’re in wait-and-see mode, in what seems to be a healthy consolidation right now for bitcoin. Market is recycling all the stories about top investment banks that already put their position on crypto,” said Moya.
• Despite BTC’s struggle to break an all-time high around $61,000, Moya does not see short-term resistance as a barrier to continued upside. “Consensus is, a break above $60,000 is not a matter of if, but when. Next barrier is at $75,000.”
• Institutional demand is needed to sustain the rally as retail investors have spent their stimulus dollars in other ways than just buying up BTC.
• “Retail traders are probably bidding up altcoins after missing the big move in bitcoin,” said Moya.

Some altcoins have been outperforming BTC over the past month. Ether (ETH) reached an all-time high and is up about 60% since March. XRP is up about 90% over the same time period versus BTC’s gain of about 36%.

Read More: Latest ‘Altcoin Season’ Fueled by XRP, Tron, Stellar Pushes Crypto Market Value to $2T for First Time

• Retail Investment App Amber Hits $1B AUM
• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Steady Near $59K; Gains in Altcoins Push Crypto Market Cap to $2T
• Grayscale ETF Announcement May Shore Up GBTC Discount, Analysts Say

A New Jersey man pleaded guilty in federal court to running the defunct crypto exchange “Destination Bitcoin” without proper licensure. 

William Green, 53, told a federal judge he illegally converted clients’ cash into crypto between August 2017 and February 2019. He pleaded guilty Monday to running an unlicensed money-transmitting business. 

The guilty plea wraps up an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation into Green’s crypto business that began in December 2018 and led to a criminal indictment eight months later. Agents brokered an undercover deal with Green that ultimately led to his arrest.

Related: Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Now Has 10K Active Nodes and $69M in Locked Value

Department of Justice officials did not say how much bitcoin Green bought for his clients, nor did they specify how much he made in fees amassed through the endeavor. Federal law requires money-transmitting businesses to acquire the appropriate licenses. 

Special agents at the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security led the investigation into Green, officials said. Both agencies utilize transaction-tracing tools that peel back bitcoin’s pseudonymity. 

Green is slated for sentencing on Aug. 10.

• Retail Investment App Amber Hits $1B AUM
• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Steady Near $59K; Gains in Altcoins Push Crypto Market Cap to $2T
• Grayscale ETF Announcement May Shore Up GBTC Discount, Analysts Say