Blockchain Bites: BlockRock Exec Says Bitcoin Is ‘Here To Stay’, Investors Load Into BTC Puts

Leading bitcoin miners are reporting their support for the network’s Taproot update. Institutional buyers are loading up on BTC puts, Deribit analysts say. Goldman Sachs thinks the “digital yuan” could be in a billion hands in a decade.

BlackRock Squawks
A senior BlackRock executive, in charge of where the world’s largest asset manager invests his fund, said bitcoin could take the place of gold, because it is “much more functional than passing a gold bar.” Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box, BlackRock’s Fixed Income CIO Rick Rieder also said, “I think cryptocurrency is here to stay, I think it’s … durable.” While this is a vote of confidence of digital payment systems and a core “narrative” of bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, Rieder said he’s not particularly a bitcoin bull and doesn’t include it much in corporate and corporate portfolios. It is also unclear whether bitcoin is worth its current price of over $ 18,000, he said.

Options, options
Investors are buying bitcoin put options, possibly signaling future volatility or a market drawdown. One-month implied volatility, which is impacted by demand for call and put options, has jumped from around 55% to a four-month high of 70.5% over the past two days, suggesting an increase in expectations of price turbulence in the next four weeks. Additionally, Deribit Insights found that several institutions bought put options. This doesn’t necessarily signal a correction, CoinDesk’s Omkar Godbole reports, “but it could be a hedging strategy against a long or bullish position in the spot market.”

Taproot support
Bitcoin mining pools that account for more than 54% of the network’s current hashrate have reported support for scaling and updating the Taproot privacy protocol, merged into Bitcoin Core last month. Bitmain’s Antpool supported the protocol update Thursday morning, joining five other pools in a collective initiative by Taproot Activation. Taproot aims to improve transaction privacy and enhance Bitcoin’s smart contract functionality. It is also designed to keep Bitcoin blocks small, with the block space as accessible as possible.

1 billion users
Goldman Sachs analysts think China’s digital yuan could account for 15% of total consumer payments over 10 years. “In ten years we expect DC / EP to reach 1 billion addressable users, 1.6 trillion rmb ($ 229 billion) in issues, 19 trillion rmb ($ 2.7 trillion) in total payment value (TPV) annual and represent 15% of total payments for consumption “, A report dated 17 November reads. This user gain could help commercial banks catch up with fintech companies, which currently dominate the payments scene in China.

Star hit
Mingxing “Star” Xu, founder of OKCoin and CEO of OK Group, was reportedly released from detention by Chinese authorities. According to a Bloomberg report on Thursday, Xu appeared on a private social media platform to post that he had collaborated in an investigation related to a merger of shares that OK Group had concluded years earlier. “The authorities clarified the matter and proved me innocent,” Xu wrote on his WeChat feed on Friday. OKEx had previously suspended all account withdrawals, claiming the absence of a key holder. The exchange plans to allow “unlimited withdrawals” by November 27th.

Ethereal Earnings
In a broader market bull run, ether (ETH) is making significant gains. Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency jumped to a 28-month high, taking year-to-date earnings to nearly 290%, reports CoinDesk’s Omkar Godbole. The second largest cryptocurrency by market value surpassed $ 500 this morning around 9:00 UTC, pushing it to its highest price level since July 18, 2018, according to CoinDesk 20. Ether is now 185% below its record high of $ 1,433.

Data costs
Filecoin, the decentralized storage network incubated by Protocol Labs, saw explosive growth a month after its mainnet. Since it went live in mid-October, the network has exceeded one exabyte of storage capacity.

One exabyte equals 1,000 petabytes, or about 15 Library of Congresses (at the last count). Filecoin’s blockchain-based network creates a market for data storage by allowing users to rent unused storage space to those who wish to back up their data.

When he first presented the idea, Protocol Lab CEO Juan Benet said, “They laughed at me directly, saying, ‘You will never get a decentralized network that goes beyond a few petabytes, maybe 10 petabytes.'” , at Decrypt’s virtual Around the Campfire conference on Thursday. So, getting an exabyte is a real achievement.

To be sure, not all of this information has only been published in the last month. The Filecoin team has seeded the net with various experiments over the past year, including sending physical hard drives of data to prospective miners and launching an incentivized testnet called Space Race, which has been ported to the live version of Filecoin.

Like other blockchains, Filecoin creates immutable versions of certain types of data. For some, this may raise environmental concerns, especially considering how much of the internet appears to be obscure and redundant, outdated and mundane (ROT).

Addressing these concerns at the conference, Benet said Filecoin’s environmental concerns “are not very profound compared to other IT systems”. He mentioned Bitcoin, which is often criticized for consuming a large amount of energy to fuel its consensus model, and said that Filecoin consumption is a “small fraction”.

And, considering it does “something useful” in data storage, it might be a price worth paying.