12th September 2022 > > Australia.

tl;dr

Australians know best.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A brief foray about $22k was just that – brief. BTC has essentially been in a holding pattern since mid-June, a whole quarter ago. With The Merge mere days away, price action could get very choppy.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Australia

Irfan Ahmad is the Asia Pacific digital lead for State Street Digital, the crypto unit of State Street, one of the world’s largest banks, and a renowned investment manager.

For those who focus solely on price movements as a measure of the health or otherwise of the crypto world, he has some information you might want to take note of:

“During the course of the June, July period where things were really hotting up in terms of activity, we saw institutional clients not necessarily double down, but they weren’t really deterred from placing strategic bets on the asset class itself.”

For those of a sceptical bent, I agree that part of his role and responsibilities is to be upbeat about the rate of institutional adoption of cryptos, but that does not mark him out as being dishonest.

He goes on to say that there is an institutional “belief that the asset class is here to stay”, which is his opinion, but I think it is one worth listening to.

He explains further that as an administrator for crypto funds, providing custodial services, they are in constant discussions with institutional clients about future products in the crypto space.

…

Why should we care?

There is no doubt that the recent – and possibly still ongoing – crypto winter has caused financial pain for recent entrants. It has exposed some fault lines, not least the excessive amount of leverage that had been built up over the last couple of years.

But the process of adoption, and adaption continues regardless, though possibly with more care and thought, with less emphasis on financial engineering.

Many of the larger themes of recent times – non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralised finance (DeFi) to name just two – are now embedded in the crypto world. These innovations and developments are not going away, but there is an iterative process to finding their most useful applications.

Whilst cryptos remain an asset class just 1/10th the size of gold, volatility will always be high, accentuating the moves seen in other risk asset classes. But if you are convinced that cryptos will one day in the relatively near future grow to a market cap greater than gold, then stay attuned to development and adoption, not just to daily price swings.