The Intersection: Crypto and Wall Street This Week - InvestingChannel

The Intersection: Crypto and Wall Street This Week

As bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies get increasing attention from investors, Wall Street and its traditional banks continue to adjust to the shift. Catch up on this week’s top stories highlighting the intersection of these old guard and new school areas of finance with this recap compiled by The Fly: 1. GOLDMAN PREPARES BITCOIN TRADING OPERATION: Goldman Sachs (GS) is moving ahead with plans to set up what appears to be the first bitcoin trading operation at a Wall Street bank, The New York Times reported Wednesday. Goldman will start to use its own money to trade with clients in a variety of contracts linked to the price of bitcoin and will also create its own non-deliverable forward to offer to clients. The bank is not initially planning to buy and sell actual bitcoins,though “a team at the bank is looking at going in that direction if it can get regulatory approval and figure out how to deal with the additional risks associated with holding the virtual currency,” according to the report. Rana Yared, a Goldman executive overseeing the formation of the operation, said the bank has decided that bitcoin is not a fraud and does not have the characteristics of a currency, but clients want to hold it as a valuable commodity. 2. TELEGRAM CALLS OFF COIN OFFERING: The Telegram messaging app is calling off a planned sale of cryptocurrency to the public after pulling in $1.7B by selling newly created cryptocurrency to under 200 private investors, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Telegram plans to use the money it has raised for its next project, a digital payments and technology platform called Telegram Open Network, to build out its technology and further redevelop and maintain its main messenger service, which has about 200M users globally. The network “can become a Visa (V)/MasterCard (MA) alternative for a new decentralized economy,” the company said. 3. COINBASE SUPPORTS BLOCK TRADES: Coinbase is now supporting block trades, which occur off an exchange’s main order book to reduce market impact of big trades, Business Insider reported Tuesday. The exchange, which also preparing to open an office in Chicago, is looking to attract more institutional clients to its professional trading platform GDAX. The move comes after New York-based exchange Gemini, founded by the Winklevoss twins, began offering block trading last month. In addition, Recode reported that Coinbase had valued itself at roughly $8B, much higher than its last preferred valuation, when it made its bid to acquire Earn.Com. 4. SQUARE BOOKS BITCOIN PROFIT: Square (SQ) brought in a $200,000 profit via bitcoin in its first quarter after it began to allow Cash App customers to buy and sell the cryptocurrency back in January, Business Insider reported Thursday. The Cash App enabled trading of bitcoin without charging any fees and price fluctuations helped the company sell $34.1M worth of bitcoin at a cost of $33.9M. 5. RIOT PRODUCES 100 BITCOIN: On Friday, Riot Blockchain (RIOT) announced its unaudited cryptocurrency mining production yield for the month of April totaling approximately 100 Bitcoins and 61 BCash. With regards to Bitcoin this represents an approximate 45% increase from the company’s yield for March. The company remains on track to have approximately 8,000 cryptocurrency ASIC miners deployed by the end of May, it said. 6. LONGFIN TO DELIST: Longfin (LFIN) announced Thursday that it intends to voluntarily delist its Class A Common Stock from Nasdaq, and to this effect the company has already sent in a formal notice to the Nasdaq stock market. 7. CRYPTO CHATTER: In a Saturday interview with Yahoo Finance, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, BRK.B) CEO Warren Buffett said buying bitcoin is a “gamble”, not an investment, because it lacks intrinsic value. On Monday, Citron Research tweeted, “$SQ Short term tgt $30 started as innovative pymt co. – now just another processor. 15x rev growing slower than $FB. Collection of yawn businesses. WallSt drunk on Bitcoin nonsense, SQ-Cash to BTC trading has been insignificant. Even w/ hyper growth still 40% too rich.” In addition, economist Nouriel Roubini criticized bitcoin in a heated debate at the Milken Institute Global conference on Wednesday. “There is no decentralization, it’s just bulls-t,” he said, adding “This was a bubble … the ones who arrived late to the party are the suckers.” CRYPTO STOCK PLAYS: Cryptocurrency revenues have been pointed to as reasons to be bullish on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA) in select research. Overstock (OSTK), DPW Holdings (DPW), Kodak (KODK), Seven Stars Cloud Group (SSC), Riot Blockchain, Longfin, Pareteum (TEUM) and Social Reality (SRAX) are other stocks that have been touted, or promoted themselves, as a way to play the crypto theme PRICE ACTION: As of time of writing, bitcoin rose roughly 4.7% this week to $9,648 in U.S. dollars according to CoinDesk. 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