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Chicago-based Rothschild Investment Corporation is increasing its bitcoin holdings. Since October 2020, the company has increased its stake in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) by 24 percent.

According to an update from the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), Rothschild Investment Corporation holds 30,454 shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. Grayscale is an asset manager that enables institutional investors to invest in some of the most popular cryptocurrencies. Only recently Grayscale has the establishment of additional funds on Chain Link (LINK), Basic Attention token (BAT), Decentraland (MANA), Liver peer (LPT) and Tezos (XTZ) based announced .

No ties to the legendary Rothschild family

Rothschild Investment first bought shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust in 2017. A short time later, they sold them and only re-entered the crypto market in 2019.

The investment company founded by Monroe Rothschild in 1908 no longer has any connections with the Rothschild banking family. Nevertheless, the entry of the investment company repeatedly causes controversy in the crypto space.

Trader and analyst Credible Crypto says Bitcoin is at a critical juncture as bulls struggle to push the leading crypto asset higher.

The trader tells his 99,000 Twitter followers that BTC may be due for a larger corrective move after BTC failed to stay above immediate resistance at $34,000.

“Moment of truth here for BTC and the rest of the market really. If BTC does make this final leg down, it will drag everything else with it for now. Have been watching the 34-35k level for days now and we finally tested it.”

According to Credible’s chart, BTC may retrace all the way down to support of $26,000, which represents a 20% decline from its current price of $32,300.

While BTC continues to consolidate, the crypto analyst is tracking the performance of Ethereum (ETH). He says the leading smart contract platform is poised to more than double its value in its USD base pair.

“In the same way BTC stole the spotlight from $20,000 – $40,000, ETH is going to steal the spotlight from $1500 – $3000. It’s ETH-season baby.”

Credible notes that ETH/BTC looks bullish as well after breaking out from a two-year accumulation period.

“We got the daily and weekly close I was looking for on both the USD and BTC pairings. FULL BULL on ETH. SEND ITTTTT!”

Looking at Credible Crypto’s chart, Ethereum is primed to ascend to 0.055, printing gains of nearly 35% from its value of 0.041.

As for XRP, the crypto strategist predicts another leg down before it can regain its bullish momentum.

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Investors with large amounts of capital appear to be stockpiling one decentralized finance (DeFi) asset in particular at a rapid rate.

New data from crypto analytics firm Santiment shows the number of whales buying Uniswap (UNI) has skyrocketed since the start of the month.

“Uniswap has just broken [Sunday’s] all-time high and just crossed $13 for the first time.

New whale addresses are a clear reason! Our whale holders data indicates addresses with 100,000 or more $UNI have inflated to a new high themselves at 237.”

Uniswap is a decentralized exchange built on the Ethereum network. The platform fueled the rise of Automated Market Maker (AMM) protocols, which allow users to trade assets through smart contract technology instead of a central intermediary.

The platform’s exchange token UNI offers holders control over governance, including the token’s treasury reserves, protocol fees, and default list of tokens.

UNI, along with the peer-to-peer lending platform Aave, burst into the top 20 crypto assets by market cap this week.

The amount of network fees generated by Uniswap surpassed Bitcoin on Monday. ParaFi Capital partner Santiago R Santos says it’s a sign of what’s to come from the DeFi movement.

“The great DeFi flippening. Today, Uniswap generated more network fees than Bitcoin.

It’s the first DeFi protocol, but not the last. The key feature here is that fees in DeFi not only benefit miners but also LPs (liquidity providers) and token holders. Monitor this.”

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Featured Image: Shutterstock/Elena11/chanchai howharn

In the last year, decentralized finance (DeFi) has gone from being a relatively unexplored crypto niche to a bustling industry filled with a diverse array of protocols and tools that offer new services and opportunities to users. 

As it stands, the vast majority of DeFi applications are built on the Ethereum blockchain, due to its popularity among decentralized application (dApp) developers and significant pre-existing user-base. However, this sudden growth of DeFi on Ethereum has pushed the blockchain to its limits, leading to transaction delays and inordinately high fees — making many Ethereum DeFi platforms simply unusable to regular users. 

Because of this, a large number of developers are now opting to build their DeFi applications on Polkadot, and are looking to take advantage of its unique properties to offer experiences that haven’t yet been possible on other blockchains. 

As an interoperable blockchain platform capable of bridging together the diverse array of blockchains currently operating, Polkadot has proven itself to be a promising solution to a range of challenges faced by developers and users today. 

Here’s a look at why it’s got DeFi developers’ hopes soaring in 2021. 

Major Traction

Despite launching its mainnet in just mid-2020, Polkadot has seen incredible uptake among investors and developers. 

As a result, it has already exploded into the top five cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, and recently achieved a peak market capitalization of over $17 billion — leapfrogging XRP to secure the position of 4th largest cryptocurrency. 

Image: Polkaprojects

The potential and capabilities of the Polkadot blockchain have already been recognized by almost 350 projects which are already building on the platform — including dozens of DeFi solutions. 

Polkadot is now home to several of the most promising DeFi platforms, including:

Clover

Clover is an upcoming Polkadot parachain and all-in-one open DeFi platform that allows developers to easily deploy their dApps on Polkadot and leverage its unique properties to create DeFi solutions that were previously only available on Ethereum. 

Backed by leading exchange platform Bithumb Global, Clover Finance is set to provide an open, modular framework developers can easily use for building their applications on Polkadot, drastically lowering the barrier to entry to building on the platform. 

Clover CC-1 Testnet is launched!

The testnet will be open for only developers and professional Validators. To join the internal testing, you can contact our admins: https://t.co/lTYI1aS3TT. For more details: https://t.co/kiDz91Ru7W.@polkadotnews @polkawarriors @polkaprojectcom pic.twitter.com/iJlqYTaMHB

— Clover (@clover_finance) January 19, 2021

Seascape

Seascape is a recently announced Substrate-based game platform that makes it easy for developers to launch their own blockchain-powered games while leveraging some of Seascape’s unique features

It can be used to incorporate powerful blockchain and DeFi elements — such as NFTs, CDPs, and yield-farming — into gaming applications, and features a unique reward token known as Crowns which is used to reward those who interact with the Seascape ecosystem.

Acala

While Acala is well-known within the Polkadot ecosystem for offering its first native stablecoin (aUSD), the team behind the project are insistent on not being pigeonholed. Acala is on a mission to become a hub for defi through its stablecoin platform, ultimately supporting the foundation for liquidity on multiple blockchains, whether that is within or outside of Polkadot.

While Acala is still in its early development stage, it will provide more functionality than most stablecoins once the project is officially on the mainnet. The platform will offer tools for borrowing, lending, earning interest, and of course governance voting power. 

In the meantime, Acala’s ‘bizarro’ counterpart Karura, is inching towards a launch on the Kusama canary network. Experts are hopeful that Acala will officially go live on the Polkadot mainnet in 2021.

Why It’s So Popular

Polkadot is built on a novel blockchain framework known as Substrate, which is widely regarded as being simple to build on, thanks to the dozens of composable modules that blockchain architects can use for building their solutions.

It uses a combination of the relay chain (Polkadot’s main chain), parachains, and bridges to connect the blockchain ecosystem into a cohesive, interoperable unit. 

Developed by Parity Labs, Substrate is completely open-source, allowing developers to build on, ensuring builders can create their decentralized applications for the Polkadot blockchain with even limited budgets. 

Substrate imbues Polkadot with a range of features that make it the ideal platform for building DeFi solutions on, including: 

Speed: Polkadot has a block time of just six seconds and most transactions are considered final after less than a minute. This makes it ideal for building applications where speed is critical — like decentralized exchange (DEX) platforms. 

Scalability: Polkadot can currently handle more than 1,000 transactions per second (tps), compared to just ~25 tps for Ethereum at its peak under ideal conditions. According to Polkadot’s founder Gavin Wood, this could eventually reach as high as 1 million tps, with the use of sharding and optimized parachains. 

Interoperability: Arguably Polkadot’s biggest advantage is its interoperability. This means applications built on Polkadot and its parachains can easily interact with those on other blockchains (including Ethereum). Producing the first interoperable DeFi ecosystem. 

Taken together, these features, and the breakneck pace of Polkadot’s development have positioned it as a potential launchpad for the future of not just DeFi — but potentially the crypto industry as a whole. 

 

Several weeks after signing legislation that required Russian officials to disclose their crypto holdings, the world’s largest country by landmass has gone a step further by prohibiting them from owning any digital assets. 

• The Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Russian Federation has sent a letter to civil servants regarding their cryptocurrency holdings, according to Forklog coverage. It reads that such officials have until April 1st, 2021, to get rid of their digital asset investments:

• “Officials are obliged to dispose of digital financial assets issued in information systems organized in accordance with foreign law, as well as digital currency, regardless of the country of issue.”

• Apart from prohibiting civil servants from owning such assets, the letter also forbids officials from using them in any way, including as payment options.
• This decision comes shortly after President Vladimir Putin signed a decree dictating that country officials had to disclose information regarding their cryptocurrency investments. Those included the name of the assets that belong to them, their spouses, and minor children.
• Russia already has a somewhat controversial history with trying to regulate or even outlaw cryptocurrencies. Previous reports indicated that the nation considered hefty penalties and imprisonment for holding bitcoin above certain thresholds. 
• The government rejected these propositions, and the new Prime Minister vowed to lead cryptocurrency usage in a “civilized direction.”
• Despite these setbacks, though, a recent report outlined that bitcoin is more attractive to Russian citizens than numerous other investment options, including gold.