Hi everyone,
Here I will show you some news that came by in the last couple of days that are very interesting.
Ripple and the National Bank of Egypt are now working together !
Ripple keeps going on with its expansion and this time they are starting a cooperation with the National Bank of Egypt for faster remittance payments. The NBE will use RippleNet to achieve faster transactions. RippleNet is expanding rapidly and has already a network of more than 300 international banks and financial institutions.
Ripple wants to be a lead player in the evolution of cross-border payments and they have a lot of partnerships with banks. This is not always seen as something positive, since cryptocurrencies were initially created to avoid banks, but Ripple is acting as a company and is showing some great signs that it will become a big player in the future of cross-border payments with fast and cheap transactions.
It is not clear yet if the National Bank of Egypt is going to use XRP for the transactions, but the price of XRP is rising lately which is good news. It is finally running with the other altcoins and this was much needed for XRP.
Search volume for “Buy Bitcoin” is rising once again and institutional investors are paying a premium of 30% on GBTC !
Retail investors are once again looking into buying Bitcoin. The search volume on Google trends for “Bitcoin” and “Buying Bitcoin” is rising and shows that interest is starting to come back. The search volume is at its highest point since August 2019 and this is a good sign. This probably has to do with Bitcoin passing the 10.000 level again. Here is an image :
Apparently the countries that are looking most for Bitcoin are Nigeria, South Africa, Austria, Ghana and Switzerland (top 5). Notice how three out of five countries are from the continent Africa and two countries are from Europe.
Furthermore searches for “Altcoins” and “Cryptocurrency” is rising as well which means that retail investors are looking into altcoins as well.
Institutional investors are getting more interested as well. This is shown by GBTC (Bitcoin Investment Trust) :
The price of 1 GBTC share was 9,69 on the 11th of February 2020 and the market price per share was 13$. This means that institutional investors are willing to pay a premium on BTC through GBTC (30% premium) and feel confident that Bitcoin will rise in price in the future. They leave the storage and custody to GBTC.
Barcelona football club is going into crypto with a partnership with Chiliz !
Barcelona is one of the biggest clubs in the world and has created a partnership with the cryptocurrency project Chiliz to create Barca Fan Tokens on the blockchain. Chilliz operates on the Ethereum blockchain and the Barca Fan Tokens are created by Chiliz and are used on the social mobile app “Socios”. If you participate on the app “Socios”, you will get rewarded with the Barca Fan Token and you can use this to buy products or attend events. The token will be priced against the Chiliz token. Before Barcelona, Juventus and PSG already launched their own token. These tokens are non-transferable to your own wallet or to other exchanges. It will only be available (for now) on socios.com and chiliz.net.
This goes to show that there are quite some use-cases for cryptocurrencies and even big football clubs see a future in it !
