Why has bitcoin’s market valuation soared past $1 trillion? Why is cryptocurrency a $2 trillion asset class today? Why are people suddenly going bonkers over a meme coin named DOGE? Why are NFTs making front-page headlines on every major news daily?
Because of a few people who are putting their weight behind the digital asset space and directly influencing the growth of the blockchain industry.
But who are these people? We’re profiling five of the biggest names in the industry below!
Elon Musk
Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla, CTO, SpaceX, Source: CNBC
The suave and dapper CEO of Tesla, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX, founder of The Boring Company, co-founder of Neuralink, and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI doesn’t need any introduction.
Well, that was an introduction. Besides the said positions that Elon Musk holds, he is a long-term believer in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Everyone in the crypto community is well-versedwith Elon Musk’s Dogecoin obsession. Such are the effects of his tweets that people not owning any cryptocurrencies have started taking an active interest in crypto prices and markets. You know where they headed first, right? Of course, Dogecoin!
Musk has garnered a reputation for being a straight-on DOGE “shiller.” Thus, curious folks find themselves searching for “elon musk dogecoin investment” on Google. And not just DOGE.
Musk’s company Tesla announced a $1.5 billion investment in bitcoin on its balance sheet more than two months back, along with the addition of BTC as a payment option for purchasing a new car. Musk and company understand that the cryptocurrency asset class is a great way to open up finance for all individuals irrespective of nationalities and geographies. Although we may never know whether or not Elon Musk does have any cryptocurrency, he indeed has pushed people enough to join the blockchain bandwagon.
Michael Saylor
Michael J Saylor, founder and CEO, MicroStrategy, Source: Wikipedia
Another business executive and American entrepreneur who took the world by storm with his company MicroStrategy’s massive bet on bitcoin is Michael J. Saylor. But initially, the billionaire was a hardcore skeptic.
His public disdain for BTC has now become ancient history. He admitted that his comments were unfounded (in an interview with CoinDesk last year):
“I went down the rabbit hole during COVID-19,” Saylor said, admitting he “was wrong” to have doubted bitcoin back in the $600 range.
“I wish I knew then what I know now,” he said.
Last year he kickstarted the massive institutional bitcoin investment and blockchain technology adoption drive, which inspired many other prominent corporations such as Jack Dorsey-led Square to add bitcoin to their balance sheets.
Michael Saylor has now become the poster boy of bitcoin institutional investment, and his reasons are pretty much logical. Unlike all fiat currency-based assets, BTC is deflationary as it has limited supply, and that the Bitcoin blockchain network is highly secure and permissionless. In the same interview with CoinDesk last September, Saylor expressed his “primary concern” is to “move away from the dollar.”
Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey, founder, Twitter and Square, Source: Britannica
Jack Dorsey is the founder of social media giant Twitter and payments firm Square. Jack has been a bitcoin advocate for quite a long time.
Square’s subsidiary firm Cash App has set an example in blockchain adoption in financial services by letting customers buy and sell bitcoin. Apart from this, the parent firm announced a $50 million investment in BTC, followed by an additional $170 million investment this year in February. And it just doesn’t stop at bitcoin investment.
Square Crypto, the BTC focussed arm of Square, has established a record by giving out 26 grants to boost the development of Bitcoin and recently announced funding for the team behind a popular Bitcoin blockchainexplorer.
Mr. Dorsey is behind all these developments. He recently partnered with popular musician Jay-Z to set up ₿trust, a 500 BTC endowment to fund bitcoin development and boost blockchainindustry growth. African and Indian teams will be the initial recipients of a chunk of the fund. The Silicon Valley-based billionaire tech entrepreneur has done and is still doing what it takes to boost crypto and blockchain adoption.
Recently, Mr. Dorsey sold his first tweet as an NFT for over $2.9 million, converted the proceeds to BTC, and donated to the GiveDirectly fund to help alleviate poverty in Africa.
The Winklevoss Twins
The Winklevoss twins with the Gemini bus in New York City, Source: MarketWatch/Twitter
Losing the ownership of Facebook to Mark Zuckerberg didn’t stop these two Olympic rowing and investor twins. Instead, they entered the cryptocurrency race intending to spur solid blockchain industry growth. In 2012, both bought bitcoins for $10 million when the top cryptocurrency’s price was trending at around $8.
What followed is the cryptocurrency market’s rise across nine years and the ballooning of the Winklevoss twins’ worth, to the point (around $6 billion) that they have now made the Forbes list of global real-time billionaires. As per the latest accounts, both have invested in 25 crypto firms. Apart from their investments, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss actively promote crypto purchase and adoption through Gemini, the cryptocurrency they own.
In a development that would make blockchain part of the banking industry, in October 2015, Gemini became one of the first cryptocurrency exchanges designated as a trust bank by the New York State Department of Financial Services.
The Winklevoss twins also support the current NFT trend through their acquisition of Nifty Gateway.
The twins ran “full bus” cryptocurrency advertisements encouraging people to buy BTC and other crypto assets and “fuel the open finance movement.”
While these were all successful individuals who have helped elevate cryptocurrency and blockchain technology and advocated their adoption, certain firms are operating with the same goal.
AIKON is one such firm that specializes in providing secure blockchain identity services through ORE ID, its proprietaryblockchain authentication system. The AIKON team has partnered with AllianceBlock, which wants to enable anyone and anybody to benefit from secure access to the trillion-dollar capital market without having to jump through needless hoops to do so. AllianceBlock’s objective is to build the world’s first globally compliant blockchain-based capital market. ORE ID, which impresses onusing blockchain for authentication, will play an instrumental role in the project’s identity management system.
What becomes quite clear is that blockchain technology adoption is at a nascent stage. Of course, an increasing number of business bigshots are helping catapult the ecosystem to mainstream prominence. Still, the effects of their actions have barely covered the tip of the adoption iceberg.
There’s a long way to go. This drop may seem minuscule and insignificant, but it will pave the way for the ocean’s formation.
Researchers from Elliptic, IBM Watson and MIT have used AI to detect money laundering on the Bitcoin blockchain. Back in 2019, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic published research with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab showing how a machine learning model could be trained to identify Bitcoin transactions made by illicit actors, such as ransomware groups or darknet marketplaces.
Now the partners have put out new research applying new techniques to a much larger dataset, containing nearly 200 million transactions. Rather than identifying transactions made by illicit actors, a machine learning model was trained to identify “subgraphs”, chains of transactions that represent bitcoin being laundered.
Identifying these subgraphs rather than illicit wallets let the researchers focus on the “multi-hop” laundering process more generally rather than the on-chain behaviour of specific illicit actors.
Working with a crypto exchange, the researchers tested their technique: of 52 money laundering subgraphs predicted and which ended with deposits to the exchange, 14 were received by users who had already been flagged as being linked to money laundering. On average, less than one in 10,000 accounts are flagged in this way “suggesting that the model performs very well,” say the team. The researchers are now making their underlying data publicly available.
Says Elliptic: “This novel work demonstrates that AI methods can be applied to blockchain data to identify illicit wallets and money laundering patterns, which were previously hidden from view. “This is made possible by the inherent transparency of blockchains and demonstrates that cryptoassets, far from being a haven for criminals, are far more amenable to AI-based financial crime detection than traditional financial assets.”
Binance has announced the introduction of the Binance Crypto Price Widget as part of its ongoing effort to make cryptocurrency trading both more accessible and more widely understood.
The Binance Crypto Price widget is an easy to install, easily integrated tool that provides value to website visitors by sharing live, reliable updates on top cryptocurrency prices from the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
“Websites benefit from the widget because it offers an engaging, interactive experience for visitors,” points out Binance’s Director in West & East Africa, Nadeem Anjarwalla. He further explains that the widget delivers news around prices, data and developments in the crypto world. “By providing this information, visitors are encouraged to spend more time on the site. But, more than this, because the information is credible and reliable, the website gains a reputation for credibility and reliability, too. In this way, it is able to build an audience who are regular to check in regularly with a source they trust.”
The information on offer is extremely comprehensive, offering live prices of up to 10 cryptocurrencies as well as fiat currencies. The widget is flexible, too, with website owners able to choose a customizable price, while the appearance can also be customized to match the website design and branding. Owners can also choose to integrate the widget as a ticker providing real-time feeds, or a blog.
Anjarwalla says that the widget can be installed directly onto a website with just a few clicks, starting with a visit to the Binance Crypto Price Widget page. “From there, website owners choose the appropriate code and paste it onto the location on their own website where they would like visitors to access it.”
The benefits for visitors are clear, too: having access to up-to-the-minute information for the most popular cryptocurrencies, from the world’s largest cryptocurrency, is a major advantage for those wishing to build their crypto portfolio.
“We realise that, for many would-be investors, the world of crypto remains difficult to understand and somewhat daunting. Tools like the Binance Crypto Price Widget have been made available specifically to change this mindset and to make investing more simple for everyone,” Anjarwalla concludes.
Mastercard is teaming up with Web3 players on an on-chain identity and verification framework covering a variety of applications in payments, remittances, ticketing and NFTs.
Mastercard Crypto Credential is designed to help companies, developers, and individuals to realise the full potential of powering payments, commerce, and economic value on-chain and across borders.
Among the partners onboard are crypto wallet providers Bit2Me, Lirium, Mercado Bitcoin and Uphold, which are working on an initial project to enable transfers between the US and Latin America and the Caribbean corridors.
The company is also teaming up with public blockchain network organisations Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Polygon and The Solana Foundation. Aptos says it is among the shortlist of blockchains to enable the identity and attestation element of sending and receiving funds through Web3.
The partners also intend to explore the utility of identity-oriented Web3 solutions use cases like NFTs, ticketing, enterprise, and payments.
Raj Dhamodharan, EVP, digital asset and blockchain product and partnerships, Mastercard, says: “With Mastercard Crypto Credential, we can help ensure that those interested in interacting across Web3 environments are meeting defined standards for the types of activities they’d like to pursue.
“Mastercard Crypto Credential will not only define verification standards and levels, but also provide necessary enabling technology to help bring more use cases to life.”
Separately, Mastercard has signed up another six blockchain and digital asset startups for its StartPath programme, giving participants training, access to channels and customers as well as subject matter expertise, and an opportunity for technical collaboration. The new members are Axelar, Cheeze, Coala Pay, Qonbay.io, RociFi Labs and Suberra.
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