The billion dollar Bitcoin was moved by an affordable fee of $3.54. Data from Whale Alert reveals that the transaction was a two time transaction where the first amounted to 45,671 Bitcoin (8570 Million) which in total gives the 88,855 BTC(1.155 Billion).

Xapo has been known for movement  of large funds in the past, but compared to the past transaction amounts this one was way higher.

Traditional Banking and Bitcoin

It’s no brainer that if such a transaction was to be conducted with our local traditional banks, we would have a lot to worry about like the fees and the limitations our banks place on the amount of transactions we can operate in a particular period of time. First off, an individual won’t be able to pull that off. Even if they decided to use an Automated Cleaning House(ACH) transfer that would take days to complete plus these transactions would have to be done within the jurisdictions of their daily/monthly limits.

Chase Bank, one of the most popular banks in the U.S has a limit on the users. They can send no more than $25,000 daily and that would take 128years (weekends included) to fully complete a $1.15Billion transaction. The bank however could offer the customer the option of using a wire transfer which would then allow them conduct a transaction no more than $250,000 daily thereby making a $1.15 billion possible in 13 years, all this too with the consideration of fees.

Cryptocurrency as a whole led by Bitcoin has made spending and sending of money way simpler and cheap. The location of the recipient does not matter as the funds will still reach within a few minutes.

Reactions To this transaction

Some believed that the transaction was an indication of a possible dump in the price of Bitcoin, there were some too who said its funds were laundered. Ironically, today Bitcoin has been performing well since that transaction occurred, it has even shown more potential power to the upside.

You can see more reactions here 

Audet went further to show the weekly and daily chart presenting us with the growth on lower time frames. On the weekly, we can see a figure at 99,686 active weekly users. The daily figure stands at 19,287 active daily users. 

DeFi Still Growing 

The last few months have been about DeFi projects and the massive gains they’ve presented to their investors. While some are still weary and worried about DeFi turning out to be just like the bubble of ICO back in 2017, it seems more and more people are interested in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) or at least for now because of the gains. 

The increase in the amount of active users in August could be indicating possibly that DeFi is here to stay, even though some projects might die off, the idea might be retained in the space. The DeFi ecosystem continues to grow irrespective of the amount paid out as Eth gas price in the month of August. With this increase has also come growth of decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap, Balancer, dude and OX.

“Google searches for ‘buy crypto’ is now at the highest level since January 2018, when the crypto market peaked… This is definitely a sign of new investors who are curious on the cryptocurrency space, but we’re still far from the retail euphoria that was seen back in Jan ’18.”

The rise in volume of searches could be suggesting that some retail investors and non crypto savvy investors are looking into getting involved with the volatile crypto market.

Buy Crypto and Not Buy Bitcoin 

It is worth noting that the term “buy crypto” is different from “buy Bitcoin”. Since it is “buy crypto” that is gaining volume we might conclude that investors are learning not only about bitcoin but the crypto market at large. These searches could be their first step towards buying any of their favorite tokens.

When checking the “buy Bitcoin” trend in Google trend data, it shows that it hasn’t moved much for 12 months. 

“Bitcoin itself is not getting the same kind of traction, with the search interest for ‘buy bitcoin’ laying flat since the top in May when the halving took place.”

Whether or not the trend moves, anything good for the crypto market is good for Bitcoin exposure and anything good for Bitcoin is by extension good for other major cryptocurrencies in the space.

In this article and video, I discuss the top 10 crypto altcoins in July 2020.

Bullish Altcoins List

Cardano (ADA) Shelley Mainnet Launch

The altcoin I’m most bullish on is Cardano due to their much anticipated mainnet finally launching. This hardfork will introduce staking and smart contracts to the project, among other features.

Cardano recently announced a partnership with Coinbase to allow users to stake ADA from cold storage with Coinbase custody. We should be seeing many other partnerships coming for staking also.

SparkPoint (SRK) New Roadmap and Staking

My second most bullish altcoin for July is SparkPoint SRK token. This project is only a little over a year old and is a micro cap altcoin with a market cap of only $1.8 million.

This project has developed 5 apps within their first year and just announced they are hiring 3 more developers to double their product production. They also are releasing a new long term roadmap on July 27th that will show the future plans for the project.

With SRK being only $1.8m market cap, to get a 100x return on investment would only require a market cap of $180 million. Many projects with less to show have a much higher market cap for this, so I believe there is huge potential for SRK.

Some other notable features of SparkPoint SRK:

• Monthly roadmaps and consistent growth
• Powerful Token Ecosystem
• LOW market cap
• Already generating revenue
• Creating popular products (Mobile games, Delivery app, Learning platform)
• Deflationary token supply

Altcoin Season Is Here

There is lots of bullish data showing that the next big altcoin season is here. We have already seen many projects do over 500% returns recently and Bitcoin dominance is also dropping.

I believe the cryptocurrency space has finally entered a bullish market and will be seeing the crypto global market cap pass $1 trillion for the first time by the end of 2021 or sooner.

Paul Tudor Jones, an institutional investor had earlier indicated he’s interest in Bitcoin and even claimed to have 2% of his portfolio in Bitcoin. He encouraged other institutional investors to do the same stating that he recognizes Bitcoin “potential in a period when we have the most unorthodox economic policies in modern history.”

From time immemorial, institutional investors have only invested a small portion of their capital into cryptocurrency, this could be because of regulatory uncertainty or concerns over hacking and fraud amongst other things. 

Ryan Watkins gives he’s analysis. 

The Latin American partnerships helped Dash grow as a payment option within these regions. During this period of time the number of active wallets installed on mobile devices amounted to 101,747 which is a 214% increase from the previous year and a 21% increase compared to the previous quarter. 

Dash also grew in number of daily commercial payments usage by 104% compared to previous years. This growth was made possible through several partnerships Dash has built in Latin America, especially in Venezuela and Brazil. 

In Brazil alone, about 2.5 million merchants are able to accept Dash as a payment option and also citizens can choose to pay for goods and service with it. This is made possible by ATAR Pay, a payment platform. 

Dash is partnered with Burger King located in Venezuela, in addition to that, other merchants can choose to accept Dash due to the partnership with the local advocacy programs and integration with Mega Soft Point-of-Sales (POS) terminal. 

Price Action

As could be expected, Dash price grew and showed some positive price performance during this period of time. It had made the list of top assets that performed well in terms of price because it had shown a 60% increase in price. 

Fernando Gutierrez, Chief Marketing Office for Dash Cute group said. 

“Users spend more when the price is going up because they become wealthier and because they feel they got a better deal. Price performance probably added more than a few transactions to the general long term Trend in a day to day usage”.

The amount of ETH one should own will depend solely on that person’s personal preference and whether or not they plan to stake ETH.

32 ETH Minimum for Staking

To stake ETH, you will be required to maintain a minimum of 32 ETH to run a validator. Staking Ethereum is said to yield rewards of anywhere from 4.5% to 10.5% and these figures will vary depending on the total amount of ETH you’re staking. The more ETH you stake, the smaller the percent reward gets.

This is to level the playing field and allow those with smaller staking balances to yield a worthwhile reward.

Passive Income Earnings

How much ETH you should hold will highly depend on how much passive income you want to earn from staking. Using an ethereum staking calculator, you can determine the average earnings from how much you wish to stake.

If you stake 1000 ETH, you can expect to earn around 80 ETH for the 1st year. While that is less than $20k right now, by the time you receive those rewards, ETH can be much more valuable.

Watch this video to learn more about how much Ethereum you should hold and future ETH price predictions

High Demand, Low Supply

With Ethereum staking launching soon, demand is steadily increasing to own the minimum 32 ETH that’s required to run a validator. Many people are also increasing their ETH holding stacks in order to earn more passive income once staking is live.

Recently Paul Tudor Jones announced that he has invested in Crypto as a hedge against inflation. This may soon result in a surge of demand for Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.

The surge in demand of new investors at the same time as Ethereum is launching staking can result in a bull run unlike anything we have seen.

I believe Ethereum will be the best performing digital asset for the next year.