Marion Laboure, an analyst at Deutsche Bank’s research division, said she can envision Bitcoin taking the role of digital gold in the future: lasting for centuries and largely not controlled by the government. In an update to Deutsche Bank’s website on “what’s next” for the largest banking institution in Germany, Laboure said she could “potentially see Bitcoin to become the 21st-century digital gold,” but warned investors against the crypto asset’s volatility. According to the analyst, most Bitcoin (BTC) purchases are made for investments and speculation rather than keeping the coins for a medium of exchange. “Just a few additional large …

Jake Klein, CEO of Australian gold mining establishment Evolution Mining, has said that crypto price volatility will make gold a far more attractive proposition. Speaking to CNBC on Thursday, Klein argued that Bitcoin (BTC) is still ways away from offering the longstanding security associated with gold from a hedge investment perspective despite Bitcoin’s returns outsizing gold by several orders of magnitude in the last decade. According to Klein, crypto is still a speculative play, and the attendant volatility inherent in such markets will point investors back toward gold. The unstable nature of cryptocurrency prices is an often-cited criticism of crypto …

The stock and cryptocurrency trading app Robinhood is reportedly exploring a way for users to be better protected from volatile crypto prices. According to a Tuesday Bloomberg report, the trading app is working on a feature called “price volatility protection,” which would modify certain crypto orders depending on fluctuations in price. A message in the feature’s code says Robinhood “may sometimes skip your recurring orders or buy less than your chosen amount” to protect trades from price volatility, but will inform users before taking such action and to never purchase more than the amount selected. “We’ve been doing a lot …

United Kingdom-based crypto fund Nickel Digital Asset Management released a survey of 100 wealth managers and global institutional investors to find out the biggest investor concerns associated with crypto. The survey features respondents from the United States, France, Germany, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, who collectively own $275 billion in assets under management. Conducted online from May to June 2021, the survey found low confidence among institutional investors in crypto security, with 76% of respondents citing concerns about the security of custodial services as one factor stopping them from investing in crypto. Respondents also identified the regulatory …

Despite Bitcoin (BTC) not yet emerging as an “asset class per se,” JPMorgan considers it important to meet the demand for cryptocurrency investment, according to a senior wealth management executive. A large number of JPMorgan clients see digital currencies like Bitcoin as an asset class, the company’s director of asset and wealth management, Mary Callahan Erdoes, said. In a Bloomberg interview released Tuesday, Erdoes stressed that the bank will continue providing crypto services to meet the growing demand, stating: “A lot of our clients say, ‘That’s an asset class, and I want to invest,’ and our job is to help …

Ralph Hamers, CEO of Swiss bank UBS, has said he does not fear missing out on crypto. Speaking to Bloomberg on Tuesday, Hamers said, “Clients are looking at different alternatives, and they hear about crypto, and there is a bit of a fear of missing out as well. They read it in the papers, but they also see the volatility.” Commenting on the bank’s approach to providing exposure to crypto for its wealth management clients, the UBS CEO stated: “We don’t offer it actively […] We feel that crypto itself is still an untested asset category.” Back in May, reports …

Crypto hedge fund Nickel Digital Asset Management cycled into a cash position following the crypto market collapse of May. According to Bloomberg, the $200 million crypto hedge fund led by JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs alumni redeployed its capital in anticipation of another explosive price run for cryptocurrencies. Prior to piling into a cash position, Nickel Digital focused on cryptocurrency arbitrage opportunities resulting from cryptocurrency price differences across the spots and derivatives markets. Indeed, crypto arbitrage trading reportedly offered double-digit annualized gains for institutional investors with sufficient capital to make sizable returns on these momentary price gaps. These trades are market …

Despite BNY Mellon’s entrance into Bitcoin (BTC), the CEO of one of the company’s asset management units is still sceptical about major risks associated with the world’s largest cryptocurrency. Francesca Fornasari, head of currency solutions at BNY Mellon’s subsidiary Insight Investment, believes that Bitcoin may not be suitable for most institutional investors due to extreme volatility, low liquidity, governance issues and environment-related risks. In a Tuesday Bloomberg interview, Fornasari said that Bitcoin can be more difficult to evaluate than gold due to its massive price swings, which further complicates its possible reactions in an inflationary environment. “At the end of …

Can a stablecoin make Ethereum scalable? Crypto-backed stablecoin Free TON aspires to provide a layer-two solution for Ethereum’s scalability problems. With overloaded Ethereum increasingly choked by slow transaction speeds and widely overinflated gas prices, the Free TON stablecoin will be a “true layer-two solution with immense upside,” TON Labs added. “The application of Free TON’s second layer solution does much to remedy these problems. With the stablecoin, super cheap microtransactions can now be made and in a fraction of the time it would take on the original blockchain.” That in turn opens up a wide variety of new uses, ranging …

Amid Bitcoin's (BTC) drop to six-month lows below $30,000 on Tuesday, a Norwegian financial regulator warned investors that the cryptocurrency industry is largely unregulated in the country. The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway, or Finanstilsynet, published June 22 a statement on consumer protection of crypto investors, emphasizing that the authority currently does not supervise local crypto companies in terms of anything but money laundering: “These platforms must notify Finanstilsynet in accordance with the money laundering regulations, but apart from money laundering supervision, Finanstilsynet does not supervise these actors.” Finanstilsynet further pointed out major crypto trading-associated risks like extreme price volatility …

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), a global committee of banking supervisors and central banks, has proposed new requirements for banks that want to hold cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC). In a consultation paper published Thursday, the committee provided preliminary proposals for the prudential treatment of crypto exposure by banks. The paper built on the contents of the committee’s 2019 discussion paper and responses received from various stakeholders and international industry figures. Crypto’s perceived volatility and potential for illicit use led the BCBS to assign a 1,250% risk weight to Bitcoin. This essentially means that banks must hold $1 …

Anatoly Aksakov, a member of Russia’s State Duma and a key spokesman for the country’s cryptocurrency legislation process, claimed that he has never owned any Bitcoin (BTC). Aksakov said that he doesn’t hold any Bitcoin and likely won't, as the government has prohibited officials from purchasing crypto, local news agency TASS reported on Thursday. The official went on to say that he was willing to buy some Bitcoin as an investment before the ban came into force last year. However, he thought that the price was too high at the time: “I wanted to buy only in order to accumulate. …