Hello Hive Fam!

I'm back with another Fintech Flash, where I go over the biggest news happening in Fintech and blockchain over the last week. My apologies for posting this one a few days late. Kind of crazy to think how much has happened since this was filmed!

Here's what was covered in Episode 12:

At $15K and above... Bitcoin’s market capitalization is now bigger than PayPal, Coca-Cola, and Netflix. The BTC price has surged from $10,000 to around $15,000 within the past two months, causing the market cap to jump to around $280 billion. However, Bitcoin is still behind the three largest financial institutions in the U.S. by valuation, namely Visa, Mastercard and JPMorgan. To surpass all three, Bitcoin will need to hit $23,000, or a market cap of $426 billion.

On Nov. 7 several major media outlets announced that after 4 days of rigorous vote-counting that Joe Biden had managed to secure enough electoral votes to become the 46th President of the United States. Analysts are taking a closer look at how a Biden presidency may impact traditional markets and the Bitcoin price. Several key factors they are considering are the potential passage of a new round of economic stimulus and the possibility of a stock market recovery.

The US government seized $1 billion in bitcoin from dark web marketplace - The Silk Road. The Department of Justice announced on Thursday that it had seized the wallet’s contents as part of a civil forfeiture case. The government said it retrieved the roughly 70,000 bitcoins with the help of an unnamed hacker - referred to as “Individual X” in court documents. It’s unclear if Individual X has been arrested or how their cooperation was attained.

Tether closes in on a $17 billion market cap as Bitcoin continues to soar. As of midSeptember, Tether’s market cap had seen nearly a fourfold increase since the beginning of the year. . Information from crypto data platform CryptoQuant also shows stablecoin inflow transactions hitting new 2020 highs as it exceeds 60,000 transactions.

Crypto Twitter may not be as influential as it likes to think, according to researchers at BDCenter. The researchers analyzed 1.1 million tweets between 2018 and June 2020 and found that when tweets about a certain coin start ramping up, it's because its price has changed —not vice versa. All the charts demonstrate more or less the same thing: the ‘mentions’ curve follows the price curve.

A new study by leading research firm Forrester Consulting found that retailers that accept Bitcoin as a payment method attracted new customers and significantly boosted sales. Merchants surveyed in this study who became Bitcoin adopters avoided 2.25% in transaction fees and had fewer chargebacks. The study also found that the security of blockchain-backed cryptocurrencies helped prevent payment mistakes and fraud, saving merchants about 1% of total sales.

Hope you enjoyed it and i'll be back next week for another Fintech ⚡️Flash!

XO, Lea