Daily News | GBTC Continues to Experience Capital Outflows; WLD Rises Strongly; Reddit Invests in Crypto and Claims It May Be Used as A Future Payment Method

Crypto Daily Digest: Grayscale GBTC had a net outflow of $55.7 million yesterday; Worldcoin surged 40% within 24 hours

On February 22nd, according to Farside Investors monitoring, Grayscale GBTC had a net outflow of $55.7 million in funds.

Bitwise has a net inflow of $7.9 million in BITB funds, ARK 21Shares has a net inflow of $6.7 million in ARKB funds, and VanEck has a net inflow of $2.9 million in HODL funds. The net inflow of funds from Fidelity Bitcoin spot ETF (FBTC) was $158.9 million.

The market value of Worldcoin has exceeded $1 billion, reaching a historic high with a 300% increase in price over the past month.

At 11:13 am Eastern Time on Thursday, WLD’s trading price was $8.86, reaching a historic high. This helped the token achieve another milestone: based on the circulation supply, the total market value reached $1 billion.

Especially this Thursday, the price of WLD increased by about 40%, as the registered users have exceeded 3.5 million, an increase of about 1 million since the beginning of this year. Tiago Sada, Product, Engineering, and Design Director of Worldcoin Development Team Tools for Humanity, recently announced that there is “significant news” about to be released.

The vision and model of Worldcoin itself is to allocate tokens to people willing to accept the project of spherical iris scanning to prove their “personality.” According to the World Coin website, in just the past seven days, World Coin has created over 600,000 new accounts.

However, the biggest increase in WLD is likely due to the attention brought by the recently released video generation artificial intelligence model Sora by Open AI. Although Sora or Open AI itself has not been publicly released, many traders and users consider WLD as a representative of OPEN AI and Sam Altman.

Reddit, a social media platform, submitted an IPO application and stated in its listing documents to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it has a small amount of cryptocurrency on its balance sheet. They will invest their funds in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Reddit stated that as of December 31, 2023, Bitcoin and Ethereum were the only cryptocurrencies held in the company’s vault but also stated that these amounts were “irrelevant.”

“We will invest some of our excess cash reserves in Bitcoin BTC 0.90% and Ethereum. We have also acquired Ethereum and Matic as payment methods for selling certain virtual goods, and we may continue to do so in the future.”

“Our cryptocurrencies mainly include Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as all related crypto activities, and their net book value was not significant during the reporting period.”

Reddit added that it has been “trying blockchain technology” by purchasing Ethereum and Polygon as payment methods for selling certain virtual goods, and may continue to use these two cryptocurrencies as payment methods.

Tracing back to previous records, it is expected that Reddit has shown these performances, as it has also carried out some crypto-related projects in the past, the most famous of which is a series of Polygon-based NFTs, which the company refers to as Collective Avatars and avoids the term “NFT” because it has been proven controversial for website users.

Macro: The Fed believes that “interest rate cuts can wait”; Gold prices rise every week due to the weakening of the US dollar

As for the Fed, hawkish director Chris Waller said that Fed policymakers should delay interest rate cuts for at least a few more months, as the January inflation heat indicates the need for patience. “The inflation progress we see in the second half of 2023 will continue. This means we don’t have to rush to cut rates and normalize monetary policy.”

Like other senior Federal Reserve officials, Waller stated that before supporting interest rate cuts, he hopes to see more evidence that inflation is slowing towards the central bank’s target of 2%. However, the previously released Tuesday (13th) report from the US Department of Labor stated that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in January increased by 3.1% year-on-year, higher than the market average expectation of 2.9%. The previous value was revised to a year-on-year growth of 3.4%, and the CPI increased by 0.3% month-on-month.

Meanwhile, the latest inflation report in January did not support a quick rate cut, and both the consumer and producer prices were higher than expected. Therefore, there is no guarantee of a slowdown in inflation expectations.

On February 22, the cut-off gold futures price showed an upward trend for five consecutive trading days. After experiencing a brief period of pressure, the international gold price experienced a jump in the intraday trend. Supported by the weakening of the US dollar and safe haven buying, investors are waiting for further clues on when the Federal Reserve/FED may start cutting interest rates.

Presently, spot gold is priced at $2026.5 per ounce, and has risen 0.7% this week. US futures rose 0.2% to $2035.5 per ounce.

The turmoil in the Middle East has also increased the safe haven appeal of gold. The Yemeni Hussein militants, who are allied with Iran, claim responsibility for the attack on a British cargo ship. They also attacked Israel’s port and resort city of Eilat with ballistic missiles and drones.

So far this week, the US dollar index has fallen by 0.3%, making gold denominated in US dollars more attractive to overseas buyers.