Market Status
Bitcoin breached new all time highs this month passing $28,000 for the the first time in its history. Overall Bitcoin grew by more than 225% in 2020. Compared to the 2017 bull run which was very much retail led, this time around institutions and corporations have been leading the charge.
Microstrategy doubled down on their Bitcoin bet, increasing their treasury reserve BTC to 70,470. Whereas they had previously purchased with their USD treasury reserves this time around they issued debt to finance the allocation. Reception to this was split down the middle with Bitcoin bulls calling Microstrategy’s CEO a genius whilst bears decried him for being irresponsible. Citigroup consequently downgraded the Nasdaq listed company to a “sell” rating. Whatever your side of the argument, as it stands there’s no doubt it’s it’s been a profitable move for the business.
As Greyscale continued to purchase large amounts of Bitcoin, Trump’s previous advisor Anthony Scaramucci announced that his firm Skybridge Capital was launching a Bitcoin Fund and purchased $310 Million dollars worth of Bitcoin.
Ethereum also continued its return to bull territory reaching almost $740 by year end with no sign of slowing down. Unfortunately the increase in price has also resulted in a rapid increase in gas fees.
XRP investors were dealt a blow towards the end of the month when the SEC officially announced that it had filed a lawsuit against Ripple and two of its senior executives. The lawsuit caused a number of high profile exchanges to delist XRP, including Coinbase. The announcement caused the price of XRP to fall to almost 30% of its December peak.
2020 Overview
Q1 — Bitcoin Crash
Looking back on the year it’s been quite a ride for the crypto community. On March 12th as the world began to realise the severity of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Bitcoin suffered one of its largest one-day price drops in history. Markets around the world crashed along with Bitcoin as investors pulled their money out in a rapid rush to safety. As a result the correlation between Bitcoin and the S&P 500 shot to historic highs
Q2 — Quantitative Easing
In Q2 economies all around the globe began quantitative easing to attempt to bolster their damaged economies. At the same time Bitcoin went through its third halving with the mining reward cut in half from 12.5 Bitcoins per block to 6.25 Bitcoins per block. These two events collided resulting in the macro narrative turning bullish for Bitcoin amongst respected institutional investors who began to view it as a viable hedge for global inflation and a serious competitor to Gold.
Q3 — DeFi
In Q3 Defi started to raise its head. Compound was the first to kick things off in June with the launch of its governance token COMP. Uniswap was close behind it, and the main catalyst for the ensuing DeFi mania. At the start of June, trading volume on Uniswap was an impressive million dollars a day, by the end of September this was close to a Billion dollars a day.The fact that a decentralized platform could outperform centralized exchanges really opened up everyone’s eyes to the true potential of DeFi,and the market exploded.
Q4 — Bitcoin’s Back
Q4 was when macro events and the Bitcoin narrative started to align. Over the year Bitcoin had been growing steadily from its March lows. In total it added over 300 Billion to its market cap, the amount of daily active addresses doubled and the number of addresses holding over .01BTC grew by over 700k. Not long after the start of the quarter multiple institutional investors began to come out in favour of Bitcoin. Microstrategy purchased over 70,000 Bitcoin. Square added $50Million worth of BTC to its treasury.
The overall feel of this bull market is different to the one in 2017. Whereas that was led predominantly by retail, this time around it is weighted heavily towards the institutional investor. Anecdotally many on Twitter also recognise this, something that is confirmed by google search data which is still well below its 2017 peak.
TitanSwap Delivery
Titanswap V3.1.1 was released this Month. Here is a general overview of some of the new features of the update:
1. Page URI paths optimization.
2. Change trading pair-tokens sequences with one-click.
3. Optimized some animations when loading UI components.
4. Fixed some bugs and enhanced a few features, including accounts window, pictures placeholder, font size, etc.
This is a great and magical year for DeFi and Bitcoin. However, we believe this is just a start, DeFi, Bitcoin, and TitanSwap will go much beyond today. TitanSwap will support more liquidity pools from different protocols in January, a more integrated view from trader’s view, and a secret, for now, incentive plan for traders in 2021. TITAN price start from $0.08 in Sep 24, 2020, and end at $0.67 at Dec 31, 2020. DeFi TVL grows from 670M to 15.34B at the end of 2020. What are you expectation for 2021? Whatever, we know we are going to keep focus to develop a user centric DEX and grow along with this amazing world.
