Bitcoin is showing no signs of slowing down, blowing past US$9,000 less than a week after topping US$8,000 and now quickly closing in on five figures.
The price of the largest cryptocurrency by market value is soaring as it gains greater mainstream attention, despite warnings of a bubble in what not everyone agrees is an asset. From Wall Street executives to venture capitalists, observers have been weighing in, with some more skeptical than others. Bitcoin has risen more than 40 percent over the past two weeks. By comparison, the S&P 500 has a total return of about 18 percent for the whole of 2017.
“The weekend’s bitcoin price hike is just the continuation of a long-term bull run on the cryptocurrency, fueled by the tsunami of speculative trading on Japanese exchanges and the entrance of institutional investors across the world,” said Thomas Glucksmann, Hong Kong-based head of marketing at cryptocurrency exchange Gatecoin Ltd. “It is more likely that the US$10,000 psychological stratosphere will push more institutional investors into the mix.”
The surge has swept along individual investors. The number of accounts at Coinbase, one of the largest platforms for trading bitcoin and rival ethereum, has almost tripled to 13 million in the past year, Bespoke Investment Group LLC said.
Bitcoin climbed as high as a record US$9,735.51 yesterday, and was recently up about 17 percent compared with trading late on Friday.
The rapid appreciation has made it difficult for bullish analysts and investors to keep their predictions up to date.
Hedge fund manager Mike Novogratz, who is starting a US$500 million fund to invest in cryptocurrencies, said last week that bitcoin would end the year at US$10,000.
A day later, Fundstrat head of research Thomas Lee doubled his price target to US$11,500 by the middle of 2018.
In a move toward mainstream investing, CME Group Inc has said it plans to start offering futures contracts for bitcoin, which could begin trading in December.
JPMorgan Chase & Co, the largest US bank, was weighing last week whether to help clients bet on bitcoin via the proposed futures contracts, a person with knowledge of the situation said.
Bitcoin’s surge in value is forcing Wall Street banks to balance clients’ interest in speculating on the cryptocurrency with executives’ skepticism about its future.
JPMorgan Chase & Co chief executive officer Jamie Dimon has been one of bitcoin’s most prominent detractors, calling it a fraud and deriding buyers as “stupid.”
Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase & Co chief financial officer Marianne Lake, has struck a more measured tone.
The firm is “open minded” to the potential uses for digital currencies so long as they are properly regulated, she said last month.
The total market cap of digital currencies now sits north of US$300 billion, Coinmarketcap.com’s Web site said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts