There were no good spots for investors to hide yesterday amid a global market rout as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies joined the selloff.
Bitcoin, the largest digital currency, tumbled as much as 7 percent to its lowest since the middle of August, then pared its losses to 4.8 percent as of 9:30am in London, according to prices compiled by Bloomberg.
The Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index slid by more than 11 percent, in a third day of losses. Rival coins Ether, XRP and Litecoin also retreated at least 10 percent.
“The global sell-off in equities has indeed spilled over to the crypto-space,” said Ryan Rabaglia, head of trading with cryptocurrency dealing firm OSL in Hong Kong. “The days of crypto being the safe-haven play and having a high degree of detachment from the rest of the world are seemingly diminishing.”
Increased institutional attention on the cryptocurrency space has led to greater correlation with traditional assets, although this trend is not expected to last, he said.
“With the 2018 low of [US]$5,800 being tested a number of times, our sights are set at that level for all further sell-offs,” Rabaglia said.
Cryptocurrencies have wiped out more than US$600 billion in value from a January peak as the boom in initial coin offerings last year fades further into memory.
Mainstream adoption of digital currencies has failed to materialize this year amid a series of exchange hacks and increased regulatory scrutiny.
“It is clear by now that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent the mother of all bubbles,” Nouriel Roubini, chairman at Roubini Macro Associates and a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, said in prepared testimony for a US Senate Banking Committee hearing on cryptocurrencies and blockchain scheduled for yesterday in Washington. “No asset class in human history has ever experienced such a rapid boom and total utter bust and implosion.”
Roubini wrote that the blockchain technology that underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is “the most over-hyped and least useful technology in human history” and is “nothing better than a glorified spreadsheet or database.”
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