Your Cryptocurrency Newsletter for January 22, 2021

If you are interested in cryptocurrencies, this newsletter is for you. [img]  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...](   [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [img]( [FeedBinary Newsletter]( [How Bitcoin is Helping Middle-Class Users Survive The Pandemic]( Regulators may still want to imply Bitcoin is merely a tool for criminals, but for many middle-class users, it’s proving to be a lifeline.Even as politicians like European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde criticize cryptocurrency for providing “loopholes” used for “funny business,” people like Saeed, an Iranian immigrant to France, see cryptocurrency as a necessity, because of the difficulty using mainstream financial systems. Until 2020, Saeed, who asked to be identified only by his first name, was a software engineer in Iran whose salary barely reached €300 due to rampant inflation. In 2017, he started freelancing for international clients that paid him in Bitcoin. By September 2020, he’d finally saved enough Bitcoin to go to graduate school in France. However, the pandemic made his immigration process much harder. “I passed all that strange bureaucracy and to get to a course in France last September, with only €1,000 in my pocket,” Saeed said. “HSBC, Banque Nationale de Paris, La Banque Postale, all rejected me, declining to open a bank account. I finally found a bank after a month.”In the meantime, Saeed used Bitcoin. He is exactly the type of person who benefits from “loopholes” in the traditional banking system. “Many people in Iran are working with European tech companies,” Saeed said. “Maybe I can’t buy Bitcoin directly from the exchange because of my nationality.” Saeed thinks Lagarde represents bankers’ and government interests, not average citizens, who are happy to work with him. He said stricter regulations would make his access to the financial system more time-consuming and expensive, because he’d have to pay friends and colleagues to transact on his behalf. However, Iranian migrants are hardly the sole user group relying on Bitcoin during the pandemic. In the United Kingdom, a British expat named Paul found himself trapped in London when flights back to his Asian country of residence got canceled. Due to tight capital controls in his former country, and the challenges of repatriation during constant lockdowns, Paul was living in between regulatory systems. “I closed down the business [in Asia] just before the pandemic started. My father passed away and it was difficult to continue my company,” Paul said. “I was in hotels and Airbnbs for weeks and didn’t have a residential address without Bitcoin I would have been locked out of cash. I could only take money out of the ATM for a certain number of months because it’s limited to holidays.” Luckily, Paul had a little Bitcoin from earlier that year. Unlike Saeed, he didn’t feel comfortable with the technical aspects, but he learned quickly. He used Bitcoin to buy gift cards for groceries, phone bills, hotels and Uber, plus paid a friend back in Asia to help wrap up his apartment and put things in storage. “I think it was generally a bad idea but, at least with Brexit, thank god we won’t be subject to whatever Lagarde does,” Paul said, adding that regulation can be beneficial if it avoids restrictions for people who don’t have banking access.Today, almost a year later, Paul still doesn’t have access to most of his financial accounts. Instead, he downloaded Monzo, a banking app that uses passports for identity verification instead of residential addresses. He pays friends in London to deposit to his Monzo account. “It becomes really convoluted. I primarily use crypto because it’s easier,” Paul said. “One of my friends is a student from Nigeria and had a similar experience. He used Bitcoin to pay his school fees I’ve been at my current residence for a couple of months, so I would be able to finally open a bank account. But now I don’t really see the need, especially with the news of negative interest rates.”Meanwhile, the fiat-denominated price of Bitcoin surged over the past six months. This provided Saeed and Paul both with a little extra capital to spend time figuring out what they want to do next. For Saeed, does it make sense to do the graduate program online, with fewer networking benefits and hands-on experiences (the reason he came to France)? How does Paul move forward with his career now that his family business closed and his sector (music marketing) is in shambles? Buying Bitcoin could be considered a form of gambling. Indeed, many middle-class hobbyist traders accrued life-changing amounts of wealth over the past year, usually by experimenting with risky software. For people like Paul and Saeed, who generally avoid experimental trades and lack alternative investment options, Bitcoin’s price appreciation is helping them get through a period of abysmal job markets and intermittent lockdowns. People don’t need to live in a dictatorship or a country suffering from high inflation to benefit from Bitcoin. I would know; I’m one of them. Like many people during the pandemic, my living situation changed dramatically and I initially couldn’t work full-time from home. I was lucky to sell a few poems in exchange for cryptocurrency, usually via direct messages and Bitcoin wallets or as digital collectibles through collaborations with tech-savvy artists. Then the bull market surged again, sending those meager earnings high enough to cover some of my bills. A valet worker and student in Kansas named Hess had a similar experience. Quarantine helped kill his relationship of six years and he found himself needing to move out. He put his savings into Bitcoin during spring 2020, so that by December he was able to move out.“COVID hit and I was out of steady work for four months,” Hess said. “Honestly, if it wasn’t for my decision to basically throw 70% of my net worth into Bitcoin, I don’t think I would be in as good of a place mentally and financially.” To be clear, that is an extremely risky financial move and I would not advise it as a first resort. Yet, for many people experiencing unexpected change due to COVID-19, Bitcoin has become the lifeline it was for Hess.Over the past year, Bitcoin donations may have gained popularity with several American communities, including some of the extremist groups involved with storming Capitol Hill. Incoming Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen echoed Lagarde’s concerns about Bitcoin being used for criminal activities. However, so far, the analytics company Chainalysis estimates such donations add up to roughly $522,000. These numbers might also be compared to the cumulative totals managed by other subjects referenced in this article. For yet another lawful example, Lawrence Douglas, a former operations director at an event security company in California, lost his job as a result of the pandemic. [Read Full News]( The post [How Bitcoin is Helping Middle-Class Users Survive The Pandemic]( appeared first on [Feed Binary](. [Read Full Story]( ------------------ You Might Like     [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( ------------------ [Ethereum Price Analysis For January 2021: What’s Next For ETH?]( Ethereum price analysis: what has been happening so far in 2021? Ethereum, the second-largest coin in the crypto industry, has made a major leap forward in price over the course of the last three weeks. Since 2021 began, ETH has been surging up strongly, breaching the $1,400 level and reaching a new all-time high.ETH price analysis shows that the coin was trading sideways at the end of 2020, with its price fluctuating between $550 and $750. After being stuck between these two levels for some time, it started seeing strong growth on January 3. After reaching $1,330 by January 10, the coin’s price dropped back below $1,000 briefly, but its correction was stopped by a support at $900. After that, ETH started its recovery, although its progression was slow and it did encounter a number of resistances along the way. Our Ethereum price analysis for January 2021 shows that the coin had the biggest issue with breaching the $1,250 mark again, as it struggled to do so from January 14 until January 19. It constantly tried to go beyond this level during these five days, and it even managed to do so once or twice. Unfortunately, it was always rejected before it could stabilise above it. On January 19, the coin finally surged past the resistance, hitting a new record high of $1,432. This marked the first time since early 2018 that Ethereum has been past $1,400, and the new all-time high that the coin now needs to outperform in order to set up its next record.However, breaching the $1,400 mark had similar consequences as the coin’s former surge, causing the price to be rejected. But, this time, it did not go that far down. In fact, the previous resistance at $1,250 served as a support that allowed ETH to bounce back up to $1,363, before another correction followed. The correction is still ongoing, with the coin at time of writing sitting at $1,318 – nearly three per cent lower than 24 hours previous. Still, on a weekly basis, the coin is around 17 per cent higher than it used to be, with its market cap currently at $149.5bn. The coin’s daily volume is slightly lower than it was 24 hours ago, too. It sits at $45.3bn at time of writing, which is around 1.61 per cent lower than 24 hours before this reading. Ethereum in 2021: what has been happening with the project? Back in December 2020, Ethereum finally started its long-expected shift towards Ethereum 2.0. Phase 0 was completed successfully before that, as the coin’s team launched a deposit contract that the community filled with ETH, reaching the necessary amount to start the rest of the process. The shift towards ETH 2.0 officially started on December 1, 2020, promising a lot for the future of Ethereum, which undoubtedly helped the coin’s price to soar. Ethereum’s DeFi sector, which originally exploded in 2020, continues to grow without pause in 2021. Only yesterday, the decentralised finance sector hit a new all-time high of its own, reaching $25bn in total value locked (TVL). Since then, the coin’s price started seeing a correction, while the DeFi TVL dropped by $1bn sitting at $24.03bn at the time of writing. But, similar drops have been recorded before, and the TVL will likely recover and continue to grow in days to come.Another major announcement came yesterday from Deribit, which revealed that ETH options open interest also hit an all-time high of $1.8bn notional. According to the exchange, this is around 89 per cent of the total ETH options market.Meanwhile, the confidence in Ethereum 2.0 appears to be growing, as it has been only seven weeks since the launch of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, and so far, the mentioned ETH deposit contract has already collected 2.25 million ETH. Not only that, but the number of validators has increased to 66,360 as the coin continues its transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. The Ethereum Foundation’s researcher, Danny Ryan, also published a new post recently under the title “The State of ETH 2” In the post, he looked back on all the progress achieved in 2020, but he also let out a few hints for things to come in days to come. Other recent reports have revealed that Ethereum is now processing 28 per cent more transactions than Bitcoin. However, Ethereum also got a new rival in Near Protocol (NEAR), which was reported to have surged up by 106 per cent as the DeFi sector started to heat up. Where is Ethereum going next?  Ethereum price January 2021 outlook also includes possibilities for the coin’s future. Despite ETH struggling to grow and barely reaching a new all-time high, many are optimistic about the cryptocurrency. The first reason for this is, of course, its ongoing transition to Ethereum 2.0. Then, there is the surging DeFi sector which continues to grow, attracting more developers, users and money. DeFi is still strongest on Ethereum, with most projects currently being developed on the network. Lastly, it is also worth noting that Bitcoin is consolidating with low volatility, which is typically a signal for the beginning of ‘altseason,’ as the crypto community has taken to calling it. All of this has led many to give rather positive price predictions for Ethereum, with plenty of claims that the coin’s own price surge is long overdue. After all, Bitcoin has more than doubled its own price, and Ethereum usually sees a rally about a month after the world’s first cryptocurrency. [Read Full News]( The post [Ethereum Price Analysis For January 2021: What’s Next For ETH?]( appeared first on [Feed Binary](. 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