By Bilal Ahmed Mir
During Christmas week, there have been a number of important developments in Crypto markets:
Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverband, The German Savings Banks Group, an ultra-conservative banking group that holds more than €1 trillion of German residents’ savings is exploring offering a wallet to trade Crypto to its customers. Holding the savings of approx. 50 million customers, the group is Germany’s largest financial entity. This project marks radical departure to the rationally conservative actions of the group, in light of the fact that ‘ the interest in Crypto assets is huge’ according to a spokesman for the German Savings Banks Association.
Instagram is ‘actively exploring’ NFT integration, according to CEO Adam Mosseri, which would bring the digital asset class to a mass audience thus hastening adoption. The NFT ecosystem is a hotbed of activity, according to Nonfungible, a website that tracks the industry, there have been $335 million in sales over the past week. NFT weekly sales figures had surged 12,780% since the beginning of the year, when just $2.6 million worth were sold every seven days.
Institutional Bitcoin broker NYDIG has been valued at $7 billion, during a $1 billion funding round including investors such as Morgan Stanley & New York Life. The capital will be used to further develop NYDIG’s institutional-grade Bitcoin platform using recent upgrades to the Bitcoin protocol with capabilities such as Bitcoin and Lightning payments, asset tokenization and smart contracts. The implicit valuation makes NYDIG the latest Crypto industry ‘Unicorn’ (private company with an over $1 billion valuation).
Switzerland’s largest online bank, Swissquote, is setting up its own Crypto trading platform, with the intention to launch before the end of H1 2022. Swissquote plans to offer stablecoins, as well as DeFi applications such as Staking to its customers.
