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- According to Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead, payment giant PayPal buys 100% of all newly mined Bitcoins.
- Institutional investors’ appetite for Bitcoin continues to grow after MicroStrategy once again bought more than 20,000 more BTC.
The Bitcoin price has recovered after the sharp correction from $24,295 to $22,200 and tested the $24,000 mark again this night. At the time of writing, BTC stands at $23,552, up 3.35% in the last 24 hours. The market capitalization has risen to $438 billion.
According to Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead, payments giant PayPal is largely responsible for the recent price increase. Morehead laid out in a report a few weeks ago that PayPal and Square together absorb more than 70% of all newly mined. In a new interview with CNBC he now said that PayPal even buys 100% of the newly available Bitcoin supply at this point in time.
There's a "bitcoin shortage" due to big institutional buyers like Paypal purchasing more than 100% of newly-created currency, cryptocurrency expert Dan Morehead says. https://t.co/qtI233fzM0 pic.twitter.com/H8mPoScAAh
— CNBC (@CNBC) December 22, 2020
This, he believes, is creating a “supply bottleneck” that is having a positive impact on the Bitcoin price. Institutional investors are increasingly recognizing the potential of Bitcoin and are absorbing a large portion of all newly mined Bitcoins:
We have buyers now, like PayPal, who just themselves are consuming more than 100 percent of all the Bitcoins that are issued.
PayPal announced in late October that all users in the U.S. will be able to purchase Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash within its digital wallet. The service is expected to expand to other parts of Europe and Asia early next year. Industry experts such as multiple billionaire Michael Novogratz called this move the most important news of the year for the industry.
According to an official survey, 65% of all PayPal users worldwide are willing to use this new crypto service. PayPal has more than 346 million customers and works with more than 26 million merchants, all of whom will have access to these new features. Morehead went on to say that the current rally is sustainable, as there has been a shakeout in the market to date and many projects have disappeared from the scene without adding significant value:
In 2017, there was obviously a media frenzy around it. There were all kinds of newly issued tokens that really didn’t have any basis to exist. There really was a speculative frenzy. This is being driven by the most famous global macro investors. This is being driven by public companies like Square, PayPal, and MicroStrategy.
SkyBridge Capital invests $25 million in Bitcoin
There seems to be no end to the number of institutional investors investing in Bitcoin. A few hours ago, SkyBridge Capital, a New York-based hedge fund and founded by former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, announced that the SkyBridge Bitcoin Fund will invest $25 million in Bitcoin. The fund was cleared for trading yesterday by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for institutional investors and is scheduled to open to the general public on Jan. 4.
Scaramucci made the decision after talking at length with MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor. In his opinion, Bitcoin is a strong store of value that protects against the Federal Reserve’s inflationary central banking policies:
You either have to accept that Bitcoin is a store of value or not. After doing the research, we believe it is. And given the monetary supply and the global central banking coordination right now, this will be a very strong asset class over the next decade.
As CNF reported yesterday, MicroStrategy reinvested $650 million in bitcoin and now holds a total of 70,470 bitcoins valued at $1.125 billion.
