Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary is saying that the foreign exchange market is a multi-billion dollar use case for decentralized finance (DeFi), a form of blockchain technology that supporters claim can revolutionize financial services by eliminating the need for intermediaries.

During this year’s SALT conference in New York City, O’Leary relates how investors must rely on foreign exchange middlemen to invest in overseas markets. He says the extra steps required in such dealings are often unnecessary and burdensome.

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“Let’s say a traditional mandate, such as I want to go long Europe, I’m going to buy 50 stocks. I have to buy Swiss francs, Euro-based stocks and British pounds because I want to trade them on their domestic exchanges.

In between me and that transaction is what’s called the bane of the earth – the FX trader, the currency trader who clips me every time I buy and sell. Adds zero value and sucks friction out of the system. I can’t wait until we solve this problem and give them a new career shining shoes, because they add no value whatsoever.”

The celebrity investor believes that DeFi has the potential to eliminate costly middlemen from the foreign exchange market system.

“This is where DeFi can take us, on just one use case. But it’s a multi-billion-dollar one, and I want to be alive to have a regulator domestically allow me a payment system to a Swiss franc, back and forth if I want to trade it 50 times a day, with zero FX traders. That’s my mission in life, to help them find a real job.”

In May 2020, O’Leary led a $20 million fundraising round for what is now WonderFi Technologies, a Canadian firm that plans to launch a platform to simplify access to DeFi.

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Tesla’s bold foray into the Bitcoin (BTC) market has been paying off in 2021 as BTC’s price has been rallying in October to hit over $58,000 on Oct. 14.

Tesla currently holds roughly 43,200 BTC, worth roughly $2.5 billion at today’s prices, according to online monitoring resource Bitcoin Treasuries. This is approximately 65% or $1 billion more than what the carmaker paid in February when Elon Musk’s company revealed that it had added $1.5 billion in BTC to its balance sheet.


BTC/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView
In Q2, Tesla sold 10% of its Bitcoin holdings — about 46,000 BTC — at a reported average price of around $50,000 per token. In its Q2 earnings report, the company notified that it had booked gains worth $128 million from its Bitcoin sale.

Tesla made first billion in profit in Q2 from selling cars
Following the latest Bitcoin price rebound, Tesla’s net profits from its crypto holdings came out to be as much as its income from Q2.

In detail, Tesla reported $1.14 billion in net profit for Q2, the first time it ever crossed the $1-billion mark. The income was a part of $11.96 billion in revenue that Tesla made mostly by selling cars — about $10.21 billion. The remaining $354 million came from the sales of regulatory credits.

Tesla revealed on Oct. 1 that it had delivered 241,300 electric vehicles during Q3, compared to 201,250 vehicles in the previous quarter. Combined with Tesla’s Bitcoin profits, expectations are high for blockbuster earnings set to be released after the market closes on Oct. 19.

“We think Q3 will be TSLA’s strongest quarter ever,” said Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Potter.

Will other companies follow?
Thus far, Tesla’s Bitcoin strategy has been very successful, providing a case study of how other corporates could replace a portion of their cash reserves with BTC.

That said, several companies that invested in Bitcoin before Tesla have seen even greater gains.

For instance, business intelligence firm MicroStrategy purchased around $3.15 billion worth of Bitcoin in multiple buying rounds. With its first purchase dating backing to Aug. 11, 2020, the company’s net Bitcoin profits are now near $6.3 billion, almost doubling its investment.

Jack Dorsey’s payment service firm, Square, has also seen considerable gains from holding Bitcoin, now worth over $442 million from its $220-million investment.

Additionally, Canada-based crypto mining firm Hut 8 Mining Corp has seen its $39.3-million Bitcoin purchase increase in value by more than 600%, reaching around $250 million. Back in June, the company also revealed plans to hold 5,000 BTC by 2022. source

Insurance for DeFi
Steady State is launching a comprehensive insurance solution for decentralized finance (DeFi). The project shifts responsibility from individual users, and the protocol holding the underlying assets, and transfers that responsibility to Steady State insurance. Theoretically, this should allow all parties to sleep more soundly at night.

Decentralized finance in its current form can never fully realize its potential: the risks from flash loan exploits, hacks, and stablecoin de-pegging mean that a large swathe of potential investors will simply never venture into the market. Any cursory examination of the sector makes it easy to understand why that is.

A single flash loan attack in February of this year drained $37 million from C.R.E.A.M. protocol tanking the price of its native token by 30% in half an hour. In May, flash loan exploits on a single chain, Binance Smart Chain, totalled $167 million. These sorts of reports effectively place a handbrake on the market, slowing its growth and making bigger investors and institutions turn away.

Without the additional safety that an insurance solution such as Steady State can provide, the growth of the sector will always remain underwhelming.

Steady On
Steady State posits that insurance issued through smart contracts can help to create a more efficient and better solution for decentralized finance. Parts of the insurance process which are currently carried out by humans (with all their inherent biases) can instead be carried out logically with code.

Users can interact with the platform by first staking their assets as collateral, with Steady State using the capital to underwrite DeFi protocols. Users are rewarded for staking while simultaneously safeguarding funds.

The project operates on what is called a direct-to-protocol basis. According to Steady State, the use of their insurance coverage and index pools optimizes capital efficiency. Steady State sources liquidity in a novel way which they say cannot be accomplished with user-centric models.

All of this takes place in a community-centric environment, creating insurance policies that go beyond individual cover and instead cover multiple risk vectors for entire communities. Steady State has tagged this model “DeFi insurance 2.0”.

Building the Market
Steady State hopes that their approach to DeFi insurance will allow for the growth of a true risk market, inviting users to buy and sell collateral on a liquid secondary market. This will allow users to sell funds that may otherwise be locked up in insurance smart contracts. Over time it is expected that this form of collateral trading will help to further spread risk and make the ecosystem more robust.

This will, in turn, help to build the credibility of the DeFi market, inviting large investors and institutions to participate in a number of ways. Insurance could even be a strong primary driver of adoption, as an area in which institutions can see a path towards direct participation in the market.

If Steady State can create a solution which onboards existing DeFi users and attracts a fresh influx of capital from institutions and whales, the company could indeed be set to revolutionize the insurance industry.source

AirGap, a self-custody bitcoin and crypto wallet with a storage application, announced today its latest release. In update v3.11.0, AirGap implemented support for SegWit for Bitcoin (BTC), improved secret import and entropy collection via dice rolls.

Segregated Witness (SegWit) is an update to the Bitcoin protocol that modified the way data was stored in the blockchain. This update brings several benefits, including increased scalability, faster transaction times, and, most important, lower transaction fees.


To use SegWit with AirGap, existing users of BTC need to generate a new address in AirGap Vault and send the funds to the new SegWit address.

Other Improvements Include:
Entropy collection via dice rolls and coin flips
Secret generation with dice rolls and coin flips is a security feature to generate secure mnemonics by using a specific sequence of inputs for entropy. The advantage of this is that users can collect their entropy without any digital help from the inbuilt device RNG (random number generators).

On the import page, there is now an advanced toggle. Users can then choose dice rolls or coin flips as a way of generating a mnemonic.

New secure mnemonic import feature (inbuilt keyboard)
The AirGap team has now replaced the normal device keyboard with its own virtual keyboard.

This produces advantages such as:

The keyboard can not record/save a mnemonic (some device keyboards do that for spell checking and send everything entered to a server — this is not good for security). AirGap’s keyboard does not use any external dependencies and is included with the app.
The new keyboard allows only valid words from the BIP39 list to be imported. So there can be no more typos / double spaces, etc.
The keyboard has BIP39 words autocomplete for faster imports.
There is a “scramble” button that shuffles the order of the letters on the keyboard, improving the security if someone is looking over their shoulders.
There is a “hide” button that masks the mnemonic that was already entered, improving the security if someone watches over one’s shoulder.source

Bitcoin (BTC) looks poised to pursue a run-up towards $100,000 as its price breaks out of a classic bullish structure.

Dubbed as the Bull Pennant, the setup represents a price consolidation period with converging trendlines that form after a strong move higher. It ultimately prompts the price to break out in the direction of its previous trend to a level typically at length higher by as much as the size of the initial large move.

On Bitcoin weekly charts, the cryptocurrency appeared to have been trending inside a similar consolidation structure, with its price fluctuating inside a triangle-like structure following a strong move higher (Flagpole).


BTC/USD weekly price chart featuring Bull Pennant setup. Source: TradingView.com
Last week, Bitcoin broke above the structure's upper trendline as it rose by 13.5%, with rising trading volumes to boot. As a result, the cryptocurrency's breakout move indicated its potential to rise by as much as the size of its previous trend (nearly $50,000).

Measuring from the point of breakout (~$48,200), the Bull Pennant's upside target thereby comes out to be another $50,000 higher, i.e., almost $100,000.

Other predictions
The technical setup projected Bitcoin at $100,000 not longer after many analysts envisioned the cryptocurrency at the same, six-digital valuation.

A team of researchers at Standard Chartered, headed by its global head of emerging market currency research, Geoffrey Kendrick, predicted BTC to hit $100,000 by early next year. They cited Bitcoin's potential to become "the dominant peer-to-peer payment method for the global unbanked" behind their bullish prediction.

David Gokhshtein, the founder of Gokhshtein Media and PAC Global, also imagined Bitcoin above $100,000 before the end of 2021. The executive based his bullish outlook on the amount of available fiat liquidity in the market, which, according to him, has prompted leading Wall Street players to purchase Bitcoin.

"Not everybody's going to come out publicly and tell you that they're buying bitcoin, but they are," Gokhshtein told Business Insider.

"There's too much money in the market. Way too much money. Institutions did not come in here to play for five minutes."
His statements appeared after George Soros' investment firm revealed at a Bloomberg event that it owns Bitcoin, sending the cryptocurrency spiking. That was soon followed by JPMorgan & Chase's latest report that showing institutional investors' preference for Bitcoin over gold as an inflation hedge.

In an earlier study published in May, the banking giant projected Bitcoin to reach $140,000 in the long term.

Holding sentiment on rise
On-chain indicators highlighted a rise in holding sentiment among Bitcoin traders.

Related: Tesla may have made more money holding Bitcoin than selling cars

In detail, the Bitcoin reserves held across all crypto exchanges recently dropped to their lowest levels in a year, as per data provided by blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant. The decline illustrated traders' intention to hold their Bitcoin tokens close than trading them for other fiat/digital assets.source

Users who hold debit cards issued by cryptocurrency exchange Bakkt will be able to convert their crypto balances to make fiat payments using Google Pay.

In an Friday announcement, Bakkt said it had partnered with Google to allow its users to purchase goods and services using Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies through the Google Pay wallet and payment system. In addition, Bakkt plans to build new analytics and geolocation functionality on its platform using Google Cloud tools. The exchange hopes that the features will expand loyalty redemption options “while providing Bakkt partners with valuable consumer behavior patterns.”

“This partnership is a testament to Bakkt’s strong position in the digital asset marketplace, to empower consumers to enjoy their digital assets in a real-time, secure, reliable manner,” said Bakkt CEO Gavin Michael.

According to Google, “millions” of retailers currently accept Google Pay as a form of payment, potentially giving Bakkt users the ability to pay in crypto at “supermarkets, pharmacies, restaurants, clothing stores, gas stations, beauty shops” and others. The Bakkt partnership follows major crypto exchange Coinbase's June announcement that Apple Pay and Google Pay would offer support for its Coinbase Card. Gemini has allowed its users to purchase crypto with Apple Pay and Google Pay since April.

Related: Bakkt launches payments app as institutions compete for crypto assets

Launched by the Intercontinental Exchange in 2018, Bakkt first offered BTC futures contracts exclusively to accredited investors. In March, the platform released a payments app allowing users to use crypto to make purchases, designed to “amplify consumer spending, reduce payment costs, and bolster merchant loyalty programs.”more

Litecoin has also consistently stayed in the crypto market top ten by market cap, a feat that not many other altcoins can claim.
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Conclusion: Is Litecoin a Good Investment and How Much Will LTC Be Worth?
Year   Potential High   Potential Low
2021   $1250   $75
2022   $2500   $325
2023   $1000   $200
2024 – 2025   $10,000   $500

Source:
https://www.google.com/search?q=next+boom+litecoin&oq=next+Boom+liteco&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j33l3.18833j1j4&client=ms-android-xiaomi-rev2&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8