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Microsoft Shareholders Vote Down BTC |
Microsoft (MSFT) doesn't appear to be adding its name anytime soon to the list of corporate entities holding bitcoin (BTC) after its shareholders voted against a proposal that would have directed the board of directors to study such a move.
Titled "Assessment of Investing in Bitcoin," the proposal was put forward by the National Center for Public Policy Research. The think tank group suggested that Microsoft should consider diversifying 1% of its total assets into bitcoin as a potential hedge against inflation. According to the latest data by Bloomberg, Microsoft holds $78.4 billion of cash and marketable securities on its balance sheet. The board last month had urged shareholders to vote against the proposal. The preliminary vote result was announced minutes ago at the company's annual meeting. Shares of MSFT were trading for $446 in the minutes after the decision was announced, roughly flat for the day. Already under pressure on Tuesday, bitcoin prices fell a bit more following the news, now lower by 4% over the past 24 hours to $95,700. A 3-minute presentation by Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Bitcoin Development Company MicroStrategy (MSTR), which has seen its stock price surge as much as 2,500% since adding bitcoin to the company’s treasury strategy more than four years ago, was meant to convince shareholders otherwise.
Saylor argued that Microsoft had surrendered $200 billion in capital over the past five years by issuing dividends and stock buybacks instead of purchasing bitcoin. From the beginning, though, Microsoft's board had concerns over bitcoin due to the inherent volatility of the asset. The company, according to the board, prioritizes stable and predictable investments to mitigate as much risk as possible. |
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A message from The Interchain Foundation |
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Cosmos is expanding: Skip joins the Interchain Foundation.
The Interchain Foundation has acquired Skip, one of the leading Cosmos teams, to bring their excellence in engineering, product strategy, and execution in-house and usher in an era of growth for Cosmos, and its vision for the interchain. Skip will rename to Interchain Inc. and become the ICF’s main subsidiary, concentrating product, vision, and go-to-market for the Interchain Stack and Cosmos, led by Skip co-founders Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck. This acquisition marks a departure from the ICF’s distributed product development model and starts a new growth-driven stage defined by the alignment between the Interchain Stack’s vision, and the vision for a Cosmos Hub that is at the center of the ecosystem, driving user and liquidity growth for the entirety of the Cosmos’ interchain ecosystem. |
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BlackRock's spot bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF), tickered IBIT on Nasdaq, dropped on Tuesday as the overheated crypto market cooled and unfounded concern that bitcoin's security might be compromised by quantum computing percolated across social media.
IBIT's price fell 5.3% to $54.73, the biggest single-day drop since early August, according to data source Investing.com. The bitcoin price fell over 4%, hitting lows under $94,300, as overleveraged altcoin traders were liquidated, leading to bigger losses in the broader market. While such pullbacks are typical in a bull market, Monday's losses are noteworthy because they came alongside Google's announcement of its Willow quantum-computing chip, which can solve in just five minutes a problem that would take the world's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to process.
Several users on X expressed concerns that Willow could easily crack bitcoin's complex math SHA-256, compromising the network. That's because Willow has reached 105 qubits with improved error rates. Consider qubit a super-powerful version of a regular computer bit, which can only be a 0 or a 1. A qubit can be both 0 and 1, like a switch that can be on and off until it's checked. This helps quantum computers process problems much faster than normal computers.
These concerns are unfounded, some experts said, because Willow is still not powerful enough to pose a risk. "Willow has 105 qubits, which is great for quantum experiments but far from what’s needed to break Bitcoin's encryption," pseudonymous analyst and tech expert Cinemad Producer producer said on X. "Experts estimate you’d need about 1 million high-quality qubits to make a dent in Bitcoin’s security." In 2022, research from Universal Quantum, associated with the University of Sussex in the U.K., found that a quantum computer with a capacity of 1.9 billion qubits would be required to break bitcoin's encryption. |
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Bitcoin’s Pumping. Memes Are Minting Millionaires. The bear market’s snoozing, and the bull run is here.
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Derive Cross $100M in Bitcoin Options |
It's raining options, CoinDesk said last week, pointing to growing demand for derivatives tied to bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies. Now, additional evidence has emerged in the form of record activity on decentralized finance (DeFi), which offers unique and programmable onchain options, perpetuals, and structured products.
The total dollar value of crypto tokens locked (TVL) on Derive has risen past $100 million, alongside a record-setting trading volume and monthly active traders. “Derive.xyz'sest market insights reveal remarkable growth and heightened activity, with its total value locked surpassing $100 million for the first time, amid record-setting weeks for trading volume and active traders," Sean Dawson, head of research at Derive, told CoinDesk in an email.
“Yield on all USDC deposits has reached 10% on Derive.xyz, while it hit all-time highs in notional volume at $369 million and monthly active trades at 5,416," Dawson added.
The Derive platform comprises of Derive Chain, a settlement layer for transactions; Derive Protocol, which enables permissionless, self-custodial margin trading of perpetuals, options and spot; and Derive Exchange, an order book.
The record activity on Derive is consistent with the widespread demand for options tied to cryptocurrencies and digital assets-related investment vehicles like spot ETFs and stocks. |
Successful Trading Takes More Than a Bull Market Choosing the right exchange is crucial throughout the business cycle. This has been a very, very good month to trade in crypto. People who regularly read CoinDesk are making money just by checking their phone alerts. And yet, this environment isn’t as kind to the exchanges. Continue reading here. |
What Does Quantum Mean for Crypto? |
Google’s new quantum computing chip could mean bitcoin (BTC) is finished. That was the sentiment for some on Monday as the internet giant unveiled Willow, a quantum supercomputer that can perform certain computational tasks in just five minutes that would take classical supercomputers an astronomical amount of time—specifically, 10 septillion years (or one followed by 24 zeroes; a trillion trillion).
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Such an amount of time is greater than the existence of the entire universe at 13.8 billion years. In superficial theory, such a powerful computer could mean no passwords are safe, encrypted messages are intercepted, nuclear weapons codes are found out, and almost anything can be unlocked by brute-forcing combinations of numbers and letters.
But it isn’t all a doom and gloom yet. While quantum computing does indeed pose significant threats to current security systems, it's not a master key to the universe, atleast not right now. And there is no looming threat to Bitcoin, either.
Quantum computing leverages the principles of quantum mechanics, using quantum bits or qubits instead of traditional bits.
Unlike bits which represent either a 0 or 1, qubits can represent both 0 and 1 simultaneously due to quantum phenomena like superposition and entanglement. This allows quantum computers to perform multiple calculations at once, potentially solving problems that are currently intractable for classical computers.
Willow uses 105 qubits and demonstrates an exponential error reduction as the number of qubits increases. This is a critical step towards building a practical, large-scale quantum computer, per CEO Sundar Pichai. Bitcoin uses algorithms like SHA-256 for mining and ECDSA for signatures, which might be vulnerable to quantum decryption. And the short answer is that quantum computers, even advanced ones like Google's Willow, do not possess the scale or error correction capabilities needed to immediately decrypt widely used encryption methods like RSA, ECC (used in Bitcoin transactions), or AES (used in securing data). |
The Takeaway: CoinDesk Most Influential |
It was a profound year for crypto. The gloom that started 2024 had melted away at the end. With the approval of bitcoin ETFs in January, and the re-election of Donald Trump in November, everything about the mood changed.
Bitcoin reigned supreme, zooming through $100K in December. Bitcoin dominance was at 70%-plus. And the U.S. president-elect had promised a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, perhaps to buy the U.S. as much as 5% of total supply. Bitcoin ETFs had the most successful launches of any in history, with $145 billion already invested. Bitcoin found a widely acknowledged role – as digital gold – and looks more and more like a base layer to a new financial system. Ethereum sputtered (or so they said) with critics complaining about lengthy development roadmaps and inferior performance (compared to Solana and other new L1s). Still, ETH was up 58% (compared to bitcoin’s YTD of 120%) and 500-plus Layer-2s bloomed. Base, Optimism and Arbitrum, in particular, gained real-world traction.
Solana, with SOL up 110% YTD, hummed with memecoins and many less ephemeral projects. Telegram, now a real blockchain player, purred with tap-to-earn gaming, garnering hundreds of millions of players around the world. DePIN (or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) took off as a category, promising real-world infrastructure (telecoms, electricity, mapping, and more) and a different form of crypto adoption. Polymarket showed that prediction markets could be better than polls, and became as relevant to crypto traders – and everyday people – as CNN. And AI became part of everything. Stablecoins remained the most popular form of crypto (by transaction volume) and looked ever more like a global payment layer. USDT dominated and, and, flush with profits, Tether invested in a range of non-USDT projects, hoping one day to trade legally in the U.S., too.
Crypto showed real political power, helping elect Trump and 50+ other Congressional candidates. It’s the tenth time CoinDesk has selected the people who defined the year in crypto: Our Most Influential list. (Here was the first edition in 2015.) MI highlights achievements in the last 12 months. People are chosen for their projects, ideas, leadership, personality, or notoriety. The nominees speak to narratives and trends, from ETFs and politics, to code development and marketing.
There is a top 10 of the most Most Influential – people we feel had outsize influence or led the most important projects. Then, we profile another 40 people who were also influential, but perhaps not to the same degree.
Check it all out here. |
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