Crypto market continues upward swing!

Cryptocurrency prices have continued their upward trend over the last 24 hours, with the bitcoin price climbing to within touching distance of $40,000 before dropping back slightly.

Bitcoin is up 1% since this time yesterday with ethereum around the same.

However, some smaller coins are making outsized gains even as some think bitcoin is “beginning to reassert its dominance over challengers to its cryptocurrency crown.”

See crypto market 24-hour  snapshot

Bitcoin (+1%) $38,531
Ethereum (+1%) $2,774
Cardano (+2%) $1.07
Polkadot (+5%) $20.43

Cardano and solana, two of ethereum’s major rivals, and up 2% and 4% respectively this morning, while smaller contender polkadot is up 5%. Cardano developers have proposed a small increase to the cryptocurreny’s block size in line with a broader plan for increasing network capacity.

A panacea: Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter chief executive who left the social media company last year to focus on running his payments company Block, has reiterated his belief that bitcoin will be able to cure many of societies ills and called on companies to study bitcoin and how it could potentially improve their operations.

Change is bad: MicroStrategy chief executive and bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor interviewed fellow bitcoin believer Dorsey during the second Bitcoin for Corporations conference about how corporations could integrate and use bitcoin. “We’re the closest we’ve ever been to having a native currency for the internet with bitcoin,” Dorsey said, praising bitcoin for its dependability and immutability. “Slow things tend to last and be more predictable and secure,” he added.

Meta-stasis: Dorsey was meanwhile scathing in his criticisim of Meta’s failed cryptocurrency project, Diem, saying the company’s founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg should have focused on bitcoin. Meta, which will report its latest earnings and update investors this evening, offloaded Diem and related assets to crypto-friendly bank Silvergate this week.

“Those two years or three years, or however long it’s been, could have been spent making bitcoin more accessible for more people around the world, which would also benefit their Messenger product and Instagram and WhatsApp.”

Meanwhile… MicroStrategy last night reported a non-cash digital asset impairment charge of almost $150 million in the fourth quarter, up from $65 million in the prior quarter, reflecting the decline in the price of bitcoin versus the price at which it was acquired. The company is currently rowing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its accounting practices.

Hodl on: MicroStrategy, which now holds just over 125,000 bitcoins, valued at about $4.8 billion at the current bitcoin price of $38,700, will continue to buy more bitcoin and expects more opportunities to use the currency will emerge as banks get more involved in the crypto space.

“In a world where, say, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch and Bank of America and CitiGroup and JPMorgan are interested and involved in the space, I think the options that will be available to us will be greater and the counter-party risk that we would have to incur will be less,” Saylor said, it was reported by Blockworks, speaking on MicroStrategy’s earnings call.

The bottom line: Dorsey and Saylor are preaching to the choir. The rest of the world want to see evidence of bitcoin’s benefits not just promises.

Google’s CEO weighs on on web3

The chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, has waded into the on-going web3 debate, saying he is watching the blockchain space. Web3 is the idea a decentralized, blockchain-based version of the internet will eventually replace web 2.0—dominated by the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Meta.

“Any time there is innovation, I find it exciting,” Pichai was quoted by Bloomberg as saying on Alphabet’s earnings call in response to a question about the technology. Alphabet last night reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings and revenue, sending shares to all-time highs. “We are definitely looking at blockchain. It’s such an interesting and powerful technology with broad applications.”

Google is one of the few major Silicon Valley companies to so far stay on the web3 sidelines, with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey leading the backlash against what he claims are centralized organizations masquerading as decentralized.

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