Bitcoin News Roundup for Jan. 25, 2021

With bitcoin bouncing and ether hitting a new all-time high, CoinDesk’s Market’s Daily is back with the latest news roundup.

Listen or watch all the new CoinDesk podcast episodes wherever you want.

ABOUT

With bitcoin bouncing and ether hitting a new all-time high, CoinDesk’s Market’s Daily is back with the latest news roundup.

Add Markets Daily to your Alexa Flash Briefing here.

This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.

Today's stories:

First Mover: Bitcoin Flushes 'Weak Hands' as Ethereum Hits New All-Time High

Last week's rout in bitcoin market looks like "weak hands" selling out because bidders appeared to materialize whenever prices fell to $30K.

U.S. President Biden is unlikely to raise taxes anywhere close to covering his spending proposals (NYT)

China overtook the U.S. as world's leading destination for foreign direct investment (WSJ)

Investor demand for the lowest-rated junk bonds pushed yields to record lows; that’s below where 10-year U.S. Treasury-bond yields traded for most of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (WSJ)

One-third of staff may work from home permanently post-virus (Bloomberg)

A key executive at Huobi crypto exchange is said to have been taken into custody by Chinese police investigating the over-the-counter trading service (CoinDesk)

Valkyrie digital assets filed an application with the SEC for a bitcoin ETF, joining VanEck in the struggle to win U.S. regulatory approval (CoinDesk)

Wladimir (Vladimir) van der Laan, lead maintainer of Bitcoin Core, the key software underpinning the Bitcoin network, is seeking to move further into the "background" for the sake of decentralizing the project. This move comes following criticism of his decision to pull the Bitcoin white paper from bitcoincore.org after the project received a takedown notice from Craig Wright (CoinDesk)

Crypto exchange Coinbase now has more than $90B of assets on their platform and more than 43M registered users, (CoinDesk)

New Innovation Hub from Bank of International Settlements (the central bank for central banks) is planning a platform for testing central bank digital currencies (CoinDesk)

Early exchange Coinbase plans to offer a secondary market for private shares ahead of public stock listing, as pre-IPO contracts change hands at valuations of more than $70B (The Block)

CNBC stock-picking personality Jim Cramer suggested to the winner of the $731M Powerball jackpot that they should put 5% of their newfound fortune in bitcoin (CoinDesk)

MicroStrategy's recent sale of $650M of convertible bonds offer "very little downside and an almost-free call option on bitcoin," writes the son of investing legend Bill Miller of Miller Value Partners (Miller Value Partners)

In an opinion piece, Bloomberg’s senior ETF analyst argues the SEC is long "past due" in approving a bitcoin excjange-traded fund (Bloomberg Opinion)

Crypto Twitter trader and analyst @CryptoCapo_ says the drop in open interest in coin-margined bitcoin-derivatives contracts signals market bottom is in (Daily Hodl)

HOST

Adam B. Levine

Adam B. Levine joined CoinDesk in 2019 as the editor of its new audio and podcasts division. Previously, Adam founded the long-running Let's Talk Bitcoin! talk show with co-hosts Stephanie Murphy and Andreas M. Antonopoulos.

Finding early success with the show, Adam transformed the podcast's homepage into a full newsdesk and publishing platform, founding the LTB Network in January of 2014 to help broaden the conversation with new and different perspectives. In the Spring of that year, he would go on to launch the first and largest tokenized rewards program for creators and their audience. In what many have called an early influential version of "Steemit"; LTBCOIN, which was awarded to both content creators and members of the audience for participation was distributed until the LTBN was acquired by BTC, Inc. in January of 2017.

With the network launched and growing, in late 2014 Adam turned his attention to the practical challenges of administering the tokenized program and founded Tokenly, Inc. There, he led the development of early tokenized vending machines with Swapbot, tokenized identity solution Tokenpass, e-commerce with TokenMarkets.com and media with Token.fm. Adam owns some BTC, ETH and small positions in a number of other tokens.