Bitcoin News Roundup for Jan. 26, 2021

With bitcoin hovering around $32K for a fourth straight day and top Ivy League universities said to be accumulating crypto, 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 hovering around $32K for a fourth straight day and top Ivy League universities said to be accumulating crypto, 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:

Smart Money Buying Crypto as Harvard Said to Be Holding

The brain trust has blessed cryptocurrencies, with endowments for Harvard and other universities reportedly lapping up digital assets. For bitcoin marketeers, it's a new $600B money pot.

Small-investor stock-trading activity on Robinhood, Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley's online brokerage shows no sign of slowing (WSJ)

GameStop short-sellers reload bets after $6B loss (Bloomberg)

"With the U.S. increasingly reliant on foreign capital to compensate for its growing shortfall of domestic saving and with the [Federal Reserve's] open-ended quantitative easing measures creating a massive overhang of excess liquidity, the case for a sharp further weakening of the dollar looks more compelling than ever," former Morgan Stanley Chief Economist Stephen Roach writes in op-ed. (Bloomberg Opinion)

Collateralized debt obligations make their way onto DeFi lending (CoinDesk)

It's 'frothy squared' as crypto firms line up for IPOs to tap market mania (Bloomberg)

Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital plans to launch Ethereum funds, from (Decrypt)

The market value of DeFi tokens surged to $45B, triple the amount at end of October, reported by (Decrypt, using CoinGecko data)

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.