Bitcoin News Roundup for Feb. 1, 2021

With BTC stalling and the price of silver soaring to eight-year highs, CoinDesk’s Market Daily is back with the latest news roundup.

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

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With BTC stalling and the price of silver soaring to eight-year highs, CoinDesk’s Market 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:

Silver Is the New GameStop as Musk's #Bitcoin Stalls

As bitcoin trades in a range, traders are studying the "Grayscale premium" and watching traditional markets for clues to the next market move.

The hedge fund Greylock is known for making bets on the government debt of troubled nations like Argentina, Lebanon and Venezuela. Now, according to Bloomberg, Greylock, led by CEO Hans Humes, has filed for bankruptcy protection, apparently seeking the court's help to wriggle out of its own liabilities. The proceedings reportedly will allow Greylock to terminate its $100,000-a-month office lease in Manhattan. (Bloomberg)

Reddit user "DeepF—Value," who helped direct WallStreetBets' campaign, is a 34-year-old former insurance-marketing executive who has just made $20M from gains on GameStop (GME) shares and options (WSJ)

"Fundamentals have never mattered less" as GameStop saga "makes a mockery of the idea that markets provide an efficient form of capital allocation in the economy," James Mackintosh writes in column (WSJ)

For public companies, there are benefits to having no supply caps: Data show a rise in "shelf" registrations for potential securities sales, as CEOs prepare to take advantage of buoyant market conditions (WSJ)

One of the biggest questions facing the crypto industry over the past year has been whether the companies and their new-tech platforms could "Zoom" – where suddenly everyone starts using the product. Last week showed there's plenty of progress still to be made on that front. The industry groaned under the newfound attention from ready customers, some of them ostensibly fleeing the trading platform Robinhood following a series of anger-inducing trading suspensions. Outages were reported at crypto trading venues including Coinbase, Kraken, Binance and Voyager. New York Department of Financial Services Superintendent Linda Lacewell tweeted that, as the state's virtual-currency regulator, she was "actively monitoring market volatility."

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.