Bitcoin News Roundup for Feb. 3, 2021

With BTC trading in its recent range and a look at DeFi in a post-WallStreetBets world, CoinDesk’s Market Daily is back with the latest news roundup.

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

ABOUT

With BTC trading in its recent range and a look at DeFi in a post-WallStreetBets world, CoinDesk’s Market Daily is back with the latest news roundup.

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This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.

Today's stories:

Crypto Bulls Are Back as Ether Hits All-Time High, Bitcoiners Hoard

GameStop comedown shows appeal of social media-fueled trading. Dogecoin chatter in Reddit reveals cryptocurrency analogue.

Bitwise Asset Management said Tuesday it's seeking U.S. regulatory approval to publicly trade shares of its bitcoin fund on the over-the-counter marketplace OTCQX. “There is significant growth in interest from professional investors in accessing bitcoin as a tool to hedge their portfolios against rising inflationary risk,” says Matt Hougan, Bitwise’s chief investment officer.

Grayscale Investments reopened its Ethereum Trust earlier this week to accredited investors. (NOTE: Grayscale is a unit of Digital Currency Group, which also owns CoinDesk.)

Switzerland's 21Shares (formerly known as Amun) is launching the world's first exchange-traded product for the cryptocurrency polkadot (DOT), to be traded on the Swiss SIX Exchange under the ticker symbol PDOT. Prices for DOT have doubled this year, for a market capitalization of about $15 billion.

The investment firm Accelerate Financial Technologies is seeking approval from Canadian securities regulators to list a bitcoin exchange-traded fund on the Toronto Stock Exchange, CoinDesk's Tanzeel Akhtar reported Wednesday.

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.