Exciting News From BTC, XRP & Visa

Exciting News From BTC, XRP & Visa

And we’re back with the weekly roundup of some of the hottest crypto news that has gone on over the past week. This week we saw Tom Lee give his prediction on when the Bitcoin bull run is to occur, a GMO Internet Group survey showed us that Ripple is expected to see the most gains in 2019 and we also see the Visa payment protocol slowly but surely get involved into the crypto space which we will talk about first.

Visa

Visa is one of the biggest companies out there and they are slowly but surely dipping their toes into the crypto and blockchain world by hiring professionals, but only on the down low.

Looking at SmartRecruiters, we observed that Visa is looking for a technical product manager who has a passionate outlook when it comes to payments and cryptocurrencies.

Speaking about the new role available at the company, “as a product manager on the Visa Crypto team, this person will have responsibility for executing Visa’s product strategy within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.” Following from this, they went on to say:

“This highly motivated individual will be responsible for managing a product roadmap and collaborating with key stakeholders across the strategy, risk, research, and engineering organizations. This individual will work in close collaboration with the Visa Research team to develop new products to deliver value to fintechs and Visa. This person should have great problem-solving skills and creativity to find new opportunities and anticipate how cryptocurrencies could impact payments.”

Visa has shown a keen interest in crypto before this though. At the end of 2018, they acquired the British cross-border payment provider Earthport which has a lot of deep connections with Ripple of more than $250 million.

On top of this, the firm was very open about its several blockchain-based projects and announced a partnership with IBM last year in order to test Ethereum’s technology on the global payment industry.

Ripple

The GMO Internet firm provides numerous services to Japan when it comes to the online world. They recently conducted a survey and the results are in showing that nearly half of the participants expect Ripple to see the most gains throughout 2019 when compared to other coins and tokens.

The survey was conducted from 30th January - 20th February with around 11,000 people taking part which has had some very interesting results.

Seventy percent of the respondents believe that cryptocurrencies are long-term investors and that there is a lot of potential in the future for these digital assets.

It seems that the main reasons for investment are mainly down to the potential of making money when it comes to crypto as well as the concerns to do with market volatility and exchange and exchange security. Furthermore, there is a big sign that the potentially high returns have a big place for the investor's mind with the report claiming that 90 percent of the participants entered the market following the highs of late 2017.

Tom Lee’s Bitcoin Prediction

Fundstrats Tom Lee is very vocal in the crypto community and especially when it comes to Bitcoin. Lee typically gives his comments on BTC which are usually bullish remarks and he has recently offered a prediction for when the next bull run will take off.

In a recent interview, the co-founder said that a bull run has the potential to happen within the next six months. He even added that it is “likely”. Lee added on to this prediction, guessing that it would happen in August although this wasn’t a strict estimate.

“The key number to watch is the 200-day moving average…Bitcoin’s bouncing along that. If Bitcoin holds above $4,000, it’ll cross its 200-day [moving average] by August, so I think the outside window is five to six months before Bitcoin starts to look technically like it’s back in a bull market.”

Lee made these comments on CNBC of which he makes an appearance on regularly. He has previously said that “investors are still recovering from that collapse in markets…many got very defensive.”

Moreover, he said that the use of BItcoin is always increasing and said that Venezuela is seeing an increase in the use of cryptocurrencies.

The topic of conversation moved to JP Morgan Chase who is getting ready to launch their own cryptocurrency called, JPM Coin. Speaking on this, Lee said, “I think things like JPMorgan Coin and Facebook Coin are really sort of creating use cases and, actually, I think some credibility. JPMorgan’s coin is essentially a stablecoin. I think it’s not a threat to bitcoin.”

Speaking on what makes him feel so bullish, Lee says:

“I think the real story for bitcoin’s and cryptocurrencies future is whether or not it’s going to become an asset class…as an asset class, it’s still the earliest days. [Following the Bitcoin Cash hard fork] Bitcoin is going to spend a lot of time in the low 6000s fixing itself.”

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