Messari Daily Brief Feb. 8, 2021 - What's Next?

Once Elon Musk changed his twitter bio to #bitcoin, it seemed “inevitable” that he’d make a sizable bet on the currency. We just didn’t know how large it would be. Today, we got our answer as Tesla announced that it has purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin for its balance sheet, representing ~15% of the company’s net cash.

I suppose this is cause for celebration, but I don’t feel the need to dwell on it. Instead, I’m thinking “what’s next?” Bitcoin and Ethereum have seemed like inevitable growth stories since the COVID fiscal spending surge, DeFi summer, and ETH 2.0 launch. I’m spending much more time thinking about what the future has in store for CEX/DEX tokens, on-chain lending, asset management, cross-chain infrastructure, NFTs, Web 3 assets, algorithmic stablecoins, and other new applications we haven’t yet imagined.

When BTC is your checking account, and ETH is your high-yield savings account, it pays to look beyond the crypto reserves for new opportunities. Fortunately, we’ve got the best team in the game covering those bases daily, and making sense of the crypto frontier.

If you haven’t already, you might want to redeploy a sliver of the 10%+ pop in your crypto checking to unlock all of Messari's Pro features. You’ll thank us later. :)

Headlines that matter:

• INTEL: Stacks, Terra, Loopring, YFI, Curve, Powerpool, PERP, Balancer (+ 10 updates)
• Tesla buys $1.5 billion in Bitcoin; Bill Miller may buy up to $300 million GBTC
• Ethereum Futures launch on CME (CoinDesk)
• OCC grants provisional banking charter to another crypto company (The Block)
• CoinDesk launches CoinDesk TV (CoinDesk)
• Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot sold $2.6 million of collectibles in 30 minutes (Decrypt)
• Glenn Greenwald on Journalistic Tattletales and Censorship at the NYT (Greenwald)
• Paradigm has a security-focused coding competition and leaderboard (Paradigm)
• Also, some thoughts from Charlie Noyes on Miner Extractable Value
• Daily Shade: Snoop Doge