State of Crypto: Blackrock Enters The Chat, Malaysia Punches Above Its Weight, and The Upcoming Bitcoin Halving

Enterprise Explores the State of Crypto. We review what happened in 2023 and the outlook for 2024 with Zhong Yang Chan, Head of Research with world's largest independent cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko, and Hann Liew, Founder & CEO of Halogen Capital, the first licensed fund manager in Malaysia specialising in digital assets.

In 2021, Bitcoin surged to an all-time high of $US69,000 per coin – a year later it was a different story and 2022 proved to be a terrible year for the crypto industry. Between the Terra Luna collapse and the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange — investors in the space saw billions in losses and looked to have rattled confidence in crypto.

Bitcoin began 2023 just above $US16,000. Today Bitcoin is up 168% on year, hovering around the $42-43,000 mark. Data from Crypto.com shows that the total cryptocurrency market cap increased during 2023 to reach over $1.4 trillion, marking around a 71% year-on-year growth.

Some factors that have seemingly helped include: the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which Forbes crypto contributor and content lead for Australian startup CryptoTaxCalculato Patrick McGimpsey says stands out as a pivotal event that brought crypto back into the limelight after the 2022 bear market as it resurfaced discussions around decentralised finance.

There was also the optimism surrounding spot Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the latter half of 2023, with key headlines being BlackRock’s proposed spot Bitcoin ETF as well as Grayscale’s court win versus the SEC regarding the proposed conversion of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) into an ETF. Fidelity and BlackRock also applied for spot Ether ETFs.

That said it was not all positive. In June 2023, the SEC accused Binance and Coinbase of offering unregistered securities to the public, among other allegations. Then in November, Binance came to a settlement and agreed to $US4.3 billion in fines.

We explore all this and more in this edition of Enterprise Explores.

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