cryptonews.net
- Bitcoin returned to $44,000 amidst geopolitical turmoil
- Terra LUNA gained +75% in February
- Bahrain will launch a Chainlink node
- Morgan Stanley could become the largest BTC-owning institution
After a tumultuous few days for the cryptocurrency market, the price of Bitcoin soared to a two-week high of over $44,000 on Tuesday, March 1. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the crypto market underwent a massive sell-off, resulting in the price of Bitcoin falling from $39,000 to below $35,000 at the end of last week. However, the flagship digital asset bounced back nearly as swiftly as it had fallen, with several experts praising Bitcoin’s potential to act as a safe-haven asset during times of geopolitical instability. Bitcoin’s resurgence has benefitted, with $260 billion inflowing into the crypto market cap. the total market capitalization presently stands at $1.96 trillion as of March 1.
Terra emerged as one of the best performing financial assets in February, a month mired by geopolitical conflicts and their negative impacts on the crypto market. Its token LUNA's price surged by a little over 75% to reach $91.50 at the month's UTC close. Interestingly, most of LUNA's gains in February surfaced on the month's last day. The Terra token jumped 26% on Feb. 28, in part due to similar upside moves elsewhere in the crypto market. Data fetched by analytics showed that Terra protocol burned 29 million LUNA tokens worth $2.57 billion recently. That happened as the supply of TerraUSD, a stablecoin backed not by the U.S. dollar but LUNA, increased from around 11.26 million on Feb. 1 to almost 12.92 million on Feb. 28, marking an increase of nearly 14.75%.
Bahrain will launch a Chainlink node, providing smart contracts with access to real-world data and secure off-chain computations, the companies said on Monday. In recent months, Chainlink has partnered with an array of real-world data and infrastructure providers, including price feeds for decentralized finance (DeFi), weather data, and trusted election results. It’s the third telco to work with Chainlink; Deutsche Telekom, something of a trailblazer in the public blockchain space, was the first to partner with Chainlink, and Swisscom is also advanced in this area.
According to data analysis from the MacroScope, Morgan Stanley could potentially become the largest Bitcoin-owning institution in the industry in 2022. Back in 2021, Morgan Stanley purchased millions of shares in the Grayscale BTC fund. GBTC was one of the first companies to provide exposure to the digital assets market for large institutions like Morgan Stanley. As the analyst suggests, there are major increases in ownership in a large number of its institutional funds. The increases are mostly double-digit according to balance sheets, with up to a 26% increase on the high end.
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