Bitcoin interest declines; Rolling Stone gets into NFTs

Transcript

Welcome to The Daily Forkast, July 16th, 2021. I’m Angie Lau, Editor-in-chief of Forkast.News, covering all things blockchain.

Coming up, China’s crypto clampdown hits media aggregator Bishijie.
Bitcoin interest declining.
And Rolling Stone magazine gets into NFT.

Let’s get you up to speed from Asia to the world.

China’s crypto crackdown continues to bite.

The latest hit is crypto community and news aggregator Bishijie or “CoinWorld”.
On Thursday, it announced that in order to be compliant with China’s crypto regulations, its app and website in mainland China would shut down.

Since then, nothing on the website has been updated.

Bishijie was launched by Hong Kong’s CoinNess, which operates similar services in English and Korean. The English site has not updated its news feed since last night, but the Korean one seemingly continues to operate normally.

Forkast.News tried to get comment from Bishijie and CoinNess, but no reply at the time of this recording.

Over in Korea, crypto exchange Bithumb is to end licensing deals with two overseas platforms.

Experts point to South Korea’s strict regulations against money laundering, as the reason. Experts tell Forkast.News that Bithumb is likely trying to play defense here, worried about reputational risk if money laundering arises, yet have no operational authority over its overseas licensees.

It’s yet another move from a well-known Korean exchange ahead of the deadline of September 24th, for them to comply with stringent new regulations.

Bithumb says its agreements with Bithumb Global and Bithumb Singapore will end on July 30th, meaning that both those parties will have to stop using the Korean exchange’s name.

Both operate independently from Bithumb Korea and had used the licensing arrangement to take advantage of Bithumb’s reputation in order to promote their businesses.

Global interest in Bitcoin could be on the decline if Google metrics on searches for the term Bitcoin price are anything to go by.

Google uses a scale of zero to 100 when measuring trending topics and after seeing that average at around 60 for most of this year based on data for the last 12 months, it has now dropped to 24, a seven month low. The last spike was on May 19th, when China issued a warning against speculative trading in crypto currencies.

Now, over the past five years, the last time we saw a comparable rise and fall was after the 2017 boom, which saw it climb from around US$1,000 to almost US$19,000, you’ll remember over the course of the year. And then that fall of 65% in value between January and February of 2018.

So what does that mean for investors right now? One analyst told Forkast.News that while interest levels tend to fall as prices do, the current level is still higher than it was during 2019 and 2020, and he’s optimistic about the price outlook for the rest of this year.

“Bitcoin would probably be higher than it is now, by year end, we’re right now in an accumulation phase, the amount of capital and cash that’s been flowing into bitcoin or crypto currencies in general, and all the corporates and infrastructure players that have started looking at crypto are just very supportive to higher prices.”

Meanwhile, Bitcoin was down almost 2.5% at a little under US$32,000 at the end of the Asian trading day today.
And in the top ten for crypto currencies, DogeCoin down 5.5%, PolkaDot down 5%.

And finally today, the Australian edition of Rolling Stone is set to release the iconic music magazine’s first ever NFT.

It’s also the first time that sales of an NFT will actually count towards the Australian Recording Industry Association’s music charts ranking in this case top albums, as a copy of smash hit Artist Tones and I’s debut album is actually part of the NFT bundle.

The limited edition NFT also includes artwork of the cover of the magazine’s March 2020 edition, which features Tones and I, and was the first to be published after “The Brag Media” relaunched the magazine in Australia.

The Brag Media’s CEO says he sees such sales as an opportunity for music fans to invest.

“People will see their portfolio, you know, upwards of 10x, 10x straight away. What it’s going to allow us to do is build a community of music loving NFT collectors.”

For all you dance monkeys out there, the bundle goes on sale July 19th.

And that’s The Daily Forkast from our vantage point right here in Asia. For more, visit Forkast.News. I’m Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau. Until the next time.