Crypto prices effort a comeback as bitcoin soars 5% to close out the week: CNBC Crypto World

CNBC Crypto World features the latest news and daily trading updates from the digital currency markets and provides viewers with a look at what’s ahead with high-profile interviews, explainers, and unique stories from the ever-changing crypto industry. On today’s show, Andy Bromberg, the CEO of the crypto wallet Beam, explains why he thinks spot bitcoin ETFs move away from the original ideals of crypto. He also discusses his company’s new acquisition of an app that allows people to pay for online purchases using stablecoins.

Chapters:
00:00 – CNBC Crypto World, Jan 26, 2024
0:40 – Bitcoin climbs
1:20- The headlines
4:19- Andy Bromberg of Beam

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Crypto prices effort a comeback as bitcoin soars 5% to close out the week: CNBC Crypto World

Today the crypto Market stages a partial comeback from this week’s selloff States look to restrict binance Us’s operations and Andy Bromberg the CEO of the crypto wallet beam explains why he thinks bot Bitcoin ETFs step away from the ideals of digital assets welcome to cnbc’s crypto world I’m Mackenzie sigalos digital currencies

Are efforting a late stage comeback to close out the week thanks in part to some signs that the outflows from the grayscale Bitcoin Trust might be tapering off we’ll walk you through that in just a second by noon Eastern Bitcoin traded a touch below the $42,000 Mark

Just days after it sank as low as the $38,000 level ether also regaining some ground this morning trading at 2278 while cardano jumped to 49 today’s gains helped push Bitcoin back into the green for the week up just 2/10 of 1% in the past 7 Days ether meanwhile was hit hard

By this week’s selloff it’s down about 8 and a half% now over on Wall Street crypto focused stocks were on Pace to close out the week in the green by no Eastern coinbase Marathon Riot and micro strategy all trended higher okay let’s talk about some of the

Top stories JP Morgan thinks that the worst of the ETF selling pressure on bitcoin might be over in a research note on Thursday today the Investment Bank said that investors taking profits from the conversion of the grayscale Bitcoin trust has likely been a driver of bitcoin’s recent correction JPM

Estimated that of the $4.3 billion that’s exited gbtc about3 billion can be linked to profit taking now the other 1.3 billion potentially investors moving into cheaper ETFs the bank thinks that with most of the profit taking out of the way that grayscale driven pressure on bitcoin will ease also as for which

Cheaper ETFs investors could be moving to JP Morgan sees two competitors to grayscale emerging Black Rock and Fidelity both have much lower fees next Regulators in two states told binance us that the crypto exchange is no longer allowed to serve their residents now earlier this month Alaska’s division of

Banking and securities denied a renewal of the crypto exchange’s license one of the reasons listed for the denial the firm’s owner ERS ship structure a week after binance’s founder Shang pangao pleaded guilty to charges of violating us anti-money laundering requirements Florida’s Office of Financial regulation issued an emergency suspension order

Against binance Us’s money transmitter license so for now the firm can’t serve users in that state the emergency order warned that the continued operation of bam trading which is the US exchanges operating company constitutes an immediate ser serious danger to Public Safety The Wall Street Journal reported

That Regulators in both States say that cz’s guilty plea makes him unfit to control binance us and that the former binance CEO is a roughly 80% shareholder we reached out to binance us and a spokesperson told us that the exchange is quote in active dialogue with State officials to enable the platform to

Continue to serve customers in the United States the statement went on to say that CC no longer sits on the binance us board and is not involved in its governance CZ is due to be sentenced at the end of next month and has remained free in the US on a $175

Million Bond according to a court filing from earlier this week a federal judge rejected his request to travel back home to the UAE for the hospitalization and surgery of a person in his life even though he offered to post his binance Equity as security for his return to the

Us all right turning to spot Bitcoin ETFs for our main story crypto world’s Talia Kaplan spoke with Andy Bromberg the CEO of the crypto wallet beam who warns about the possible negative implications tied to these products he also explains his company’s new acquisition of an app that lets people

Pay for online purchases using stable coins in places like Amazon and more last time we spoke was in September and you seemed confident that spot Bitcoin ETFs will win approval sure enough you were right and now these spot ETFs are trading in the US now the move

Is widely considered a win for Wall Street but apparently not everyone thinks the approval of these products is good for crypto I actually read an article where you were quoted as saying that these ETFs are stepping away from the ideals of crypto and that they could give traditional financial institutions

Excessive influence over the market can you elaborate on those points what do you think could happen to crypto with these approvals yeah it’s a great question I mean I think unequivocally the Bitcoin ETFs the spot ETFs are good for crypto it is good to be able to expose more

People to technology good to expose more people to the markets good to bring it to a w wider audience so I think that’s all good but I just think it’s really important at the same time for us to think about the possible negative implications it’s easy to get caught up

In all of the excitement which is warranted at some level but there are negative implications and for me I think the biggest negative implication is that the core promise for me of crypto of Bitcoin is this idea of self- custodial products where you have ownership of

Your own money that is the whole dream of the technology is people being in control of their own money and these ETFs while they are great they are the creation of a financial instrument where someone else owns your money and you have access to it in the form of you

Know this publicly traded share on on this Stock Exchange and that’s all well and good but it does get away from those original ideals which I think is really important to Remember My Hope Is that the industry can use the Bitcoin ETFs as sort of a top of funnel that people can

Become interest in technology hear about it get access to it for the first time maybe through these Bitcoin ETFs if that’s the easiest way for them to get access to it but then go down the rabbit hole and learn about what the technolog is actually about and begin to

Own it themselves and and really use it themselves in a in a truer way to the core ethos of the technology and I think I think what’s a little bit interesting about it and different from other ETFs is that most ETFs out there the the asset that underlies the ETF is not a

Consumer product directly it’s not something people themselves actually want need to own and use so you think about an oil ETF well sure oil is a part of my life in that I use it for different things but it’s not a product that I would go out and want to own

Myself right you might you might use it for something but it’s not a product you’d want to own whereas Bitcoin is a consumer product it is a thing that people should have and own themselves and I think if they only own it through the ETFs then they might be missing out

On some of the core Promises of the technology not the product so what do you think is the solution to this negative implication you outline I think the solution is a couple fold one as an industry for those of us who are working in the crypto industry

Which I certainly am and others are we should be building products that are easy enough to use that someone who only has the expertise to go and buy a Bitcoin ETF in their brokerage account feels comfortable using an actual crypto product as well and that’s something

That hasn’t really happened yet in a in a Broadway in the industry there’s lots of crypto products out there but many of them serve crypto native people people who are really inherently interested in the technology and want to get into the nitty-gritty and we need to see a wave

Of products that are usable by mainstream consumers who might get their interest caught by the Bitcoin ETFs and then want to go and use the products the first thing is is really a call to Industry that we have to go and build those products and the second thing is a

Call to the people who are participants in the Bitcoin ETFs and going and buying it which is that I would hope that they exercise curiosity that they maybe they get into it because they’re interested in the price or they’re interested in getting exposure to the asset class

That’s great but I would hope that many of them go and take a step further and say well why is this asset class interesting why is this technology interesting is this product something that I might want to use independent of my ownership in the Bitcoin ETF and I

Might want to actually go and play around with this technology and my hope is that people will actually do that so for for us to mitigate these negatives that come with the the many positives of the Bitcoin ETFs I think on one side the industry has to build better products

That are usable by mainstream people and then everyone who’s in the mainstream who’s using these product or getting access to bitcoin for the first time through the ETFs I hope exercises some curiosity and tries out some new products so what do you think is next for crypto now that these spot Bitcoin

ETFs are live well first of all on the Wall Street side of things I hope that it does lead to more uh ETFs for other crypto assets and people get access to more things Beyond just Bitcoin which I love but I think there’s many others out there that people should be able to

Express their opinions on you know in um in what you wrote about the the Bitcoin ETFs commissioner Hester Pur from the SEC said something really interesting she said she was was celebrating the approval of the Bitcoin ETFs but she wasn’t celebrating them and this is what she said she wasn’t celebrating the

Approval of the Bitcoin ETFs because she loves Bitcoin she said my opinion doesn’t matter I’m just one regulator it doesn’t really matter what I think of Bitcoin what I’m celebrating is that the American people now have a right to freely Express their opinions on bitcoin

And they can now buy into it if they want to buy into it via these ETFs really easily or not and they can express their opinions and that’s something to celebrate is the the ability for as free market capitalism opinions to be expressed the markets and so that’s what I’m excited for we’re

Seeing this first with the Bitcoin spot ETFs hopefully with other crypto assets as well and and my hope is that yeah the American public will have a chance to express their opinions in the easiest way possible for them on each of these assets from a market perspective and so

I hope there’s there’s more of that to come and then aside from that I would just go back to what I said earlier that I hope the industry uses this moment as a catalyst and recognizes that these spot Bitcoin ETFs are going to lead to many new people having ownership in a

Crypto asset for the first time that’s really exciting but from my perspective that matters most if we were able to then take those people and get them not all of them but some percentage of them through some funnel to go and actually participate in crypto directly owning

Their own assets taking advantage of the many products that exist in the crypto industry and being able to do more than just get the financial exposure to the asset now I want to quickly touch on bitcoin’s price in the hours following the landmark decision Bitcoin hit $49,000 and then dropped most recently

As low as the $38,000 level so what do you think is happening there yeah well of course crypto and Bitcoin are extremely volatile markets and we have to always recognize that it’s felt a little bit over the past few weeks like a precipitous drop but then if you go

And look at prices we’re actually back at where we were just a month or two ago uh you know when when we hit $40,000 um a couple months ago in November December it was ca for celebration and that was just a month or two ago and then we

We’ve come back down and people are quite upset but I think it’s important to recognize that we are actually still much higher than we were just six months ago and uh and so I think there has been a real impact there um I do think that sometimes it’s hard to say how the

Markets respond to these things sometimes you see people um really getting excited about the rumor of something happening and that impacting the price positively and then it happens and you know it it caused a little bit of a selloff because it wasn’t quite as momentous as people may have been

Planning for that’s fine too I think it’s hard to hard to expect what the market price is in and what it doesn’t um but what I would say is you know we’re we’re better than where we were just a few months ago I think a lot of

That is due to the Bitcoin ETFs and despite having a recent drop um we’re still back where we were in December which is which is not that long ago Switching gears you actually have some news to share as your crypto payments company announced the acquisition of a stablecoin powered shopping app called

Join so what was behind the decision to acquire this app and how will you integrated into your business we saw this company called join uh and they were building a shopping experience powered by stable coins where you could go online to Merchants like Amazon or Shopify merchants or all sorts of places

And buy things from them with stable coins and we reached out because we thought it might be really interesting to integrate into beam you can imagine your people are already using this product for peer-to-peer payments allowing them to also use it for online shopping when they already have funds in

The account it’s really appealing and we talked to the join team we got really decided they blew us away uh a couple co-founders Tom Dean jaad iub and Brad crook uh who built this incredible technology and built an incredible product and then we looked back and said

Well wait we just want to have this as part of being permanently um and so we we ended up talking to them and came to a deal and and acquired them so we’re using joins technology to add shopping at online Merchants to the beam Global venmo peer-to-peer payment experience Bromberg also discusses his

Outlook for payments this year you’ll be able to catch his full interview of over at cnbc.com cryptoworld okay that’s all for this week but we will be back again on Monday and we’ll see you Then