This is Where Money Will Be Made!

It’s easy to forget, at a time when the world seems an increasingly uncertain and dangerous place, that human progress is galloping along at a rare old clip. Every day, our species is making mind-blowing technological advances that will change all our lives for the better. Probably.

This progress becomes apparent when you read through the latest report from Ark Invest - the asset manager headed by Bitcoin über-bull, Cathie Wood. Titled ‘Big Ideas 2024’, it delves into fifteen of the technological frontiers that are set to be pushed back the furthest this year. Spoiler alert: crypto - and not just Bitcoin - features heavily.

In today’s video, we break down the report and analyse its talking points. We take a look at all the technologies Ark Invest thinks will make the headlines this year and examine how they could affect all of our lives. And, if trying to keep up with fifteen different areas of technological progress seems like a daunting task, don’t worry. We also have a way in which you can profit from all of them in one fell swoop.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

It’s going to be an interesting week for macro and an even more interesting week for crypto. Starting with the macro, geopolitics have been front and centre. The Middle East has been the flash point, with Israel announcing that it’s selected a date for when it plans to escalate its operations in Gaza. The problem is that the date has not been revealed.

This has created lots of uncertainty, and there’s nothing investors hate more than uncertainty. Throw in the threats of Iran retaliating for a recent Israeli attack on its embassy in Syria, and you have the recipe for a regional escalation. This would explain why the MOVE index spiked by 10% in a single day last week - it foreshadows significant volatility in the US bond market.

And in turn, this volatility runs the risk of lowering liquidity (the amount of money in the markets and the economy). The fact that the Fed discussed reducing its balance sheet runoff at the last minute arguably confirms that the central bank is concerned about low levels of liquidity. Low liquidity could not only cause another banking crisis, but a crash in both stocks and crypto.

Speaking of which, taxes are due tomorrow in the US, so it’s possible that we’ll see selling around the margins as crypto degens bite the bullet to pay back their massive tax bills from last year’s crypto gains. However, it’s equally possible that most of this selling has happened already. Friday’s sell-off could well have been the worst of it. Not only that, but the passing of this deadline could take some pressure off of crypto.

This ties neatly into the crypto side of the story, where the Bitcoin halving is the headline. You might have heard that BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes is predicting poor price action immediately before and after the halving. This is mainly due to liquidity conditions, which you’ll already know aren’t looking too good. The catch is that it apparently takes six weeks for liquidity to affect BTC.

Given that this liquidity drain will be occurring in the second half of April, this means that BTC may not feel its full impact until late May at the earliest. In the interim, BTC could get a huge tailwind out of Asia. That’s because Hong Kong regulators are expected to approve spot Bitcoin ETFs as soon as next week on a reportedly accelerated schedule.

It’s safe to assume that Hong Kong regulators want to capture the hype around the Bitcoin halving, which you already know will be taking place this Friday, 20th April. Historically, BTC has rallied into the halving. The fact that there are almost a dozen spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US and many more waiting to be listed in Hong Kong suggests that history will repeat, and possibly in a big way.

The caveat is that Bitcoin miners have reportedly been offloading their BTC leading up to the halving. This is notably different to what Bitcoin miners did prior to the last halving, which was to accumulate BTC. It’s believed this selling is due to the enormous mining costs that they will incur after the halving. The estimation is that BTC prices will need to be over $80k for miners to be profitable.

What this means is that we could see Bitcoin miners selling any remaining BTC in the days leading up to the halving. This could result in a continuation of the choppy price action we’ve seen so far. The silver lining is that this could motivate crypto investors to turn their focus to altcoins, or at least towards halving-related memecoins, of which there will likely be many.

On that note, Solana developers are expected to fix its blockchain’s congestion issues sometime tomorrow. If the fix is successful, this could bring more speculative capital back to Solana. If the fix is unsuccessful however, this could accelerate the outflows we’ve seen from Solana to Ethereum and its layer 2s like Base. Keep an eye out for Linea this week…

Note that you can keep track of cross-chain flows here and here.

💻 Crypto-Native Hardware Devices 💻

The future is hardware.

And no, we’re not talking about super computers, internet of things or anything like that.

Instead, we’re talking about how consumer-end hardware is beginning to drive the adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain protocols. The concept of ‘crypto devices’ is no longer limited to hardware wallets.

In fact, over the past few months, we’ve been seeing some major efforts going towards building consumer-end hardware devices, such as phones or gaming consoles, for crypto-native users.

As you’re likely aware, the first such major device was the Saga phone launched by Solana Labs last year.

Admittedly, the product had a slow start due to its fundamental tech stack not being very revolutionary. Rather, it was as average as it came, and received a stinker of a verdict from tech-review superstar Marques Brownlee.

The only difference the Saga phone brought to the market was its integration of crypto-native features such as the Solana Mobile Stack, the Seed Vault and a Dapp Store. The TLDR here is that these features allowed the phone to create two things - the first being a secure element to store private keys, while the second is a mobile-phone style marketplace for decentralised applications on the Solana blockchain.

But this just wasn’t attractive enough for crypto-natives to make the shift from their existing devices. Especially since some of these dapps had already cracked a way to be listed on the app stores of Google and Apple, and most of their target users already had a dedicated hardware wallet.

It needed something more. Thankfully, that came in the form of rewards.

You see, users quickly began realising that the value of some of the airdrops/rewards they received from using dapps on the phone compounded when the market rallied at the end of last year. For instance, one of the rewards available to users of the Saga phone was an allocation of 30M $BONK tokens.

While these were worth a mere $10 at the time of allocation, the figure quickly went up to a few hundred dollars by the end of December. In other words, the airdrops began paying for the phone, and BONK in turn gained more prominence within the Solana memecoin community.

This success has, in turn, served as a validated proof-of-concept for other crypto projects and ecosystems. In fact, just over this past week, we saw three announcements relating to the launch of crypto-native hardware devices by projects within the Bitcoin, Sui and TON ecosystems.

While the first is similar to the Saga phone, in the sense that it’s a smartphone device dedicated to a particular blockchain ecosystem - in this case TON - the other two announcements are from Bitcoin and Sui ecosystem projects attempting to chart a route for a different type of consumer-end hardware product - gaming consoles.

In Sui’s case, the announcement was made by Playtron at the recent Sui Basecamp event. Playtron’s product - the ‘SuiPlay0X1,’ runs a device-agnostic gaming operating system, enabling gamers to play both Web3 and Web2 games across PC and mobile. A Decrypt report also quotes Mysten Labs co-founder and Chief Product Officer Adeniyi Abiodun confirming that the device could see a similar community engagement model as the one that led to the success of Solana’s Saga.

For Bitcoin meanwhile, the announcement was made by Ordz Games at the recent Paris Blockchain Week. Ordz Games’s product - the BitBoy One (no relation to the crypto influencer), will function as part gaming handheld, part Bitcoin wallet, and part miner for decentralised physical infrastructure networks (DePINs). It will also reportedly support various play-to-earn games, as well as being able to run emulated retro games from the original PlayStation era and earlier.

These aren’t the only products to launch in recent months either, as even the Aptos Foundation announced back in February that it will be launching a Web3 smartphone in partnership with Jambo Technology.

Safe to say, it’s easy to see how these products could perhaps experience similar levels of success to the Saga. In fact, we believe this is just the start of an incoming wave of other consumer-end crypto hardware products.

If we’re being bold, we’d even go so far as to predict that these products will fuel the next big wave of crypto adoption among consumers this cycle. Hardware may just turn out to be the best alpha play of them all this time around.

🔥 Hot Deal of The Week 🔥

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🔮 Video Pipeline 🔮

* How to Buy Bitcoin: Complete Beginner’s Guide
* Bitcoin Halving: Everything you need to know!
* Watch These Airdrops: Step-by-Step Guide
* BlackRock’s Tokenising The World: What it Means For You!
* Tether CTO Interview
* Near CEO Interview

🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* M6 Labs Crypto Market Pulse: Reading The Crypto Star Charts
* Conquering Crypto Taxes: Is CoinTracking Full-Service Worth the Investment?
* Best Ordinals Wallets 2024: Top Ordinals Wallets Reviewed!
* Aave Review: Decentralised Lending Platform
* Unveiling the Future: The Convergence of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence
* Best Crypto Exchanges in April 2024
* Top DePIN Projects 2024: DePIN Crypto to Watch!

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

Crypto is growing as an asset class and, the more mature it gets, the less opportunity there will be for outsized gains. Therefore, let’s grab this bull market with both hands and make the most of it.  

“The opportunity of a lifetime must be seized within the lifetime of the opportunity” - Leonard Ravenhill

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.