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The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says he expects a winning streak for the digital currency Bitcoin to eventually come to an end.

Personally, Ive been surprised that Bitcoin has continued to flourish, Eric Rosengren, the head of the regional central bank, said in an interview with The New York Times on Friday.

The digital currency is trading at more than $50,000 per coin and on Friday surged to a market value of more than $1 trillion. That increase has been helped along as big companies like Tesla and finance firms like Bank of New York Mellon increasingly embrace Bitcoin.

But Mr. Rosengren said he could not see a long-lived use case for Bitcoin in a world where central banks were likely to offer their own alternatives eventually.

I would suspect, down the road, that a number of central banks will have digital currency, he said. When there is a digital currency available, other than the underground economy, its not clear why people would use Bitcoin.

I would expect, over time, Bitcoin prices to come under pressure, he continued.

Mr. Rosengren noted that China and Sweden were well along in thinking about digital currencies, and that the Boston Fed was also researching the possibility for the United States. The Fed and especially its chair, Jerome H. Powell has been clear that it will tread very carefully into the digital currency space, given the important role the U.S. dollar plays in the global economy.

Some smaller central banks have been more experimental. The Bahamian central bank introduced the Sand Dollar, a central bank digital currency, last year.

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A Fed president predicts the Bitcoin boom wont last. - The New York Times

Price Point

Bitcoin (BTC) pushed higher on Friday to a new all-time-high price, stopping just shy of $53,000. At the current level of outstanding bitcoin supplies, a move above $53,665 would push the largest cryptocurrencys market capitalization to the $1 trillion mark,seen as a milestone in bitcoins maturation as a global asset.

Signs continued to mount that bitcoin is seeing increased mainstream adoption or at least mainstream attention from the likes of the giant bank JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the bond-investing legend Jeff Gundlach. (See Bitcoin Watch, below.)

But bitcoin perhaps wasnt even be the biggest story this week in digital-asset markets. Binance coin (BNB), the in-house in-house token from the similarly named cryptocurrency exchange, has soared this month to a $40 billion market capitalization, ranking it third among all digital assets behind bitcoin and Ethereums ether (ETH).

Related: Bitcoin's Rise Should Make Regulators Ask if the Fed's Policies Have a Hand in It: WaPo

In traditional markets, European shares rose and U.S. stock futures pointed to a higher open. Gold slid 0.2% to $1,772 an ounce.

PAY YOUR SWISS TAXES IN BTC: The Swiss canton of Zug dubbed Crypto Valley thanks to the many digital-asset companies drawn to the jurisdiction because of its friendly blockchain and crypto regulation has started accepting tax payments in cryptocurrency. For now, theres a cap of 100,000 Swiss francs ($111,300). As the home of the Crypto Valley, it is important to us to further promote and simplify the use of cryptocurrencies in everyday life, said Zugs finance director, Heinz Tannler, when the tax initiative was announced.

BIDDERS UP: Christies, the 255-year-old auction house of art, antiques and apparently meterorites, will now accept cryptocurrency for payment, Bloomberg reported. That Christies is willing to accept cryptocurrency for the first time, according to the piece, says more about the auction houses attempt to break into new audiences than it does about a shift in the traditional art market.

Story continues

Bitcoin beating gold where it counts right now on the inflation trade

Related: Morocco Considers Launching a Central Bank Digital Currency

Bitcoin continues to outshine gold amid calls for more fiscal spending to boost the U.S. economy back to full strength.

The worlds biggest cryptocurrency set a new record price of $52,954.49 on Friday, CoinDesks Omkar Godbole reported, having scaled the $50,000 mark two days prior. Meanwhile, gold fell to $1,760 early Friday to hit the lowest level since July.

Bitcoins potential use as a hedge against inflation, and possibly a better one than gold, has become a key narrative on Wall Street as well as in Washington.

In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, U.S. Treasury SecretaryJanet Yellen said that the proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus package could help the U.S. get back to full employment in a year, a sign that President Joe Bidens administration is undaunted in pushing for a large bill. She added that the risk associated with delivering too little stimulus is greater than the price of doing something big.

But she added that bitcoin is a highly speculative asset.

Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of the $130 billion DoubleLine Capital and one of the worlds most renowned bond investors, tweeted Thursday that he was a long-term dollar bear and that bitcoin was maybe the Stimulus Asset and that it doesnt look like gold is. Gundlach previously had said he didnt believe in bitcoin.

Lots of liquid poured into a funnel creates a torrent, Gundlach wrote in the tweet.

Analysts for JPMorgan wrote in an 86-page reportthat bitcoins competition with gold as an alternative currency is here to stay, though they called it an economic sideshow in that the rise of digital finance is the real post-Covid-19 story.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft-founder-turned-philanthropist, said hes neutral, notable perhaps because he didnt immediately pan it, as some other successful U.S. business people have done, later to miss out on big market gains. (Looking at you, Warren Buffett.)

The past couple of weeks have seen fundamental arguments made for choosing silver, bitcoin, and Treasuries over gold, wroteEdward Moya, senior market analyst for the foreign-exchange broker OANDA. Bitcoin has benefited from relentless retail demand and on expectations that institutional interest is still growing.

Binance coin shoots to $40B valuation, trailing only bitcoin and ether

While cryptocurrency exchange Coinbases valuation soars to a $77 billion valuation based on private-share trading, rival Binance is seeing rocketing demand for its exchange tokens in digital-asset markets.

Prices for the BNB tokens have jumped five-foldthis month, for a market value of about $40 billion. According to Messari, that valuation makes Binance coin the third-biggest digital asset after bitcoin and Ethereums ether.

The token serves as Binances internal currency: It can be used to buy cryptocurrencies on the exchange and pay fees. So the jump in BNBs price might reflect speculation that Binance, already one of the worlds biggest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume, will occupy a dominant role in the future of fast-growing digital-asset markets.

According to CoinDesks Sebastian Sinclair, the price rise might be tied to increased interest in a decentralized financial application called PancakeSwap, which helps users find yield-earning opportunities in crypto markets. PancakeSwap runs on Binances own blockchain, Binance Smart Chain.

Daily volumes on PancakeSwap have shot up to more than $1 billion, from $37 million at the start of the year, CoinDesks Will Foxley reported.

The BNB token is needed to process transactions on the Binance Smart Chain, similar to the way ether is used on the Ethereum blockchain.

For what its worth, the BNB token itself is set atop the Ethereum blockchain, under the common ERC-20 standard for digital tokens.

That helps explain why a tokenized or synthetic version of the BNB token, called wrapped BNB (WBNB), appears to be the primary token traded on PancakeSwap within the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem, according to CoinGecko, a crypto-markets tracking site:

DEFI AT $400 BILLION? Bloq founder Matthew Roszak told CoinDesk TV that the growing arena of decentralized finance, or DeFi, where total collateral now sits at $40 billion, could add another zero in a year from today.

TULIPMANIA 2.0? While bubbles of the past explode only to later collapse and never to return to their previous glory, bitcoin is known for its two-steps-forward-one-step-back moves, Joakim Book, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, writes in op-ed for CoinDesk Opinion.

WHAT IS A BITCOIN ETF, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? CoinDesks Ollie Leach explains.

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First Mover: Bitcoin Meets Torrent as Lowly Binance Coin Gets $40B Valuation - Yahoo Finance

The worlds No. 1 cryptocurrency hit a record high on Friday, propelling it to a market value above $1 trillion for the first time ever.

A single bitcoin BTCUSD, +0.73% jumped to a record at $$53,910.44, based on prices tracked by CoinDesk, briefly bringing its total market capitalization to a peak at $1,002,547,798,785, according to data from research company CoinMarketCap.com.

Bitcoin was last up 4% on Friday at around $53,734, and has surged over 85% since the beginning of 2021. By comparison, gold prices GC00, +0.32%, which bitcoin often competes against for investment dollars, are down nearly 6% so far this year.

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.19% is looking at a year-to-date gain of 4.5%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.00% is up 3.3% and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.07% is looking at a gain thus far in the year of over 8%.

Bitcoinprice reaching the 1 trillion dollar is the most exciting news of this year, wrote Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at AvaTrade, in an emailed note. This was long coming and the fact is that we are only 10X away from flipping the gold market cap on its head, he said.

The ascent of the digital asset created just 12 years ago by a person or persons known as Satoshi Nakamoto has been attributed to growing institutional interest in bitcoin and other alternative cryptographically backed assets.

The fervor for bitcoins was given a fresh spark earlier this month when Elon Musks Tesla Inc. TSLA, -0.77% said that it has acquired $1.5 billion in bitcoins in January and that it could accept the worlds No. 1 digital asset for payment in the future.

Late Thursday, Musk via a tweet, further explained his rationale for getting exposure to bitcoins, describing the decision as simply a less dumb form of liquidity than cash, is adventurous enough for an S&P500 company.

Other institutions including PayPal Holdings Inc.PYPL, which back in November opened up its cryptocurrency platform to all U.S. customers after conducting a more narrow rollout, has helped drive bitcoin prices sharply higher in recent weeks and months.

And several high-profile Wall Street investors, including Stanley Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones, have embraced bitcoin. Famed investor Bill Miller, founder of Miller Value Partners, ina letter to clientsearlier this monthpublished on the firms website, reaffirmed his bullish outlook on bitcoin.

One point worth noting is that despite the parabolic move in bitcoins in the recent period its dominance, its share of market value compared against other alternative digital assets, is just around 60%, down from a recent peak around 70% at the start of the year.

That may suggests that other cryptos, like Ether ETHUSD, -6.70% on the ethereum blockchain, are also drawing strong interest among buyers along with bitcoin.

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Bitcoin market value tops $1 trillion for first time ever as crypto price soars - MarketWatch

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is no longer a bitcoin bear. He has now taken a neutral stance on bitcoin as an investment. However, as an innovation, he says that cryptocurrency is one that the world would be better off without because it allows for certain criminal activities.

Bill Gates spoke about bitcoin and cryptocurrency in two separate interviews Thursday. One was with CNBC where he was asked what he thinks about bitcoin in the context of climate change seeing how bitcoin takes an enormous amount of energy to digitally mine. Gates simply replied:

I dont own bitcoin. Im not short bitcoin. So, Ive taken a neutral view.

Bitcoin can go up and down just based on the mania or whatever the views are, and I dont have a way of predicting how that will progress, Gates continued.

The Microsoft founder added: I do think moving money into a more digital form and getting transaction costs down, thats something the Gates Foundation does in developing countries. But there, we do it so you can reverse the transactions so we have total visibility of whos doing what. Its not about tax avoidance or illegal activities.

Gates has been no fan of bitcoin. In an interview with CNBC in 2018, he, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, and vice chairman Charlie Munger talked about bitcoin being worthless.

As an asset class, youre not producing anything and so you shouldnt expect it to go up. Its kind of a pure greater fool theory type of investment, Gates remarked. I would short it if there was an easy way to do it. BTC was trading at around $9,300 on that day. Since then, the price of the cryptocurrency has risen almost 511% to $56,805 at the time of writing.

Another interview published Thursday where Gates talked about cryptocurrency was with The Wall Street Journal. Responding to the question, Whats the one tech innovation the world would be better off without? he said:

The way cryptocurrency works today allows for certain criminal activities. Itd be good to get rid of that.

However, Gates quickly added, I probably should have said bioweapons. Thats a really bad thing. We shouldnt have technology for that.

According to Forbes real-time list of billionaires, Gates ranks fourth with a net worth of $124 billion. The first on the list is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with $189 billion in net worth, followed by Tesla and Spacex CEO Elon Musk with $182 billion, and then Bernard Arnault with $159 billion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been granted a patent for a cryptocurrency system using body activity data. This crypto-mining system leverages human activities, including brain waves and body heat, when performing online tasks such as using search engines, chatbots, and reading ads.

What do you think about Bill Gates remarks regarding bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Bill Gates Neutral on Bitcoin but Says Cryptocurrency Is an Innovation the World Can Do Without Featured - Bitcoin News