Weekly review calendar week 6 – 2022

With over $10 trillion in assets under management, BlackRock ranks as the world’s largest asset manager. Back in November 2020, CIO Rick Rieder was already expressing a positive view of digital assets. According to Rieder, Bitcoin even has the potential to become the “safe haven asset” par excellence. A few months later, the asset manager filed prospectus amendments for two of its funds that allow the purchase of Bitcoin futures. According to insiders, BlackRock now wants to go a step further and offer cryptocurrency services to its institutional clients. With BlackRock’s full entry into the world of digital assets, institutional adoption in the States would get another huge boost after the biggest Wall Street investment banks are already standing by with similar services.

Microstrategy, a Nasdaq-listed software company, is one of the first companies that has been actively acquiring Bitcoin and adding the digital asset to its balance sheet. By now, Microstrategy’s bitcoin holdings are worth around $6 billion, and the strategy has found some serious followers in the form of automaker Tesla, among others. As of this week, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms has joined. KPMG Canada has made its first initial investment in digital assets with an allocation to Bitcoin and Ether. The decision was motivated by a reflection of the firm’s commitment to new technologies and asset classes. According to KPMG Canada, cryptocurrencies are a maturing and promising asset class, which is perceived by an increasing number of financial service providers and investors. An interesting trend to watch.

US authorities are now in possession of bitcoins worth around $3.5 billion. In 2016, a hack of the crypto exchange Bitfinex made the rounds. In the incident, nearly 120,000 Bitcoins were stolen. Subsequently, the Bitcoins were sold by the hacker to another party at a whopping discount. The buyers were hoping to launder them over a longer period of time. A large part of these funds has now been seized and the price surge that has occurred since then has multiplied the amount that was originally stolen. The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced this week the seizure of the stolen Bitcoins and the arrest of an accused couple. Despite various cover-up attempts, the couple was eventually tracked down by investigative authorities. The incident shows, contrary to popular belief, that it is proving difficult to make criminal funds disappear through a publicly accessible network.

In a recent report, blockchain analytics specialist Chainalysis examined potential money laundering activities in the emerging NFT industry. The study makes clear that the popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) skyrocketed in 2021. Given this backdrop and the pseudonymity of cryptocurrencies, it was reasonable to suspect that NFTs would be vulnerable to abuse. But while money laundering with physical art is difficult to quantify, analytics specialists can make reliable estimates of illicit activity with NFTs thanks to the blockchain’s inherent transparency. In fact, the company was able to identify only minor NFT activity related to criminal activity last year.