BREAKDOWN: Gradually, Then Suddenly - Mastercard, BNY Mellon, Amazon, Twitter Poised to Join the Bitcoin Party
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2021
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the wake of Tesla’s big announcement on Monday, a wave of corporate engagement with crypto emerges.
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.
On today’s episode of The Breakdown, NLW looks at a slew of news from corporates getting into the bitcoin and crypto space, including:
- Twitter CFO exploring bitcoin treasury holdings and payments to employees and vendors
- Mastercard announcing crypto coming to payment rails in 2021
- Amazon revealing its digital currency plans in a series of job posts
- BNY Mellon, the world’s largest asset custodian, opening new digital asset business
- Why Christine Lagarde says central banks won’t buy bitcoin anytime soon.
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Earn up to 12% APY on Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD, EUR, GBP, Stablecoins & more. Get started at nexo.io.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BNY Mellon is the world's largest custodian bank. It holds for customers 41 trillion in assets. |
| 0:08.5 | Today, it announced that it was rolling out a new digital custody unit focused on digital assets, including cryptos. |
| 0:15.4 | If you had any doubt about whether banks were going to be falling over themselves to be the first in line to actually offer their customers' crypto services, I think that's now pretty well cleared up. |
| 0:26.7 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:30.9 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:37.7 | The Breakdown is sponsored by neo.io and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:44.3 | What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, February 11th, and today we are talking about MasterCart, |
| 0:51.4 | BNY Mellon, Amazon, Twitter, all joining the Bitcoin party. So the big question after |
| 0:59.3 | Elon and Tesla's Monday announcement about their $1.5 billion Bitcoin buy was what the |
| 1:06.0 | follow-on impact would be. Would there be a wave of other CEOs racing to join in? Would there be calls from |
| 1:12.9 | board members asking executives what their Bitcoin plan was? J.P. Morgan's strategist tried to throw a little |
| 1:19.4 | cold water on this notion. A Bloomberg article from yesterday was titled J.P. Morgan sees Tesla |
| 1:25.8 | Bitcoin bet as too bold for others to follow. |
| 1:29.2 | Importantly, their point wasn't about narrative. They acknowledged that this was a highly |
| 1:33.1 | influential narrative. It was about real volatility and what volatility corporate officers |
| 1:38.3 | were willing to deal with. Here's the way that Bloomberg put it. Corporate treasury portfolios |
| 1:42.9 | are typically stuffed with bank deposits, money market funds, and short-dated bonds, meaning that annualized volatility |
| 1:48.8 | or the range of swings during the course of a year hovers around 1%. Adding a 1% Bitcoin |
| 1:54.0 | allocation, quote, would cause a big increase in the volatility of the overall portfolio. |
| 1:59.0 | Such an allocation could mean the portfolio's volatility |
| 2:01.4 | rises to 8% due to Bitcoin's 80% annualized volatility, they said. Well, pour one out for those guys, |
| 2:08.5 | because the news since then has been way more flood than trickle. First of all, let's talk about |
... |
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