Daily Digest 1/3
Insight on the biggest stories of the day. “Neither this post nor any other on cryptofal.com should be taken as financial advice. It is not.”
Markets on Alert as Evergrande Ordered to Demolish 39 Buildings on World’s Largest Artificial Island
A major factor in the start of the current bearish market that we are in was the announcement of the Evergrande debacle. As the story continues to develop, Evergrande will now have to demolish 39 buildings that were under construction on Haihua Island. Haihua Island is the world’s largest piece of artificial land. In total the building takes up about 435,000 square meters of the island.
Evergrande has continued to default as they were downgraded to “Restricted Default” by Fitch Ratings after missing last month’s deadline. Even last week they missed $255 million in coupon payments and the 30 day grace period has started.
All of this has led to the share price of Evergrande to -89% to close out the year at $1.59. This also caused an index of Chinese developer shares were also down today by 1.7%. This is still potentially bad for the global markets as Evergrande was a huge player until it turned out they were frauds.
Enormous crypto-trading floor planned within $3 billion New York casino project
A Crypto trading floor inside a multibillion-dollar casino in New Yorks Manhattan Skyline is reportedly being considered. The idea was proposed by Jason Ader who is a former Las Vegas Sands board member. The proposal for this will be submitted to the local gambling authorities by January 7.
“The goal is to have a differentiated, but comprehensive, approach to entertainment that goes beyond casino gaming with some pretty cool elements,” said former Las Vegas Sands board member Jason Ader, in an interview from December.
The total cost of this project is estimated for at least $3 billion and will be named “Mirai” which is Japanese for “future”. One thought that this brings up for some in the crypto community is that putting crypto on a casino floor will cause “crypto to get regulated into oblivion”. Regulation is certainly needed in the crypto space as so many people are losing money everyday to hacks but the fear is over-regulation by people who do not yet understand the technology yet.
Blockchain to Revolutionize Healthcare: Two Use Cases We Need Now
Blockchain has a lot of uses cases beyond the financial sector that we are seeing through the use of many different cryptocurrencies. Another major sector that stands to benefit from blockchain technology in Healthcare.
Something that may be holding blockchain back from mass adoption is that people are failing to see past the fact that blockchain can be used for more than just speculative investments. One way in particular that it can help in Healthcare is evolving the way patient data is stored, used, and protected.
The main problem blockchain solves here is that with current systems sending and receiving this information can take days or weeks. That personal information is also susceptible to hacks. Putting it on the blockchain would make the transfer times almost instant and allow patients to have full ownership and final decision on what hospitals get their information.
There is also a lot of fake medicine being made in many countries but Africa is seeming to have a really hard time with it. The WHO estimates between 42 and 70% of medications from there are fake. Attaching blockchain to logistics would allow for the tracking from start to finish on the transporting process to ensure nothing has been tampered with. These are just a few ways that blockchain can be used outside of cryptocurrencies.
Back in August, we saw a real pullback in the NFT market immediately after reaching its all-time high in terms of daily volume. Even over the months leading into December, we saw the total volume drop month over month.
December closed as the first month with an increase in volume from the month before and even almost reached October’s numbers. This could be a good sign for the growth of the NFT market as a whole. Just the other day as well, the search term “NFT” surpassed “Cryptocurrency” for the first time ever.
One reason we may be seeing increased volume in NFTs and a simultaneous decrease in regular crypto volume is that it is more tangible to certain investors. They have a better understanding of what the NFT is and does as opposed to the highly complicated and computer technical tokens that are used to power ecosystems like Ethereum.