Bloomberg Crypto

This special bonus episode features Bloomberg QuickTake’s Katie Griefeld and Tim Stenovec. The pair have created a new video series called Crypto IRL. It takes us behind the scenes of this current crypto winter, and features interesting perspectives from special guests. You can catch the new series on a range of platforms including Bloomberg TV and YouTube.

For more information, go to Bloomberg.com/QT

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With apologies to TS Eliot - in finance, September is commonly held to be the cruelest month of the trading calendar. This extends to the crypto markets, too: Almost every year since 2013, Bitcoin prices struggle come September. And market conditions have been especially unforgiving this year. So what’s the outlook for crypto asset prices as we leave September behind?

Joining this episode from Sydney is Jamie Coutts, crypto market analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence.

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On Tuesday September 27th, Bloomberg reporters Allyson Versprille and David Pan participated in a Twitter Spaces with Costa Samaras. Samaras is the White House’s chief advisor for energy policy in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

They spoke about the office’s crypto climate report and what’s next for US efforts. This episode features highlights from that conversation.

Read more here

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If you’ve ever found yourself on Crypto Twitter, you’ll be familiar with the hype machine that keeps the industry’s thousands of projects going. Rallying cries of “WAGMI” — an acronym for We Are All Going To Make It — and “To the Moon!” abound, found in tweets from accounts with colorful, graphic profile pictures and usually a hashtag or two.

But there are always two sides to a coin, and if you’ve come across a Twitter display name featuring the Tulip emoji, you might find a crypto skeptic instead. A reference to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1600s, these figures – technologists, academics and writers among them – are working to counteract crypto’s steady rise to the top with a dose of reality.

Stephen Diehl is a software engineer by trade, a leading crypto skeptic and now co-founder of the recently established Center for Emerging Technology Policy. He joins this episode to break down crypto’s promises of a brighter tomorrow, and when he thinks it might actually be closer to myth.

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You may have heard of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and you may have heard of its CEO and Founder, Sam Bankman-Fried. But have you heard of Alameda Research? 

It’s not a Silicon Valley robotics lab but it is one of the largest and most influential cryptocurrency trading firms in the world. Founded by Sam Bankman-Fried and operating with a modest team of 30 employees, Alameda pocketed over $1 billion dollars in profit last year. The firm and its employees have, for the most part, preferred not to draw too much attention. In recent months though, it’s gotten harder for Alameda to fly under the radar, as the collapse of crypto has revealed a tangle of connections between Alameda, FTX and the broader virtual currency markets.  

But as Alameda’s influence spreads and connections emerge, so have concerns over potential conflicts of interests. 

Bloomberg reporter Hannah Miller joins guest host and Bloomberg crypto senior editor Anna Irrera in this episode to untangle these connections.

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For investors trying to get exposure to crypto, there are many different options available these days. Products like crypto ETFs, or exchange traded funds, are one of the most popular alternatives to owning tokens directly. 

What are crypto ETFs and how do they work? And what does it mean that many of the products pitched as ways to diversify your crypto portfolio are actually pretty similar to each other? Katie Greifeld joins this episode to tackle these questions.

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This September marks the one-year anniversary of China declaring that crypto transactions were effectively illegal. The decision wasn't entirely unexpected: China has been trying to crack down on crypto in one form or another since at least 2013. 

The 2021 declaration prompted some pretty swift and significant changes, including the uprooting of a Chinese Bitcoin mining community.  

This episode features Bloomberg reporters Yueqi Yang and David Pan, as well as Winston Ma, a Managing Partner & Co-Founder at CloudTree Ventures, who’s also an NYU Adjunct Professor in the global digital economy.

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So, ‘The Merge’ happened. After years of anticipation, multiple false starts and delays, the biggest ever software upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain is complete. 
And now the question is: what’s next?  What are the other major milestones for the future of Ethereum’s ecosystem and the Ether token itself?

In this episode, you’ll hear from Bloomberg reporter Olga Kharif and from Dave Liedtka, senior editor for crypto.

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Losses from this year's crypto winter have affected the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, from hedge funds, to lenders, to countless individual retail investors. By most calculations, $2 trillion worth of value has been wiped out. 

Before the big chill, the estimated total market value of crypto assets worldwide stood around $3 trillion in November 2021. But how is market value calculated? And how representative is it of crypto’s actual economic value? Did the digital asset boom ever even happen? Is there an element of groupthink when it comes to crypto’s overall valuation? Do we need to rethink market value?

Bloomberg reporter Vildana Hajric joins this episode to weigh in on this increasingly disputed metric.

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Miners are on the move again, forever chasing that combination of abundant electricity for relatively low prices. This time, they’re heading north of the Arctic Circle. Sweden and Norway are home to some of the most abundant energy sources in the world: geothermal, wind, and hydro electricity. 

These countries have increasingly become attractive to Bitcoin miners. But the combination of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with rising inflation and environmental factors like drought, are curbing the availability of cheap electricity in these Nordic regions. Miners in some of these areas could even be regulated out of the market. 

Bloomberg Editor Lars Paulsson joins this episode to discuss what’s happening in the region.

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