Cryptocurrency Adoption in Finance, Pop Culture, Art, and Music

Today’s episode will cover events happening the week ending December 11th, 2020. This week we’ll be discussing a few of the big adoption stories of the week. More information about all of the stories discussed today can be found on Talk.Bitcoin.Tax Full Show Notes: (00:23) It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to frequent listeners that large mainstream corporations and businesses are rapidly adopting cryptocurrency, generally by investing into BTC. There are a couple of whales this week, one who is no stranger to Bitcoin and one who has been around for ages, but is just now getting into the world of crypto. The new whale this week is MassMutual, an insurance company that was founded in 1851 and currently serves five million clients. Not only did they invest $100 million into Bitcoin, they also “acquired a $5 million minority equity stake in NYDIG, a subsidiary of Stone Ridge that provides cryptocurrency services to institutions”, according to Bloomberg. The familiar whale this week is MicroStrategy, who has purchased hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of BTC in the past 6 months or so. According to Cointelegraph, “The company currently sits on 40,824 BTC representing over $734 million, which represents a gain of nearly $260 million from the basis acquisition price.”  Earlier in the week, they announced that they were working to raise an additional $537 million dollars to invest in Bitcoin…but today they issued a press release stating that they have surpassed that goal by successfully raising $650 million – which is over 36,000 BTC. This means MicroStrategy will nearly double their BTC coffers, and secures their place as the number 1 publicly traded company investing in Bitcoin, according to the list at Bitcoin Treasuries.  While exciting for advocates of BTC adoption, it’s been reported that traditional financial analysts are worried that the company is investing too much in BTC. (02:01) Adoption isn’t only infiltrating the financial world this week. In pop culture, a movie about The Silk Road, a notorious marketplace for buying and selling illicit materials, is set to release this coming February. This mainstream recognition could be good or bad for cryptocurrency adoption. If the movie is successful, it will undoubtedly increase mainstream exposure to the world of cryptocurrency. However, illicit activities, which essentially defined The Silk Road, are often conflated with cryptocurrency in general, since purchased on The Silk Road were made with cryptocurrency. (02:33) In music, the popular music and podcast streaming app Spotify may be the next big company to embrace crypto, at least according to a recent job listing. According to FXstreet, “A job offer posted by Spotify recently on Lever, an end-to-end talent acquisition platform, seems to indicate that the giant audio streaming service is looking at potentially enabling cryptocurrency payments.” (03:06) Finally, in the art world, Beeple, a popular contemporary online graphic designer, has gone all in on NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. Beeple, the alias of Mike Winkelmann, is known for his long running daily abstract digital art releases. Beeple first ventured into NFTs by offering his first collection of unique art-based NFTs during the presidential election. Today, and throughout the weekend, Beeple is dropping his second collection, which will include a number of his daily art works, auctioned off in the form of NFTs. Of course, anyone can view his art for free, but as his FAQ states “This for people who are interested in COLLECTING artwork, which is a very different experience. I want people to feel like they can truly own, collect, and display this artwork in a way that feels more exciting and engaging than just viewing a picture on Instagram.” Some of the NFTs also include a physical token that will be shipped to the winning bidder. If you haven’t heard of Beeple, I would definitely suggest checking his unique art-style out. Check ou