Zoom out and welcome the Fire Horse

Recent weeks have all looked alike for financial markets: metals, tech stocks, and crypto - everything has gone down, but again, it is Bitcoin that is being declared dead by the experts. We promise we won't repeat last week's edito - you know the drill, we think doomers are wrong.

What's different from last week is that we're not alone: this week, Goldman Sachs disclosed in its filing a $2.36 billion exposure to crypto, including over $1 billion in Bitcoin through ETFs. Long story short, the transfer of coins is happening and Wall Street is accumulating.

CoinShares attended CoinDesk's Consensus event in Hong Kong, and in a nutshell, no one looks shaken by the recent price action. On the contrary, the general consensus (no pun intended) is quite clear: finance is moving on chain, on a global scale, and the BlackRock news related to the listing of its tokenised money market fund BUIDL on the decentralised exchange Uniswap had not even yet come out.

This week, we've recorded many soon-to-be-published interviews with actors who are contributing to this movement, aiming to reduce settlement times, frictions, and software silos to improve the efficiency of value exchange. In the meantime, Hong Kong is preparing for the Chinese New Year, which will celebrate the Fire Horse: a creature that, we learned, reflects fresh opportunities and significant change. We'll take that as confirmation that the big picture is bright, even if clouds currently persist above our heads.