TDLR
•Landon Cassill will be the first NASCAR driver to receive his entire paycheck in cryptocurrency
•in a new sponsorship deal with cryptocurrency brokerage platform Voyager Digital Ltd
•The NASCAR event is also an example of how cryptocurrencies are gaining increasing relevance
Good day fellas! Not active on reddit much but I've been in this space since '17. I've been involved with AI mostly but the more I read about crypto, the more I realized how big of an opportunity this is. It's like the early internet - only better, fairer, financier and softwarier.
This year, I've made the commitment to make a career out of crypto. If you're in the same boat as me, you'll notice a distinct lack of community in our country. That's why I've started a meetup group (yes, one more darned group). I'm looking to build a quality community and get like minded people like us connected.
If that sounds like you, and you see beyond the hype and the trading and the moons... do check out the group. We're discussing Ethereum this week (a bit beginner side). And also the latest news about Bitcoin adoption in El-Salvador and what that means for Crypto.
Would love to see you there. Let's make things happen!
On June 9, El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender after it’s Legislative Assemblyvoted to embrace the cryptocurrency. It is undeniable that, in doing so, the government of El Salvador has taken a dramatic step toward bringing decentralized finance closer to the public.
DeFi, or decentralized finance, refers to financial products running on the public blockchain. It is mainly contrasted against traditional financial products in that DeFi products lack a central point of authority mediating their transactions, instead relying on the innovative structure of the blockchain to distribute information across entire networks. Its key characteristics are openness, transparency, and immutability. More and more DeFi related projects are emerging with the developments in DeFi technology; one such example is liquidity mining .
DeFi liquidity mining refers to the practice of earning profit by providing liquidity for DeFi products. With the rapid increase in the number of cryptocurrencies entering the market, the demand for money transactions is increasing. Therefore, a decentralized fund pool to exchange tokens at any time is particularly important. Liquidity mining solves this problem. In the liquidity mining, the liquidity provider (LP) puts various token assets into the pool to share in transaction fees and receive a platform token reward. Traders exchange tokens in the pool while paying transaction fees and gas fees. The more funds in the pool, the larger the pool and the stronger the liquidity, and the better it can cope with a larger number of token exchange events.
Today, with the rapid growth of data and the serious undervaluation of data value, DeFi has unsurprisingly been implemented into data value release. As one of the most important assets today, data value release is an urgent problem to be solved. In the process of studying blockchain and data encryption computation, GDF has advanced the method of combining data and liquidity mining to release the value of data.
In GDF's blockchain platform GoodData, data owners, data users and ordinary DeFi enthusiasts all can benefit from the released value of data.
Data owners can publish data as data tokens through the GoodData blockchain platform. These tokens are then made available to query customers who wish to access the data for information or research purposes. After the platform automatically creates the liquidity pool, the price rise or transaction of data tokens can bring benefits to data owners. Furthermore,in order to avoid data leakage, encryption algorithms are used to protect the original data throughout the transaction. After obtaining the token, the data user has the right to compute data, but not have the ownership of original data. This is essential for protecting private information associated with the data set that should (or must) not be shared. This ensures the data can continuously release value securely, so as to encourage more people to share data.
Data users can obtain the right to use the data by purchasing or exchanging the data token, where machine learning training or multi-party computation can be carried out in the local environment of the data owner. Data users can also obtain GooD token at the same time of purchasing data token to participate in higher value data.
Even investors without data demand can buy valuable data tokens as a liquidity provider (LP) to earn investment revenue. Because the GooD obtained by participating in the liquidity mining can be used to participate in the data token, it also affects the price of the data token. As prices directly affect the mining profit, liquidity providers may prefer to deposit more valuable data tokens, which also provide potential price discovery for data tokens.
As technology develops, decentralized finance will inevitably become more mature.. In the future, the DeFi products will be more abundant, and will likely offer products that were not possible in traditional finance. This post has explored the potential value of data, under DeFi; however, much like the unreleased value of data, there will be more and more previously intangible assets made possible by the development of DeFi and its various applications.
Join us on:
Website： https://goodata.org/
Medium：https://medium.com/gooddatafound
wechat: Good Data Foundation
Twitter：https://twitter.com/gooddatafound
Telegram ：t.me/gooddatafound
Discord：https://discord.gg/v9WayuMpHs
Reddit：https://www.reddit.com/r/gooddata/
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MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor said the problem isn't bitcoiners but those negative headlines about mining.
“We are not trying to fix bitcoin.”
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor‘s remark Wednesday at a meeting of the new Bitcoin Mining Council seemed to encapsulate the gist of what the event, on Twitter Spaces and attended by more than 7,000 listeners, was trying to accomplish.
There were few concrete next steps discussed this time. Instead, the meeting became another way for bitcoin industry representatives to air their grievances about those claims that bitcoin mining is bad for the environment.
For instance, here’s what Perianne Boring, president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, had to say:
Saylor said the Bitcoin Mining Council’s responsibility is to provide a “sharing, cooperative and informative space [from which] people can learn the benefits of bitcoin mining.”
He said not having that “informative space” – or reading the headlines – has prompted politicians to move against the cryptocurrency.
“Bitcoin has external threats,” Saylor said. “The threat is not bitcoiners talking to each other. The threat is people that don’t understand bitcoin.”
INTRO
The upcoming merger of Support.com and Greenidge in the 3rd quarter must, according to all rules of the market, lead to a massive price increase.
In this DD I will show you why this is the case, based on the company data, the annual reports and the balance sheets of the companies. All my theses I will provide with the original sources of the companies, so that all data can be checked/confirmed by yourself.
I will try to keep it short, but still want to give you a good overall view.
COMPANY PROFILES
This merger involves the two companies Support.com and Greenidge. Below is a brief overview.
Support.com, as the name suggests, provides technical and customer support services. They are currently expanding into on-demand fintech and cryptocurrency support to meet the growing demand in the segment.
Fittingly, they have agreed to merge with Greenigde. This merger is not a rumor or in talks, but is already final and will be executed in Q3. [1]
Greenidge is a bitcoin miner that operates its own green power plant in Upstate New York. This is a special feature, because green energy is becoming more and more important in the crypto sector and mining, the process of "creating" bitcoin, is based on computationally intensive processes that require a lot of energy. Through their own green gas power plant, they can operate very profitably, and are far ahead of the competition.
Through the merger, Greenidge will be publicly tradable via Support.com.
WHY SHOULD THE SHARE PRICE RISE?
Currently the market cap of SPRT is about $100M USD, after the merger within the next months (no exact date yet, only Q3 is known [1]), the market cap will be about $1.6B, if we assume a price of $5 USD per share.
This is based on this formula:
5 USD (share price) \ 38M (outstanding shares) / 0.12388 (merge ratio) = ~1.6B (market cap after merger)*
Since the merger has been finally decided but not executed yet, the current ticker SPRT only considers support.com. Hence the current low market cap.
Therefore, for the time being, we only take a closer look at support's assets.
SUPPORT AS A SOLID BASE
Support.com currently holds 40M USD net cash. Net cash is cash that sits in the company after all deductions. After taxes, expenses and liabilities. Pure earned assets.
In addition, there are of course other assets such as real estate, hardware and the like that currently come to a value of 39M USD.
| NET CASH | TOTAL ASSETS | TOTAL VALUE |
|---|---|---|
| 40M USD | 39M USD | 79M USD |
So if you were to liquidate the company now, you could realize cash withdrawals and realizations of 79M USD [2]. That doesn't take into account customer data, business relationships, future profits, existing contracts, etc. pp. All these things that actually contribute to the value of a company.
If you think I have a point here, just wait and see. Because the real kicker is what Greenidge brings to the table.
GREENIDGE AS A MULTIPLIER
Greenidge can't be traded publicly yet (hence the merger) and is therefore still grossly undervalued compared to its direct competitors (e.g. RIOT). The nice thing is, you can compare these values very accurate because mining is really only about the hashrate. With this you can see how profitable a miner is running and where its market value is.
The hashrate of RIOT (the direct competitor) is 1.1 EH/s with 43MW and the expected output of SPRT should be 41MW and at the end of the year 45MW.
Why should be and not is? There was a ban in New York State on power plants being used for bitcoin mining. This ban has now been lifted and 100% of the juice can go to mining. [3]
That means Greenidge's performance is really ramping up lately. I did a detailed comparison of Greenidge with its two main competitors MARA and RIOT and researched and compared all the data by hand. Please check out this thread for that https://www.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/comments/o0l0ra/i_compared_sprt_with_its_two_main_competitors/
Here is just the table that shows the core values in comparison
| STOCK | Marathon Digital Holding (MARA) | Riot Blockchain Inc. (RIOT) | Greenidge / Support (SPRT) |
|---|---|---|---|
| TRADING AT | ~$30 USD | ~$35 USD | ~$4 USD |
| MARKET CAP | $2.9B USD | $3.35B USD | $1.6B USD (combined) |
| HASH RATE | 1.46 EH/s | 1 EH/s | 1.1 EH/s [B] |
| MINING COST | $28 MWh | unknown [A] | $22 MWh |
| REVENUE 2020 | $4.4M USD | $3.9M USD | $12M [C] |
| MINTED BTC 2020 | 254 BTC [D] | 1,005 BTC | 1,186 BTC |
| SOURCE | https://ir.marathondh.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1240/marathon-reports-first-quarter-2021-results | https://www.riotblockchain.com/news-media/press-releases/detail/101/riot-blockchain-announces-financial-highlights-for-the | https://corporate.support.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Greenidge-SPRT-Merger-Release-FINAL.pdf |
[A] no data found for that but they relocated to Massena, New York to reduce costs. The good news - Greenridges Power Plant is already located in NY.
[B] will increase to 2.6 EH/s in 2022 (expansion is already fully funded)
[C] this is only Greenidge though. Combined with support.com 2020 revenue of $44M it totals to $56M. The net cash of both companies combined is $70M USD. Net cash!!
[D] but they bought 4,812.66 BTC end of 2020 for a total of $150M USD. So they are holding a lot of BTC but did not mined it.
As I said, please check out the link to my detailed comparison (https://www.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/comments/o0l0ra/i_compared_sprt_with_its_two_main_competitors/) but from this data alone you can see that Greenidge is actually superior to its competitors in every aspect, mines more efficiently, generates more bitcoins and even makes more profit, but still only reaches half of the market cap.
If we now take into account the current valuation of Support plus the value Greenidge brings to the table, I think the market cap would have to at least double to be valued similarly to its direct competitors. Accordingly, the share price would have to rise from 5 USD to 10 USD.
with a similar market cap close to the competition, the price rises to at least 10 USD
POTENTIAL
I don't want to scare you off by saying that this price is even too low but my honest personal opinion is that this is even too conservatively calculated.
Greenidge will be the first US listed miner with its own 100% ecological green-energy power plant [4]. Green energy is an ever-burgeoning topic in the crypto discussion and is becoming more and more important. Elon Musk [5] brought the topic up again a few days ago when he announced that Tesla will accept BTC again if 50% of the miners are green. Greenidge is completely CO2 neutral [6].
Both companies are still growing (Greenidge more than Support) and have a nice roadmap with many interesting points. However, in this analysis, I have not considered the future prospects. If you take into account that Greenidge is still expanding its power plant (so it can further extend its lead in energy costs and capacity) and plans to expand its hashrate to 2.6 EH/s by 2022, you can see where the journey is going.
the roadmap shows there is great ambition
If one then also assumes that Bitcoin prices will tend to rise, then of course the revenue will rise even further.
As I said, it's important to me that you understand that all of these future projections are not included in the above calculation at all. There we are talking about the financial statements and balance sheets of the companies. All data is based on the real data and is not fantasy dollars, rumors or possible outlooks but only facts.
CONCLUSION
I am bullish. That's for sure. But I'm not connected to the companies or anything. I didn't know either company before doing my research. I formed my opinion independently and spent days going through press releases, financial statements and balance sheets to research all the data directly at the source.
I have been invested for a few days, but I am not a financial expert. I share with you my findings because I am personally convinced of them. I invite you to discuss and I have linked you some relevant sources to verify what I wrote and to make your own decisions.
In my opinion, the share price has to go up. All the facts are in favor of it. Why it has not exploded yet has two reasons in my opinion.
See this screenshots with filters visible to rebuild the view on Yahoo for yourself.
Look at how much the short float increased in the last weeks. This stock is artificially held down. Maybe until the merger took place, I don't know yet but I am already investigating it and start to see a pattern. Again, you can look at the short float increase at yahoo or any other tool.
pay special attention to the red line that is showing the rising short % of float
Within the next days I will make a dedicated post about the short situation of this stock but again, that is not what this is about. In this DD I only focused on hard facts and validation.
I look forward to discuss with you!
SOURCES
[1] Merger Agreement https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1104855/000119312521091327/d131914d425.htm
[2] Net Cash / Assets Support https://www.investing.com/equities/support.com-financial-summary
[3] Crypto Mining Bill NY https://www.coindesk.com/new-york-crypto-mining-bill-dies-in-assembly-after-passing-state-senate
[4] official merger announcement https://corporate.support.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Greenidge-SPRT-Merger-Announcement-032221-FINAL.pdf
[5] Elon Musk Green-Energy https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-bitcoin-tesla-payment-green-energy-environment-2021-6
[6] Greenidge carbon neutral https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greenidge-generation-bitcoin-mining-operation-to-be-carbon-neutral-in-2021-and-beyond-301291782.html
Bitcoin is under pressure as Fed taper concerns linger, although some expect crypto to remain resilient.
Bitcoin traded lower as investors unpacked Wednesday’s announcement from the U.S. Federal Reserve that it could raise interest rates by late 2023. Assets deemed to be risky like stocks and crypto also appear to be weighed down by lingering concerns that the Fed may wind down its bond-buying program sooner than expected.
Some analysts, however, expect bitcoin to remain resilient if inflation continues to rise, which could lead to outperformance versus traditional markets.
In a newsletter published on Wednesday, EQUOS, a digital asset financial services company, described the initial down move across risk assets as a “knee-jerk reaction.”
“Bitcoin and stocks will likely correlate through the turbulence, before reality hits: Inflation is likely to see bitcoin outperform stocks,” EQUOS wrote.
Bitcoin (BTC) $37546.2 -2.45%
Ether (ETH) $2326.63, -3.75%
S&P 500: 4221.86, -0.04 %
Gold $1772.94, -2.19%
10-year Treasury yield closed at 1.52%
“Past bitcoin bull market cycles have tended to occur alongside year-over-year increases in the core CPI (consumer price index)…. and bear market cycles have come as CPI has rolled over,” David Grider, head of digital assets research at research firm Fundstrat, wrote in a newsletter published on Wednesday.
Bitcoin is widely considered an inflation hedge, but it may just be that the cryptocurrency benefits from loose monetary policy that has occurred around periods of high inflation, according to Grider.
In the wake of the crash, billionaire Mark Cuban is now calling for regulation of stablecoins.
A near-total collapse in the price of a share token of a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol was “the world’s first large-scale crypto bank run,” the people behind Iron Finance said in a blog post providing a postmortem. The run brought the worth of the protocol down from $2 billion to near zero on Wednesday.
A “negative feedback loop” was created when a series of large holders tried to redeem their IRON tokens and sell their iron titanium (TITAN), the token of the Iron Protocol, the post said. That, in turn, caused more TITAN holders to run for the virtual hills, leading to what the team labeled “a classic bank run.”
“What we just experienced is the worst thing that could happen to the protocol, a historical bank run in the modern high-tech crypto space,” the post said.
The run was enabled by the fact that Iron Finance is only partly collateralized. It had enough for normal day-to-day operations, but just like in the bank run depicted in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” if everyone wants their money all at once, the bank can’t pay up. Unfortunately for Iron Finance, there was no George Bailey around on Wednesday.
“When people panic and run over to the bank to withdraw their money in a short period, the bank may and will collapse,” the post said.
The so-called run garnered even more attention than it would have because of billionaire investor Mark Cuban’s use of Iron Protocol. In the wake of the crash, Cuban is now calling on regulators to determine what constitutes a “stablecoin.”
While declining to say how much he had lost, Cuban said that “it was enough that I wasn’t happy about it.”
Redemptions in Iron Finance, which were disabled automatically due to the drop in TITAN’s price, were set to resume at 17:00 UTC (1 p.m. ET on Thursday), the team said. However, at press time, the function wasn’t working.
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor said the problem isn’t bitcoiners but those negative headlines about mining.
“We are not trying to fix bitcoin.”
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor’s remark Wednesday at a meeting of the new Bitcoin Mining Council seemed to encapsulate the gist of what the event, on Twitter Spaces and attended by more than 7,000 listeners, was trying to accomplish.
There were few concrete next steps discussed this time. Instead, the meeting became another way for bitcoin industry representatives to air their grievances about those claims that bitcoin mining is bad for the environment.
The fake wallets are an escalation in phishing attempts following a 2020 data breach that exposed 272,000 customer addresses.
The 2020 data breach of the hardware wallet company Ledger has taken yet another turn.
Scammers are sending fake hardware wallets to people whose data was gathered via a third-party data breach. These fake wallets contain hardware designed to steal the user’s crypto.
The scam is an ambitious one. First appearing in May, the scammers went to the extent of soldering additional hardware to the housing of a Ledger Nano wallet and packaging it in a Ledger box. The most recent iteration adds the additional facade of a sealed bag with Ledger’s logo on it, and even shrink-wrapping the box itself, to appear as if it was never opened.
In a Ledger blog post Thursday explaining the scam, the company said the box includes a fake letter explaining the “need to replace your existing hardware wallet to secure your funds. This is a scam. The Ledger Nano is fake.”
The fintech lead at U.K.’s central bank urged eco-conscious citizens not to “throw the blockchain baby out with the bitcoin bathwater.”
According to the Bank of England’s fintech director, the technology behind central bank digital currencies (CBDC) could be “tens of thousands of times more efficient per transaction” than bitcoin (BTC, -3.49%).
During his speech at the Future of FinTech Conference on Thursday, Tom Mutton gave attendees an overview of the Bank of England’s current standing on CBDCs. Much of Mutton’s speech reiterated the bank’s noncommittal interest in the development of a CBDC and its purported commitment to keeping cash “available for as long as [people] wish to use it.” However, he also addressed feedback from a 2020 survey on CBDCs done by the bank.
Mutton provided the Bank of England’s counterpoints to concerns raised in the survey, including the need to preserve privacy, increase public trust and ensure equitable access to the technology.
Founded in July 2018, ZBG is a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange, a global platform of ZB.COM.
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Currently, ZBG supports 11 languages, with an average daily activity of more than 160,000, providing over 3 million users around the world with trustworthy cryptocurrency trading, contract trading and other crypto asset investment services.
In the future, ZBG will continue to expand its global market and provide stable, safe and fast blockchain project listing, diversified crypto assets and blockchain derivatives investment services to more blockchain enthusiasts around the world.
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ZBG Official Bangladesh (Telegram): https://t.me/zbgbangladesh
Twitter：https://twitter.com/ZBG_Exchange
ZBG, World’s top 10 crypto currency exchange.
Link to future value!
ZBG Team
June 18, 2021
