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The Bank of England should steal a march on the rest of the world and develop a crypto-currency, a fintech entrepreneur has urged.

Ron Kalifa, former boss of payment processing company Worldpay, urged governors at the Bank to embrace the currencies rather than dismiss them as a dangerous fad. He said: 'Britain should get ahead on this. Why leave it to China?'

In a report on how to improve the UK's burgeoning fintech sector, he added: 'Individuals would be able to access central bank money.

The world's first bitcoin exchange traded fund is off to a hot start. The Purpose Investments bitcoin ETF now has more than $590 million in assets under management after launching just one week ago.

The ETF was the first physically settled Bitcoin ETF to win approval and began trading in Canada on Thursday. It now gives investors a more direct way to invest in bitcoin relative to other closed-end funds like the popular Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and a less direct way than outright owning bitcoin through an individual wallet.

Robinhood has seen six million new cryptocurrency traders on its platform in the first two months of 2021.

"That's more than the number of new crypto traders at Robinhood during the entirety of 2020," Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev tweeted Thursday.

In 2020, the number of users trading through Robinhood Crypto peaked at 401,000 for a single month, with a monthly average of about 200,000 customers trading on Robinhood Crypto for the first time.

American technology major Nvidia is all set to roll-out GeForce RTX 3060, the company's latest and most powerful Graphics Processing Unit later this month.

This is designed primarily for delivering the best user experience for gaming and professional work, but the GPU can also be used for other power-intense tasks including gene sequencing, weather simulations, and cryptocurrency mining. 

Bitcoin’s price hit yet another ATH, above $56421 based on data from coinmarketcap.com. The market capitalization of the asset is well above $1 Trillion and the 24-hour trade volume on exchanges is up 26.64 percent. While on-chain analysis of Bitcoin points towards a bearish sentiment, Panteral Capital has a bullish projection and perspective on the current price rally. Pantera Capital’s Bitcoin fund is the best-performing one by far, followed closely by Grayscale, and the performance of their Bitcoin fund signals that Bitcoin’s price is 3 weeks ahead of their projected target for February 2021.

Tanzeel AkhtarSat, February 20, 2021, 2:20 PM·1 min read

The first publicly traded bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in North America has collected $421.8 million in assets under management (AUM) in two days.

• Purpose Investment’s bitcoin ETF officially started trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) under the ticker “BTCC” on Thursday.
• The fund has seen huge interest, trading well over $100 million shares on its first day, and by the end of Friday it had collected $421.8 million AUM.

The proliferation of cryptocurrencies in the more mainstream business infrastructure is often misunderstood by the public yet is also larger than most perceive. According to a report by Allied Market Research, in a filing published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the retailing giant Walmart applied for a patent to use a digital coin tied to a traditional fiat currency, which could allow for cheaper and faster transactions as well as loyalty features. In 2018, Intel won a patent for "Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator with Optimized Message Digest and Message Scheduler Datapath". In the filing, Intel outlined a method by which it could augment the existing bitcoin mining process, consuming less electricity, thereby, spending less money in the process. 

The board of Al-Moammar Information Systems Co. (MIS) is to become a founding shareholder with a consortium of commercial entities to establish a digital bank in Saudi Arabia in compliance with Islamic law, according to Al Arabiya.

The company would contribute SR25 million ($6.66 million) to the bank’s capital, according to its statement on Tadawul, and its establishment would be subject to the approval of authorities.

The seemingly unstoppable rise of Bitcoin continued Tuesday with the cost of a single unit of the digital currency rising above $50,000 for the first time.

The same Bitcoin just one year ago would have cost you $10,000. The price is up almost 200% in the last three months alone.

Bitcoin is rallying as more companies signal the volatile digital currency could eventually gain widespread acceptance as a means of payment. The vast majority of those who have acquired Bitcoin have treated it as a commodity, like gold, with few places accepting it in exchange for goods or services.

Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin. While interest in the latter is soaring, Ethereum is growing in popularity as well.

Ethereum is an open-source, blockchain-based distributed computing platform that can support smart contract functionality. That’s a complicated way of saying that Ethereum not only makes a cryptocurrency called ether possible, but it can also support the launch of new cryptocurrencies and make it possible to crowdsource funding for new projects.