Phil and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions, a leading provider of unsecured business lines of credit, talked about the need for having passive income to ensure financial freedom for business owners. The importance of income diversification in this rapidly changing world cannot be overemphasized. And passive income can be a great way for business owners to generate extra cash flow without having to sacrifice a lot of time they would normally spend on their business.

With Phil as the featured guest, the conversation naturally turned to the opportunities for business owners to leverage cryptocurrency to create passive income, like earning interest on the crypto they already have, or building a well-balanced diversified crypto portfolio with GCISL’s range of Invest products.

You can listen to the full episode or read summary on the official webpage of The Entrepreneur MBA Podcast: Passive Income and Financial Freedom For Business Owners.

their website.

Capital Safe. You must be satisfied that this crypto offering is suitable for you in light of your financial circumstances and attitude towards risk. The price or value of cryptocurrencies can rapidly increase or decrease at any time. The risk of loss in holding cryptocurrencies can be substantial. Funds received by us in relation to cryptocurrency transactions are not safeguarded (under the UK Electronic Money Regulations 2011) or covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. References to GCISL herein mean to Global Crypto Investment Solutions Limited (GCISL) Ltd. Use of GCISL’s products and services is subject to our Terms of Use, which can be found at aqru.io.

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GCISL Ten, the newest product in our INVEST range, is a weighted basket of the top ten cryptocurrencies, designed to give you instant diversification in your cryptocurrency portfolio and enable you to benefit from the movement of the market as a whole, while helping manage the risks associated with investing in single coins. The cryptocurrency basket is rebalanced weekly to ensure it contains the highest-cap coins in the market, weighted according to their market capitalisation.

Investing in cryptocurrencies can offer opportunities for retail and institutional investors to generate significant returns. With more than 12,000 coins available in the market, however, it can be difficult to review how each token works and to build your portfolio based on this data. As a result, many retail investors have chosen to simply invest in a few, well-known individual coins which can not only lower their return opportunities, but it can also increase the risks associated with sudden price changes. Through GCISL Ten our customers can easily access a diverse portfolio of cryptocurrencies, ranging from market titans Bitcoin and Ether, through to smaller coins with a market cap that places them among the top ten cryptocurrencies. GCISL Ten does not include stablecoins, security tokens, and tokens constituting specified investments.

As well as helping investors diversify their cryptocurrency portfolio, we designed GCISL Ten to ensure that customers can easily manage their crypto assets, without having to worry about management fees eating away their revenues. All we charge is a fee of 0.35% when depositing or withdrawing funds into GCISL Ten, with no annual management fees or exchange fees when the basket is rebalanced. GCISL Ten doesn’t have any lock-in periods, so you can withdraw your crypto at any time.

GCISL Ten is part of our efforts to enable investors to take advantage of all the opportunities available in DeFi. With this in mind, we designed GCISL Ten to complement GCISL Trend, our high-return strategy that uses a sophisticated algorithm to help you to capture market upside,  limit market downside,  and access the competitive returns available in the crypto market. While the cryptocurrencies used by both GCISL Ten and GCISL Trend are the same, each cryptocurrency basket is balanced differently to respond differently to movements in the market. Together, they provide customers with an impressive layer of diversification to their portfolios.

As our CEO, Eric Collins, says: “The crypto market offers excellent opportunities, but too often retail investors rely on just one or two coins, potentially missing out on the general movement of the market. GCISL Ten provides instant diversification, and the weekly rebalancing of the crypto basket allows investors to continually access the most exciting coins in the market. It shows our commitment to offering GCISL customers the very best of DeFi as we continue to strengthen our already impressive product offering.”

Every week we will post an update of how the basket is rebalanced into our WhatsApp and Telegram accounts, so make sure you’re following us to keep up to date with GCISL Ten’s composition and performance.

* Excluding stablecoins, security tokens and tokens constituting specified investments.

** Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Capital Safe. You must be satisfied that this crypto offering is suitable for you in light of your financial circumstances and attitude towards risk. The price or value of cryptocurrencies can rapidly increase or decrease at any time. The risk of loss in holding cryptocurrencies can be substantial. Funds received by us in relation to cryptocurrency transactions are not safeguarded (under the UK Electronic Money Regulations 2011) or covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. References to GCISL herein mean to Global Crypto Investment Solutions Limited (GCISL) Ltd. Use of GCISL’s products and services is subject to our Terms of Use, which can be found at aqru.io.

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We’ve always been super proud of the cutting-edge technology that’s the foundation of everything we bring to life. Our Yield-as-a-Service API is a living-and-breathing example of how we build our technology to be scalable beyond its original scope, and we’re thrilled to have the chance to launch it with our inaugural YaaS partner – Quickbit.

Quickbit is Sweden’s pre-eminent crypto company, founded in 2016. Much like ourselves, they set out with a belief that the financial services of the future will be based on blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, and with a goal to make them available to more people with an easy-to-use, safe and prudent platform. Sound familiar? Well, it sounded like a natural partnership for us!

By integrating our Yield-as-a-Service API, Quickbit is now able to give their customers access to GCISL’s Yield products, so that they can benefit from our market-leading returns across DeFi, the way our own customers do – simply, safely and securely.

Digby Try, GCISL Co-founder, says “The partnership with Quickbit is a significant milestone for us in our mission to strip the complexity from the crypto universe. We set out to make building a balanced crypto portfolio a reality for all investors, and being able to benefit from curated high-yield opportunities is a major part of this. Our partnership with Quickbit enables us to share that vision with a wider audience and continue our path to achieving that goal.“

Hammad Abuseifan, CEO at Quickbit, says “Through this partnership with GCISL we are able to offer our Quickbit App users a DeFi solution that creates more value throughout our ecosystem of crypto products. Our mission to simplify the use of crypto and integrate it into the everyday lives of people by offering safe and easy-to-use products is well in line with the values of GCISL.”

If you are interested in our Yield-as-a-Service solution and how to integrate it on your platform, just send us a message at help@gcisl.com and our team will get back in touch.

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We are thrilled to introduce the first product of our newest INVEST range – GCISL Trend is now live.

With GCISL Trend you get easy access to a weighted basket of the top ten cryptocurrencies*, overseen by a sophisticated algorithm designed to outperform the market – and paying a 0% yield when not actively invested.

How GCISL Trend Works

1. With a few clicks, you’re authorising the GCISL algorithm to purchase a weighted basket of the top ten cryptocurrencies* when there is positive market momentum, and switch into less volatile USDC as positive momentum in the market decreases.
2. Each week, GCISL rebalances the portfolio between coin weightings and USDC based on our algorithm’s predictions. We take the guesswork out of investing by using a road-tested strategy that preempts market movement.
3. When the market is bearish, a higher percentage of USDC is allocated to the portfolio to protect your investment – and while your funds are in USDC they pay you a 0% yield, ensuring that you earn a return even when the market is falling. And when the market is bullish, the portfolio is re-allocated into cryptocurrencies so that you are able to benefit from potential gains as the market rises.

Every week we will post an update of the basket composition, and analysis around any changes, into our WhatsApp and Telegram accounts, so make sure you’re following us to keep up to date with GCISL Trend’s performance.

Sign up today and get trending

* Excluding stablecoins, security tokens and tokens constituting specified investments

** Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Capital Safe. You must be satisfied that this crypto offering is suitable for you in light of your financial circumstances and attitude towards risk. The price or value of cryptocurrencies can rapidly increase or decrease at any time. The risk of loss in holding cryptocurrencies can be substantial. Funds received by us in relation to cryptocurrency transactions are not safeguarded (under the UK Electronic Money Regulations 2011) or covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. References to GCISL herein mean to Global Crypto Investment Solutions Limited (GCISL) Ltd. Use of GCISL’s products and services is subject to our Terms of Use, which can be found at aqru.io. 

The post GCISL launches GCISL Trend appeared first on GCISL.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been working on creating a more well-rounded GCISL – a platform where you can build a balanced, diversified portfolio of crypto assets in the familiar GCISL way – simply, safely and securely. Going back to the start, our CEO Eric Collins talks about the evolution of GCISL and raises the curtains on what we have in store for you. So watch the video or read on…

“We created GCISL  because we were a group of crypto investors who were looking around the market trying to find somewhere we could earn yield on multiple digital assets easily, simply and safely. We really couldn’t find anywhere that we thought was good enough. So that’s where we came up with the idea for GCISL and that’s what we built.

It’s been a little over a year now since that first line of code was written and the market has changed phenomenally with the rise of NFTs and huge new Innovations coming into the space which has also given us a lot of opportunity. Our mission hasn’t changed – over that whole period we’ve remained and still want to be the safest place where you can easily invest your crypto, earn market leading yields and do it in a secure and safe way. With that in mind, I am really pleased and proud to be able to show you the next phase of what’s coming out at GCISL, which is the launch of a few new products. Up until this point you know GCISL as a yield venue – the best place to put your assets to earn interest on them. 

We are going to expand it now! 

We’ve always had the aim to create a place where customers are able to build diversified and balanced portfolios – not just earning yield but also earning growth, experiencing the growth of the digital assets that they have. So that’s what we’ve built and that’s what we’re going to be launching in the next couple of weeks. The first product that is going to be live is the GCISL Trend product which you’ll learn a lot more about in the coming weeks. But even more than one product, it’s the evolution of the platform, which is now not just yield..We now have three modules: One is Earning. One is our market leading Exchange and now the new one is Investment products – all coming together to create a way for you to get exposure to crypto assets in a simple way on a secure platform.

Yield still very much sits at the heart of what the GCISL does and that’s the one thing that stays the same – we will remain committed to providing a fully transparent, reliable and scalable platform that customers can build trust in. That’s going to be a commitment for as long as GCISL is around.

You’ll be hearing a lot about our new products over the coming weeks and we’d love to hear your feedback so please go to our social media accounts and send us messages. We do every effort to read and respond to every single one of them. We are delighted to have this product suite go out and can’t wait to hear from you.”

Sign-up today and get crypto-smart.

The post The best of crypto all in one single platform – GCISL Update appeared first on GCISL.

But what really happened? Should you panic? (spoiler: no!) Has this happened before, or anywhere else? What does it mean for the future of cryptocurrency?

But if you’re looking for reassurance upfront, here’s the hot take:

The Hot Take on the Crypto Crash

The 20%ish flash crash that happened in the Bitcoin price in May doesn’t even rate in the top 10 of Bitcoin crashes. It was primarily due to a spectacular technology car crash on a dubious unrelated coin that happened to end up dumping Bitcoin onto the market and depressing the price in a flash crash, before recovering. It doesn’t alter the underlying worth of general cryptocurrency, and the only long-lasting impact it might have is to change the ecosystem of stablecoins and speed up a new era of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

Most reporting used the flash crash to draw attention to the cryptocurrency bear market that has been going on for some time and imply that the two were related, in order to make a story. But that’s lazy reporting mostly driven by the need for clicks and the need for traditional finance to distract from their own woes by hitting on the crypto market.

Ironically, some of the problems here were that the crypto market and the regular stock market are linked like never before: so much of the investor panic was caused by traditional finance people selling their crypto because it was easier to sell than their more traditional assets (24/7 markets) and because they didn’t want their clients to know they had crypto.

Fun fact: did you know that traditional finance has more of a hand in crypto than ever before? Surprise!

Let’s get some perspective – a brief history of crashes

OK, so if you’re in the mood for a read, let’s have a calm look at what’s going on. Unemotional investing is the only kind you should be considering right now, so grab a tea and let us explain.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme” – Mark Twain

It’s important to separate the normal workings of a market over time (where prices can go up and down over long periods), and short-term crashes. The crashes are dramatic and spectacular, and the reporting is breathless!

But what’s important is their impact on the market’s long-term prospects. Was it a glitch, or the inevitable results of greed and stupidity? Have lessons been learnt?

Yes, cryptocurrencies are down since January

It’s certainly true most cryptocurrencies are down in price since the beginning of 2022.

Using data from CoinMarketCap.com, on 1st January 2022, Bitcoin closed at $47,686.81 and closed yesterday (22nd June 2022) at $19,987.03 – this is a drop of 53%. Ethereum closed at $3,769.70 on 1st January and at $1,051.42 yesterday – a drop of 72%.

Why? This is partly the natural movement of a healthy market, whether it’s a stock market, a commodities market, or a crypto market.

Markets of all kinds go up and down naturally. That is unless they’re artificially stabilised, like the US Federal Reserve did for the COVID stock market plunge of 2020, helping it to bounce back from massive losses to pre-pandemic highs.

Sometimes this natural movement is due to chronic factors, such as a recession. Sometimes it’s a reaction against over-enthusiasm.

Sometimes a market will move downwards very, very quickly. That’s a crash, obviously.

For each of these crashes, you can identify them as a combination of:

1. Something is wildly overvalued and warning signs were ignored
2. A new idea has gone horribly wrong
3. War and/or plague
4. A change in the rules

Stock Market Crash – 1929

For instance, the stock market crash of 1929 was driven by a new idea: buying on margin.

According to a recent article:

“In the 1920s, prior to the crash, a financial practice called buying “on margin” was invented. It allowed people to borrow money from their brokers to buy stocks. In many cases, people could leverage a large amount of borrowed money from a small initial investment. Investing this way may have contributed to the irrational exuberance of the Roaring Twenties.”

Black Monday – 1987

Black Monday was essentially another brilliant new idea gone horribly wrong: programmatic trading.

“It is thought that the cause of the crash was precipitated by computer program-driven trading models that followed a portfolio insurance strategy as well as investor panic.” (see the full Investopedia article here).

Dot Com Bubble – 2000

Now to 2000, and the Dot Com bubble, which was caused by deregulation and wildly overvalued tech stocks, and ignored warning signs. Remember, this is still “traditional” finance!

“Many investors foolishly ignored the fundamental rules of investing in the stock market, such as analyzing P/E ratios, studying market trends, and reviewing business plans. Instead, investors and entrepreneurs became preoccupied with new ideas that were not yet proven to have market potential. Furthermore, they ignored the blatant signs that the bubble was about to burst, as indicated by Larry Elliott, economics editor of “The Guardian.” (See original source).

Global Financial Crisis – 2008

The 2008 financial crisis was a particularly nasty combination of a “brilliant” new financial idea – derivatives based on mortgage debt, and a wild dose of overvaluing and dishonesty about the risks, as well as further deregulation.

“The financial crisis was caused by unscrupulous investment banking and insurance practices that passed all the risk to investors.”

And the taxpayer footed the bill.

Coronavirus Crash – 2020

In 2020, the COVID crash caused a big drop, causing massive Government intervention.

According to Forbes:

“Personal Capital’s Chief Investment Officer, Craig Birk says if we learned anything from 2020, we learned why it’s so important to have a long term plan and stay the course. There were a lot of stories this past year that were hard to understand. In reality, the market didn’t change much, and the average investor’s big picture goals didn’t change. But so many storylines around coronavirus and the election caused a distraction.”

Bitcoin has pretty much the same reasons for crashing, it just does it quicker

Here are the major stock market crashes:

And here are the major Bitcoin crashes (Bitcoin has the longest history, and is a good marker for the rest of the sector):

While traditional finance reserves its crashes for every 10 years or so (give or take), cryptocurrency has its crashes in internet time.

This is partly because the market is much smaller than the traditional finance market, and has a lot more exposed technology and new financial ideas.

Both of these factors make it much easier for the market to be affected by smaller players, such as hackers. Someone dumping 10 million dollars onto a market is a blip in traditional finance, but a whale in cryptocurrency, though this becomes less true as time goes on.

Bitcoin crashes – more perspective and… what happened after the headlines?

Investopedia’s article on Bitcoin is recommended reading!

Yahoo Finance has a good article about the 7 biggest Bitcoin crashes. May 2022 is not one of them!

“Keep in mind that many major corrections of 20%, 30%, 40% and more didn’t make the list.”

An extremely good article covering the early crashes of Bitcoin was written in April 2013 by Forbes. We shall be quoting from it: it covers some of the earlier crashes that the Yahoo article ignores, and provides a valuable time-capsule into how Bitcoin was being covered.

June 8-12, 2011 – Technology Glitch – Bitcoin crashes 99%… or does it?

An exchange hack at Mt Gox, by far the biggest Bitcoin exchange at the time. To Bitcoin, this was like The New York Stock Exchange getting hacked for trillions of dollars and confidence in Bitcoin cratered – even though it wasn’t Bitcoin that was the problem.

But what happened next?

Well, the price didn’t stay at $0.01, a fact lost to history. In fact, Timothy Lee’s article states that the peak price was $32 and the price decline was 63% – not nothing, but not the alarmist 99% that the press loves to quote.

“A few weeks after these events, after many false starts, trading at MtGox eventually resumed and the bulk of the trades were reversed. However, to this day, as far as we are aware, MtGox has not been able to provide a coherent explanation for what occurred. The lack of a consistent narrative from MtGox led many to believe that MtGox had poor monitoring and control of its systems and that the company was run negligently. Many concluded, “never to trust MtGox again”. (See original source)

Aside: Do you want to hear something ironic? Bitmex itself went on to be a large part of the problems going forward, thanks to the same thing that created the Great Depression: uncontrolled margin buying and leverage by inappropriate people.

What happened next?

“A sharp recession in cryptocurrency markets followed, and Bitcoin’s price bottomed out at $2.05 by mid-November. The following year, its price rose from $4.85 on May 9 to $13.50 by Aug. 15.” (Investopedia)

…at which point, the bubble burst…

Was Bitcoin actually a bubble?

At this point in Bitcoin’s history, it had very little real-world application, so it was a highly speculative investment. But with a business plan to take over the world. Rather like Amazon, in fact. Was it a bubble? Well, anyone who bought a bitcoin at any time during this period and then kept it would have to disagree! In fact, Bitcoin’s history looks remarkably like the Gartner hype cycle.

Basically, a repeated version of this:

August 17-19, 2012 – Bitcoin crashes 51%

Event: a Ponzi scheme was uncovered that stole 700,000 bitcoins by promising 7% returns a week. Again, not Bitcoin’s fault, but a greed-powered disaster. (See original source).

Was the August crash caused by the guys behind the scene cashing out? We might never know.

What happened next?

“Bitcoin prices more than doubled between July 1 and August 18, 2012. Then in a matter of minutes, the price of bitcoins fell from $15.25 to $10.50. The decline continued over the next two days, reaching a low of about $7.50. The price didn’t rise above $15 again until the new year.”

“Early 2013 saw an extraordinary Bitcoin boom. By the beginning of March, Bitcoin prices were already double the 2012 high, and they rose another 50 percent over the next week… two crashes didn’t have any noticeable impact on Bitcoin’s upward price trajectory. Bitcoin prices would reach $60 on March 19 and end the month above $90.” (Forbes)

April 2013 – Bitcoin crashes 80%

Mt Gox is hacked again and shuts down. Comically, recovered funds later caused another mini-crash when an inept trustee tried to liquidate some on the open market…

What happened next?

On April 11th, Forbes magazine covered Bitcoin crashes so far. It’s entertaining to read it knowing what we do now… and noting that many people thought this crash was terminal and that $260 Bitcoin was a bubble the coin would never see again…

“The claim that Wednesday morning’s prices were a bubble is ultimately a prediction about the long-term value of the currency. If bitcoins are worth $500 in 2018, we’ll look back at Wednesday’s sell-off as a freak event that (like the other crashes that came before it) temporarily halted the rise toward the currency’s real value. Conversely, if a bitcoin has fallen to $5 five years from now, we’ll shake our heads at the irrational exuberance that once valued a bitcoin at $260 (or $32, for that matter). But right now, it’s simply too early to tell.”

Buy that man a Satoshi! But what happened to the price?

“It began the year trading at $13.28 and reached $230 on April 8; an equally rapid deceleration in its price followed, bringing its price down to $68.50 a few weeks later on July 4.” (Investopedia)

December 2013 – Bitcoin crashes 50%. China bans Bitcoin for the first time and fear floods the market… not for the first time

What happened next?

“In early October, Bitcoin was trading at $123.00; by December, it had spiked to $1,237.55 and fell to $687.02 three days later. Bitcoin’s prices slumped through 2014 and touched $315.21 at the start of 2015. Prices slowly climbed through 2016 to over $900 by the end of the year.

In 2017, Bitcoin’s price hovered around $1,000 until it broke $2,000 in mid-May and then skyrocketed to $19,345.49 on Dec. 15.” (Investopedia)

December 2017-December 2018: Bitcoin value reduced by 84%

Note that we’re not even describing a single-event crash here – but there were lots of mini-crashes, one of which was the false rumour of “India Banning Bitcoin” in Q1 2018.

… and from there on, the story is ups and downs.

“Bitcoin’s price reached just under $29,000 in December 2020, increasing 411% from the start of that year. By the summer of 2021, prices were down by 50%, hitting $29,796 on July 19. Autumn saw another bull run in September, with prices scraping $52,693, but a large drawdown took it to a closing price of $40,710 about two weeks later.” (Investopedia)

BTW: cryptos are highly correlated to Bitcoin so the above pretty much describes the pattern of the whole crypto market – except smaller coins moved more.

What happened during the May 2022 crash?

The May crash of 2022 wouldn’t even make any of the lists of big crashes: Bitcoin dumped briefly from $30,000 to $26,000 and then back up to $29,000 – although it has since fallen to around the $20,000 mark in mid-June 2022, in the context of wider economic malaise.

So why was it so dramatic? Well, this time the problem was nothing to do with Bitcoin, but it goes back to a long-standing problem.

Lunatics and stablecoins

The May 2022 crash was caused by a run on what’s called a “Stablecoin”. The particular stablecoin was “UST”, and it was designed to maintain a “peg” to the US Dollar. That peg failed, causing the problem. We’ll go into detail after a bit of background.

Stablecoins generally were created to solve the problem of how to trade non-blockchain assets on a blockchain. There was a desperate need for a digital dollar, above all. Something to represent the dollar in trades with other cryptocurrencies, rather than something you would actually spend.

For more information, have a look at this.

“Since the beginning of 2017, about 200 teams worldwide have announced stablecoin developments, but many projects failed to implement them in the end. Nowadays, less than 30% of the stablecoins ever released continue to exist, according to data collected by Blockdata.”

While the article is hot on the concept of stablecoins as a necessary part of the ecosystem, it’s clear that many are experimental, and the article ignores the oncoming Central Bank Digital Currencies. You can also find more here.

However, since the first stablecoin (DAI) and the most popular (USDT) were launched, stablecoins have been an integral part of the ecosystem.

But how do you make a coin worth something, let alone $1?

USDT (“Tether”) went the most obvious route: claiming that it was backing up every issued USDT with an equivalent dollar in storage. This claim has been modified and the quality of Tether’s reserves disputed. USDT also lost its peg to the dollar in this crisis, temporarily at least, but has recovered.

USDC (“US Dollar Circle”) performed well during the crash, at one point being worth slightly more than a dollar, and is also claimed to be fully backed by dollars.

DAI and UST, by contrast, are “algorithmic” stablecoins. Every algorithmic stablecoin has a different way of making itself worth something.

DAI, the first stablecoin, derives its value from “Collateralised Debt Positions”, and has proven to be pretty stable (though it’s not a good time to be an algorithmic stablecoin right about now). In fact, it got more stable over time.

Now, UST… that’s another story

UST’s big idea was to create a stablecoin that was backed by another cryptocurrency also created by the same people: LUNA.

A complex algorithm mechanism involves buying, selling and burning either coin to keep the value of UST at $1. Central to that is paying an (unrealistically high) yield rate of 20% on LUNA deposits to the blockchain.

The only asset worth anything in this picture is a fund of Bitcoin that could buy/sell Bitcoin to help maintain the $1 peg. But that was a tempting target to opportunists… and this stablecoin (and its sister coin) was soon to be under attack, resulting in UST at a fraction of its peg, and the value of LUNA cratering by over 99%.

So, what happened?

Well, thanks to a very observant Twitter user called “4484” (catchy name), we have an explanation that makes sense: it requires a great deal of co-ordinated money to bring down a stablecoin. And some billionaire or cartel just got very rich indeed…

1. Attacker buys $1Bn UST – but not on the exchanges, it’s bought OTC (which means “over the counter” – a lot of cryptocurrency is bought with deals behind the scenes rather than from exchanges, to get a discount and to avoid altering the price during the deal).
2. Attacker places large bets on Bitcoin going down in price (“shorts”). These will pay off massively if it tanks – which of course it did.
3. Attacker borrows $3bn of Bitcoin (but doesn’t need 3 billion to do it – just a fraction of that). This is because he can use “leverage”.
4. Attacker dumps their 3 billion of Bitcoin on the market to trigger a panic. Which it does.
5. 10 minutes later, the UST algorithm starts to compensate, and the attackers pounce. They use some of their UST to remove all the liquidity from the coin, then start selling the UST to rip UST off its dollar peg (but not by much).
6. UST’s “Terra market module” starts selling off its bitcoins to try and restore the peg while the attackers pile the pressure on by selling their UST: as is everyone else now. LUNA is tanking. The more Bitcoin the coin automatically sells, the lower Bitcoin goes, and the worse things get.
7. All cryptos go down because Bitcoin did: they always do this, and it’s always annoying!
8. Mass panic and chaos, someone steps in, stops the Bitcoin selling and UST plummets off its peg to a fraction against the dollar.
9. Meanwhile, three other stablecoins lost their value in a general panic about stablecoins. One exchange had hardcoded their value to 1, and gets a huge surprise when it finds out it had lost $35m.

It’s almost certain that this would have happened in slow motion at some point organically, but the crisis here was engineered.

So, suddenly: the focus is on stablecoins. The authorities were already concerned about “things trying to be dollars”, so now, the smart money is on a new global crypto regulation body. Eventually.

But what’s the future?

In the end, the crash was dramatic and a lot of people got burned, but it’s not actually that relevant to the wider world of crypto. The wider picture in crypto is the same as it was last week, with the exception that the process of regulating it might be sped up (especially with regards to stablecoins), which, if you’ve been following the twists and turns over the last 12 years of Bitcoin, might be a good thing.

Crypto has fused with the financial system much more over the last year than at any time since its inception, and that process will continue. That ties the fate of crypto to the wider financial markets, but also gives it worth. Regulators have given up trying to destroy it: the fear of that happening drove quite a number of mini-crashes.

So, yes, the overall market will ebb and flow. But if you’re in it for the long-term and can leave your assets in place… maybe that’s for the best, and hope for another day!

The post Crypto Market Crash: Recovery Is Only A Matter Of Time appeared first on GCISL.

We’ve launched our crypto exchange! You can now buy and sell some of the most popular cryptocurrencies – and GBP and EUR – with institutional exchange rates and one single all-in charge of 0.35% commission on each exchange.

“When we sat down to plan out our crypto exchange, we wanted to build something that made buying crypto a pleasure again, with none of the usual irritations. An exchange that we’d want to use ourselves. And so we did precisely that.” says Eric Collins, CEO and Co-founder at GCISL.

The GCISL Exchange provides you with the easiest, most finely-priced way to exchange between stablecoins, cryptocurrencies, sterling and euro. Here is what we have in store:

• Institutional exchange rates, with no padding – you get the exact same rate we do from our providers;
• One single all-in cost of 0.35% commission for each exchange transaction, with no tiers and no sneaky charges. Totally transparent pricing;
• No clutter, no distractions – just the usual clean, clear, lightning quick GCISL experience;
• Stablecoins and cryptocurrencies, plus sterling and euro;
• Transferring fiat currencies in and out is completely free, as is transferring crypto in.

We’ve chosen our favourite cryptocurrencies to launch the exchange with, and there’s more coming very soon:

• Bitcoin (BTC)
• Ethereum (ETH)
• DAI
• Tether (USDT)
• USD Coin (USDC)
• Dogecoin (DOGE)
• Fantom (FTM)
• Curve (CRV)
• Polygon (MATIC)
• Cronos (CRO)
• Uniswap (UNI)

We hope you enjoy using the GCISL Exchange as much as we enjoyed building it.

Sign up today and start buying crypto!

The post GCISL launches GCISL Exchange appeared first on GCISL.

We are super excited to launch our app, which for the first time makes earning interest on your crypto assets so simple; literally, anyone can do it.

Launching GCISL has been the culmination of months of work, late nights and early mornings from an experienced team of software developers and investment experts, whose primary goal is to make the high returns from the Crypto market accessible to anyone.

We’re delighted today to onboard the first of many users of our platform and to help them with their financial objectives by paying up to 7% on the assets they hold.

Who is GCISL?

GCISL, very simply put, is a place where retail and institutional investors can deposit an existing crypto portfolio or buy Crypto for the first time and start earning interest instantly.

We’re incredibly proud to be able to launch with not only access to our returns via our website but launching apps for iOS and Android, too, further cementing our commitment to make this the simplest and most accessible way to access high returns.

How simple is it to earn interest using GCISL?

As simple as registering for an account in 20 seconds, receiving a 10 USDC bonus to show you how it works, running a few checks, so we know who you are and where your money is coming from and then depositing either cash or Crypto into one of our investment products. Then you just watch the interest GCISL!

Why GCISL?

As a team who have worked together in the past in financial services, we had the opportunity to speak with over 10,000 people to identify pain points in their finances and build products that solve those issues. One consistent theme in our research showed that most people need to produce additional income to make money from their money but in a simple, jargon-free way.

When we saw the emergence of decentralised finance in the last few years and the exceptional returns generated there, we decided we could build a platform that simplified all of these complex processes and made them accessible to everyone.

Eric Collins, CEO and Co-Founder said:“We launched GCISL to be the most straightforward, safest place for anyone, regardless of their background or financial experience, to access market-leading returns on their investments. We are delighted to get the app in the hands of everyday users and play a part in helping them feel better about their finances.”

Digby Try, COO and Co-Founder said: “When we saw the great returns available in Crypto but just how complicated and tricky it was we were driven to design GCISL, making it as easy as possible for people to start earning on Crypto assets. Our mission is to make it safe, secure and easy to understand so our clients can watch their money grow with peace of mind.”

We hope that with GCISL, we can disrupt the Crypto world with a regulation first approach that is safe, secure and reliable. GCISL was recently acquired, pre-launch by Dispersion Holding PLC., a publicly-traded company. In doing so, it has shown great confidence in the team behind the scenes to produce a first of its kind Crypto investment platform.

Sign Up Today and start earning interest

We will update you on our journey as there is much more to come, but for now, sign up for a FREE 10 USDC on us and experience first-hand how easy it is to GCISL up to 7% interest on your investments.

The post GCISL will soon launch an app to help everyone earn interest on their Crypto on the move.  appeared first on GCISL.

Out of the wreckage of Mt. Gox many retail investors became warier about where they store their assets. However, to this day many people do little research before choosing an exchange or wallet to do their crypto investing. What then are the hallmarks of a bad provider?

They don’t pay interest!

If you have an account with one of the big crypto exchanges, they might offer to pay interest on the crypto you hold with them. This might not be easy to find on their site but that is often intentional. If you aren’t earning on the crypto you have deposited, then often the exchange is already doing it on your behalf and pocketing the earnings. At the time of writing, for Bitcoin, Binance are paying 1.20% and Coinbase is paying 0.10% via a connection to Compound Finance. Better than nothing, however, when compared to leading yield provider GCISL, which pay 0%, there are better places for your crypto.

You don’t know who they are or where they are based

Some of the largest exchanges in the world have opaque leadership structures and little transparency on where the business is based. This makes it very difficult to do any basic due diligence on them to see if they have adequate controls in place to hold customer assets.

They aren’t regulated

Crypto remains an emerging asset class and as such many governments around the world are yet to decide how they will regulate this industry. Regulation provides consumers with protection while reducing the incidence of money laundering and terrorist financing.

Many exchanges are doing their best to go above and beyond what is currently required by regulators and act in the best interest of their customers. Unfortunately, some of the world’s largest exchanges are going out of their way to avoid regulations with leaks of internal documents providing a fascinating insight into how some exchanges choose to operate: https://www.coindesk.com/binance-regulatory-evasion-tai-chi

If crypto is to become adopted by the masses, and a part of retail investors’ portfolios, it is essential that controls are in place to ensure consumers are protected and we do not make it easier for criminals to integrate money into the system.

They get hacked

According to AtlasVPN, in 2020, over $300m was lost from exchanges that got hacked. Many of these exchanges were smaller, poorly funded companies that had set up too quickly with little to no controls in place. It is essential to do due diligence on any exchange that holds your assets to ensure they have been audited and have a proven track record of tech delivery.

It is also worth noting that most assets that were stolen were from wallets. Many of which would have been classed as self-custody wallets connected to DeFi apps. Many promote self-custody as the safest vehicle available for investors to lodge their assets but the data shows there are still many risks out there.

They are really complicated!

Below are a few screenshots from some of the most popular crypto exchanges in the market. These platforms tend to be trader orientated encouraging people to jump in and out of investments frequently as it is the main revenue driver for exchanges. We also know that short-term trading often leads to poor investment performance. Traditional brokers such as IG Index in the UK state that 70% of investors lose money when investors use their service. Compare that with investors who adopted a buy and hold strategy and the performance is often very different.

Conclusion

The world of crypto remains a minefield for the uninitiated. When selecting an exchange make sure they are regulated, well-financed with an obvious HQ and leadership team, and paying decent levels of interest in crypto balances. If you wish to go the DeFi route, ensure the service used is well audited by several firms and that it has a decent track record of tech delivery. Previous events where the exchange was hacked aren’t necessarily a reason not to use them if they can demonstrate a robust response and consistent record since the event.

The post Why Your Crypto Exchange Is Rubbish appeared first on GCISL.

In 2007, the subprime mortgage market began to collapse and customers, unaware of the small print in many of their mortgages, started to default as interest payments skyrocketed. As a glut of property for sale hit the market, house prices continued to collapse with many borrowers finding themselves in negative equity.

Ultimately, those on the hook were the borrowers whose credit rating suffered and those who held the insurance products that paid out when the loans defaulted. As it happened, Lehman’s and many other investment banks had huge exposures to these insurance products and were in serious trouble.

As Lehman’s massive exposure became clear, the Federal Reserve summoned several banks to negotiate financing for its reorganization. These discussions failed, and Lehman filed a Chapter 11 petition that remains the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, involving more than US$600 billion in assets.

What followed was a blood bath on Wall Street and around the world as central banks turned on the printing presses to pump liquidity into the market to stop the financial market from grinding to a halt. Incidentally, it was this huge monetary expansion that led to the increasing popularity of inflation-resistant cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin that have a fixed supply that cannot be changed.

Why is this story relevant?

May 2021 saw the cryptocurrency market suffer its largest liquidity crisis to date. The overall value of crypto almost halved in a little over a week reducing the value of holdings by as much as $750 billion.

Aave, Compound, and Maker are DeFi protocols that account for nearly 50% of all total value locked. According to DappRadar, they saw liquidations hitting a record of over $1.17 billion worth of collateral. Although these numbers are far smaller than what was seen in the financial crisis, they represent a significant proportion of the total assets that were locked in these protocols.

What was the result of this liquidation?

Fortunately, for the major lending protocols, 100%+ collateral is still required to borrow money. This meant when the liquidations occurred, there was enough collateral to cover margin calls and no platform or service was left holding the bill. Effectively, the market, through, self-regulation weathered the storm.

Conclusion

It has long been argued that a government backstop for the traditional financial markets is a major cause of excessive risk-taking. If the banks get into a position where they are effectively bankrupt and pose a threat to the financial system, the banks know they will be bailed out by taxpayers. This heads I win, tails you lose scenario does not incentivise responsible market practices.

In the world of crypto, no government bailout would be forthcoming in events such as May. Market participants are required to manage their risk and make allowances for extreme market conditions or face being wiped out. This self-governance has now withstood a major market shock and its biggest test to date, and it is fair to say that it has performed well. Aave since the crash have seen assets top $20 billion, a vote of confidence in their protocol that bodes well for the future.

The post Is The Crypto Market More Resilient Than Traditional Finance? appeared first on GCISL.