Due to the overall excellent performance of Blocktrade Capital’s Weighted Index Fund for crypto assets in its first month of trading, founder Ben Marks has announced he’s making an additional $250K capital contribution into the fund, bringing his total investment to $500K. Ben cited the fund’s strong performance, Bitcoin’s latest price action, Ethereum’s advancements with scaling, and recent developments in the institutional space as factors for why he is currently bullish on the crypto markets.
The fund’s portfolio has performed extremely well from its April 16, 2018 inception to date with a 22.6% return, compared to Bitcoins 10.9% during the same period. Although Bitcoin’s performance hasn’t been quite as impressive as other coins, it’s the upcoming $10K price point that is reason to be optimistic. Bitcoin has twice now been tested and pushed back from $10K, indicating a huge wall of resistance. When Bitcoin builds enough momentum to finally cross $10K, it should do so with enough force that it continues on an upward trajectory and settles somewhere in the $11K – $12K range.
CoinDesk’s upcoming Consensus conference in New York from May 14-16 could be the catalyst for Bitcoin propelling past $10K, as its price increased a full 35% in the days following the 2017 conference. Considering that attendance at this year’s conference is supposed to nearly double last year’s 2700 attendees, its not unrealistic to think that next weeks’ Consensus could have a huge impact on prices.
Recent developments on the Ethereum front are also cause for excitement. This past week developers announced plans to implement sharding, which distributes all the data on the blockchain across multiple servers instead of just one. This was previously causing a bottleneck and slowing the network down. The team has also been making headway with Plasma, a similar scaling solution that works by adding a second layer of smart contracts over the main blockchain that doesn’t need to be validated by the network. These new developments show that Ethereum is addressing the issues of scalability that have plagued them in the past.
Finally, Goldman Sachs’ recent announcement that its opening a cryptocurrency trading desk is an extremely positive development for the industry. Goldman Sachs often sets the standard that other financial institutions follow, and its entering the space could very well be the tipping point for mainstream institutional adoption of cryptocurrency. With Blocktrade Capital also working hard to bridge the gap between crypto and institutional players, its safe to say positive momentum in the markets should continue.