Bank of America Initiates Research on Digital Assets & Crypto

Bank of America (BoA) follows the trend of cryptocurrency in response to the increasing user transaction demand and institutions' interest. Bank of America announced to initiate research on this powerful digital asset system.

According to a Bloomberg report on Monday, Candace Browning, head of global research at Bank of America Securities, said in an interview that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is now mainstream and growing.

 "This isn’t just Bitcoin anymore, this is digital assets and it’s creating a whole ecosystem of new companies, new opportunities, and new applications."

This is the first time the Bank of America has established a digital currency research team led by Alkesh Shah as the red hot ecosystem continues to gain traction amongst all classes of investors in July this year.

The official report released on Monday by Bank of America Securities, a subsidiary of Bank of America, pointed out that the market value of the entire cryptocurrency industry has reached 2.15 trillion U.S. dollars. Such a large number makes people have to start to pay attention.

Anto Paroian, Chief Operating Officer at crypto/digital assets hedge fund ARK36, said Bank of America's announcement of the launch of its digital assets research coverage is a significant bullish signal for the markets. 

"it shows that the narrative of institutions buying into the digital asset space is alive and can still serve as a potential uptrend catalyst. In other words, we can still expect 'explosive' news around this subject from big market players similar to those we saw in Q1 2021; BoA is yet another mainstream financial institution to publicly hail digital assets as a new asset class. Their comment about the industry being "too large to ignore" should give investors confidence that digital assets are here to stay - and that they are a force to be reckoned with."

According to data from Coinmarketcap, the current global crypto market cap already reached $2.18 trillion. BoA stated that the current entire digital asset ecosystem will not only include bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but will also include more digital assets and emphasized that:

"Bitcoin is important with a market value of ~$900bn, but the digital asset ecosystem is so much more: tokens that act like operating systems, decentralized applications (DApps) without middlemen, stablecoins pegged to fiat currencies, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs ) to replace national currencies, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) enabling connections between creators and fans."

Analysts from Bank of America believe that digital assets based on cryptocurrencies will become a new asset class in the future.

The statistics in the report show that as of June 2021, 221 million users worldwide have traded cryptocurrencies or used blockchain applications, compared with 66 million in May 2020.

In the first half of 2021 alone, global investment in blockchain/ distributed ledger technology (DLT) and cryptocurrency companies has exceeded 17 billion U.S. dollars, a five-fold increase from 2019.

In addition, the research report also reminded the risk of regulatory uncertainties in the cryptocurrency field.