China stepped up its crackdown on Bitcoin mining causing the world’s leading cryptocurrency to drop another 15% of its value: is the crypto space about to undergo a seismic shift into a new form; possibly highly regulated?
China’s Crackdown on Crypto Continues
It’s a tricky time to be investing, right now. Picking growth stocks while the world resets after the pandemic is nigh on impossible, but the fashionable cryptocurrency sector continues to face pressure led by China’s ruthless crackdown on Bitcoin mining.It’s not just Bitcoin that is suffering as well, because, just as many investors feared for the last few years, governments are starting to take a keen interest in where the sector is heading.
The Chinese government has recently focused its efforts on the Sichuan province in the west of the country where most of the mining activity takes place due to excessively cheap hydropower. This purge has led to many of the miners fleeing China and moving their operation abroad.
Observers have commented on how this isn’t such a bad turn of events in the grand scheme of everything. For some time now, Bitcoin mining was starting to centralise in China which came with a whole host of potential issues. There is now talk of how this redistribution of hashing activity will lead to the network finding more efficient ways of expanding.
One company that is already gearing itself up for big changes is Bitfarms, who will shortly debut on the tech-focussed Nasdaq exchange. The firm, which will be the largest cryptocurrency miner trading publicly, is promising to use 99% renewable energy.
There was another sign last week that the crypto markets are particularly volatile right now when billionaire investor Mark Cuban fell victim to a token crash. IRON Titanium Token, AKA TITAN, lost all of its value on June 16, falling from over $60 to barely more than zero.
Rumours still persist that this was a “rug pull” where coin developers pack up and leave with all of the funds. Yet another reason to refrain from investing in crypto right now until the space starts to stabilise again.
As for the BTC position we still have open, the plan remains to hold in the long-term and wait it out.
Tech Stocks
Tech stocks have done particularly well since the COVID-19 pandemic started 18 months ago. No doubt this is as a result of us all living much of our lives within our homes for an unusually high proportion of the time.A couple of market corrections in March and May of 2021 were the only wobbles that the technology sector has really seen recently. There was also talk of a materials shortage to manufacture semiconductors but prices on the whole have remained stable for affected products.
To this end we have picked out a couple of tech stocks, and ones that aren’t particularly trendy.
Cloudflare: This content delivery network (CDN) provider is into a long list of interesting niches in the IT world. From serverless computing to 5G they are committed to building a faster and safer internet to users in every continent.
The Q1 figures for Cloudflare showed an insane 51% year-on-year growth with revenue for 2021 coming in at $138.1 million. That’s a great performance for shareholders who have enjoyed a 450% payback if they invested in the company when it floated in September 2019.
We hope that the market dominance will allow further growth throughout the rest of the year.
PTC Inc: PTC is one of the fastest-growing tech stocks in the market. Over 6,000 employees working in 70 different offices in 30 countries work to provide a service that helps businesses to differentiate their products, improve productivity, and much more.
PTC’s improved software and technology services helped the company to post Q1 figures that beat market estimates and build on it’s increasing market capitalisation of $15.5 bn.
