We beat the drum quite a bit on the whole digital currency space, but we only know of a handful of advisors that have really embraced the whole trend. In fact, the wealth management sites we regularly monitor cover digital currencies somewhat, but none seem to really advise advisors on how to work with customers on this asset class. Yet, the asset class is growing like weed (pardon the marijuana reference pun, another "growing" asset class). Just since January 1, Ethereum has risen over 4500% and Coinbase, the digital currency trading exchange, signed up 400,000 new users in the last 30 days! So one more time, to our advisor readers, get to know about digital currencies and find a way to advise your clients on them other than to advise them not to invest, because that's not going to work very well with the kind of returns possible - and yes, there are definitely risks, too. But there's a lot of very smart people working on cryptocurrency derivatives right now, and soon they'll hit America's shores. (NOTE - After publishing this piece on Wednesday, the digital currency experienced a flash crash - just like the markets have in the past. It will be interesting to hear how this occurred.)
(Cindy Taylor/Publisher)
"The price of Bitcoin has hit record highs in recent months, more than doubling in price since the start of the year. Despite these gains, Bitcoin is on the verge of losing its position as the dominant virtual currency.
The value of Ether, the digital money that lives on an upstart network known as Ethereum, has risen an eye-popping 4,500 percent since the beginning of the year.
With the recent price increases, the outstanding units of the Ether currency were worth around $34 billion as of Monday — or 82 percent as much as all the Bitcoin in existence. At the beginning of the year, Ether was only about 5 percent as valuable as Bitcoin.
The sudden rise of Ethereum highlights how volatile the bewildering world of virtual currency remains, where lines of computer code can be spun into billions of dollars in a matter of months.
Bitcoin, the breakout digital currency, is also hitting new highs — one Bitcoin was worth $2,600 on Monday. But the Bitcoin community has struggled with technical issues and bitter internal divisions among its biggest supporters. It has also been tainted by its association with online drug sales and hackers demanding ransom.
Against this backdrop, Ether has been gaining steam. The two-year old system has picked up backing from both tech geeks and big corporate names like JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft, which are excited about Ethereum’s goal of providing not only a digital currency but also a new type of global computing network, which generally requires Ether to use.
In a recent survey of 1,100 virtual currency users, 94 percent were positive about the state of Ethereum, while only 49 percent were positive about Bitcoin, the industry publication CoinDesk said this month.
If recent trends continue, the value of Ethereum’s virtual currency could race past Bitcoin’s in the coming weeks..."
Source: NYTimes.com