 Craig Wright goes to war again, this time against Rand Neuner. The CNBC host announced an interview with Wright on Twitter with a mildly interesting revelation. The man the crypto community have dubbed fake Satoshi, then accused Neuner of reaching an agreement and threatened something was about to occur, and Rand, along with his organization, will be out of it and on the French. But last time we checked, both CNBC and Rand are still in operation. In other news, Tim Draper has made another bold prediction. This time he looked into his crystal ball and saw that in five years, only criminals will be using cash. He cited an interview, The criminals will still want to operate with cash because they catch everybody who is trying to use Bitcoin. As bold and bullish as ever, Draper went on to question the security of his bank holdings. My bank is constantly under a hack attack, he said. Perhaps he is right to distrust the bank. This week, a French court fined major Swiss bank UBS over $5 billion for illegally soliciting clients and laundering the proceeds of tax evasion. Also this week, stablecoins are key to adoption report. Lightning network relay, Elon Musk is bullish on crypto and Vitalik Buterin discloses his crypto holdings. Hint, he has a lot of Ethereum. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Oli Jain and this is your weekly Hodler's Digest. Let's take a look at the markets. Last week's remarkable rise in Bitcoin prices sparked great enthusiasm in the crypto community. Bitcoin's price rallied by almost 10% and many crypto enthusiasts have already been speculating that the crypto winter is finally over and a new bull run is imminent. However, some big names in the industry were a bit more cautious. Popular crypto journalist Joseph Young reminded the community that we are still very far off from the all-time highs while also noting a reduction in selling pressure. Binance's CEO CZ was equally cautious in commenting on the market spike expressing surprise for the community's excitement. Looking for the causes triggering the rally, some analysts said that JP Morgan launching its own centralized token was definitely an encouraging sign for many institutional investors, a point mocked by many in the crypto community. Others even pointed at this week's China-US talks deemed to bring an end to the trade war that has been ravaging the global market since last year as a possible reason. We talked to some analysts asking them their perspective on the current status of the crypto market. The reason for A, the crash is just the natural ebb and flow of this very kind of this volatility of crypto with these higher highs and higher lows. And the reason for it going up over the last two days is just the normal we've seen bounces even in December we saw a bounce up to 4,000. So we keep on bouncing up back over the $3,500 level. I think we'll continue to see that. And for my fund, Bitbol, we do research, we believe it will continue to go steadily up with volatility and reach about $5,000 by the end of the year for Bitcoin. We saw JP Morgan do launch their coin, which will help the institutions. Actually, it's a stable coin intended for institutions to more easily purchase other digital assets with. So yes, that actually did help. As a fund, we do social media sentiment analysis and press sentiment analysis. And it was very up over the last since that JP Morgan announcement. We'll continue to see volatility in crypto. We do see it appreciating as an asset. You know, a change from $4,000 where it is today to $5,000 is quite a gain, especially compared with other assets that you could put your money into. But it's not going to be a straight bull run yet. I don't think that the trade war that we see between the US and China or between any countries, for that matter, has been a dominant factor influencing those forces. The forces are much more endemic and specific to the way that Bitcoin functions. It's pretty plausible to assume that this may be that market juncture, where some of the professional investors are choosing to deploy real capital into the market for Bitcoin and maybe other cryptos, which to me, if it's true, certainly does indicate a potential bull market. We also spoke to Brian Kelly about more credible reasons that the crypto markets are experiencing enough swing. What I think really happened is you've seen just a massive shift in sentiment in the crypto markets. Two or three weeks ago, you were in a market where no matter how good the news was, it didn't really impact the price of Bitcoin. Now we're in a market where you're starting to get some positive news flow and it's starting to potentially support the price. So I would say stuff like Jack Dorsey and Twitter and a Lightning Network and Square as well in saying that it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when Lightning Network comes to Square. Comments like that. Comments like Elon Musk saying that Bitcoin is better than paper money and it's going to disrupt paper money. I think that's really interesting and those type of comments are starting to support this kind of more bullish sentiment that we're having in the marketplace. Jack Dorsey recently reiterated his views that Bitcoin could become the internet's native currency. One more major figure to do something similar is volatile investor in human meme, Elon Musk, who this week came out in favor of Bitcoin. In an interview, the Tesla CEO said the Bitcoin structure is quite brilliant, adding that the digital currency is a far better way to transfer value than paper. However, he expressed some concerns about crypto, but overall he was pretty bullish. Crypto bypasses currency controls. Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper. That's for sure. Last year Musk had tweeted that he only owned 0.25 Bitcoin that a friend had given to him many years ago and besides that he literally owned zero crypto. It is always good to hear big industry figures like Musk and Dorsey being pro-crypto, but sometimes their positions on crypto can seem a bit contradictory and even misguided. If we take a look at Dorsey, for example, he appears to believe in decentralization when it comes to Bitcoin, but not so much when it comes to his own platform, Twitter. He has faced a lot of criticism lately with regard to censorship. We spoke more about this notion of decentralized social media and more with Minds.com CEO Bill Ottman. I think the values of Bitcoin and Twitter are very different. You know, okay, it's good that Dorsey is talking about Bitcoin, but then he also has the cash app and he's selling Bitcoin. So he's leveraging it and he's evangelizing it to a certain degree. Okay, that is positive. I don't think it's fair to ride this high horse and at the same time, you know, not be fully representing the values. It's just, it's sort of unacceptable, I think, these days for none of the major platforms to be walking the walk in terms of transparency, you know, making clear steps towards decentralization. The JPM coin has put stable coins in the headlines once again. Of course, the digital currency launched by the bank is not designed for the crypto market and is unlikely to increase adoption. However, there are many other interesting projects out there that could and paved the way for 2019 to become the year of the stablecoin. Dai, launched by MakerDAO, for example, is both decentralized and crypto collateralized. Every token is backed by Ethereum. We spoke to Rune Christensen, founder of MakerDAO, about the project. It was very important for us to build a stablecoin that had both the stability but also the decentralization and be able to combine those together into what we consider then the ultimate stable. The end result is a stablecoin model that is backed by collateral sitting on the blockchain. It's an autonomous system that just runs itself through smart contract code and then uses that, like that code to basically ensure that there's always a lot of collateral in the system. And that collateral is always more than the amount of stablecoins in circulation. So for instance, right now, there's something like 80 million die-in-circulation, so 80 million dollars worth of stablecoins in circulation. And backing those, there are about something like 240-250 million dollars worth of Ethereum tokens that provide the backing for the value. With more and more coins entering the market, the US dollar is fast becoming the most tokenized asset, leading to a report published this week to conclude that stablecoins will play a key role in the adoption of crypto technologies. The report, titled The State of Stablecoins 2019, hype versus reality in the race for stable global digital money, looked at 44 different crypto and stablecoin companies and analyzed their key features. The report identifies countries like Venezuela and Angola as battlegrounds, not just for the adoption of stablecoins, but for the adoption of crypto in general. Also, while the companies surveyed might eventually offer interest rates for holding stablecoins, at the moment people are happy to hodl for free. We talked to George Salmon, blockchain and crypto advisor, about the upsides of stablecoins, the downsides, and the challenges they face in 2019, including the possibility of the Fedcoin. I think stablecoins solve a real problem for them, where if you buy, if you're an Argentine or a Venezuelan, you bought Bitcoin at 15,000 and now it's at 3,000, you still hold your own money, you still have that money. You don't need to necessarily worry about the government hyperinflating it and all that, but you've lost a fair bit of value in it as the price of Bitcoin has gone down. Whereas with a stablecoin, it basically trades within a range tied to a US dollar or gold, which are very much less volatile. It's still not owning your money, it's still not having control of your money, and of course, since it's programmable, they can seize it at any time they want from you and track and trace that money at will. It's like saying that Fedcoins would wipe out Bitcoin, in my opinion. I think what's going to actually lead and pave the way is not the ones that are staying back to traditional assets. It's going to be ones that reimagine things in ways that we haven't thought of and how you can use your money. If I don't see fiat currency going away any time soon, but I certainly think that what we're starting to see is that money is being reimagined and governments aren't going to be the only ones who are trusted and who can create money going forward. To me, that's exciting. The Bitcoin Lightning Network is growing. This week, Bitcoin's second layer reached an all-time high total capacity of over 700 Bitcoin. Corresponding to about $2.7 million. The Lightning Network operating on top of the Bitcoin blockchain is designed to allow pretty much instant Bitcoin transactions without fees. The recent hype surrounding the network is partly due to the Lightning Network torch event launched on Twitter earlier this month by an anonymous Bitcoin enthusiast called Hodelanot. The Twitter movement mimics a marathon in which users can send a small amount of Bitcoin on the Lightning Network to a trusted person who will then do the same, thus passing on the torch further. The Lightning Torch aims at demonstrating the Lightning Network's efficiency in transferring very small sums of Bitcoin with no third parties involved, which would not be possible at all on other networks. Every time the torch is passed on, the amount of Bitcoin gathered increases. This initiative quickly gained visibility thanks to major personalities of the crypto industry jumping in, including Binance's CZ, Trump's Justin Sun, and Litecoin's Charlie Lee. Even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey supported the marathon, with many wondering whether Twitter could ever implement the Lightning Network among its own features. In order to send the micro payments, Torchbearers have been largely using Tip-In, a browser extension enabling tips on the Lightning Network. By installing the app, for now still in beta, users can see a Tip-In button appearing on their Twitter interface. To get more insight about how the Lightning Torch started, we reached out to Hodelanot, the initiator of the event himself. I didn't have much ambitions with it. It originated from me wanting to actually use Lightning, since I think it's very fascinating to actually utilize these amazing rails to send payments around the world. I just came up with a tweet, basically, and thought, let's see what happens with this. But I think the torch has become somewhat of a symbol of this economic free speech, and also the spirit of the community. The coolest thing about this is that so many normal people have held it, and chose to pass it on. We're going to donate it to BTC Venezuela. BTC Venezuela is there working for grassroots Bitcoin adoption in a country that is currently in hyperinflation. Also, they do a lot of humanitarian efforts, like basically feeding people. They're going to get the torch, and I also made this Telecoin fundraiser, which will be donated to them. The transaction limit in Lightning Network is 4.29 million Satoshi. That's 0.04 Bitcoin. But this fundraiser has already raised four times that amount, and I know several people have pledged to donate the same amount as the torch. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin disclosed his cryptocurrency holding in an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit this week. Vitalik joined other Ethereum core developers who decided to prove their accountability in front of the community, showing the absence of any possible conflict of interest. According to Vitalik's disclosure, the majority of his fortune is unsurprisingly made up of Ethereum. Precisely. He owns 350,000 Ether, amounting to about $51 million. Although Buterin disclosed that he also owns non-Etherean-based tokens, including Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Dogecoin, and ZCash, these tokens make up less than 10% of his total Ethereum fortune. Besides having some non-financial interest in a series of crypto-related projects, Vitalik revealed being a shareholder of development and blockchain research from Clearmatics, as well as Starquare, a scalability and privacy-focused startup. Apart from his salary at the Ethereum Foundation, in the last 12 months, Buterin received compensation also for advising a number of non-Etherean-related projects. Commenting on the self-disclosure, Buterin encouraged more people involved in protocol decision-making to follow his example. This episode is sponsored by TradeSanta. TradeSanta is a cloud-based trading bot. Set it up in less than two minutes, trade multiple pairs, choose between long and short strategies, use tech analysis indicators, and see your results in real time. TradeSanta works 24-7 to get you the profit you set. The platform is already integrated with Binance, BitTracks, BitcoinX, and HitBTC. The link is in the description below. How do you rate Vitalik Buterin's crypto portfolio? Let us know your crypto portfolio in the comments. And as always, remember to like, subscribe, and hodl.