Did you see today’s headline, dear readers?

PayPal and Venmo are considering direct sales of cryptocurrency to their end users, as soon as a few months from now.

Watch this space, PayPal is pivoting after Facebook’s Libra project took a back seat, so things could get interesting.

Y’all, it’s been a minute. This COVID-19 has been some serious crazy for those of us in NYC, no doubt.

But check out what marker we passed again yesterday…

Bitcoin jumped 6% on Thursday, causing a $13 billion surge in market value for the entire cryptocurrency market, according to data from Coindesk.

The entire cryptocurrency market is worth a combined $267 billion as of Friday morning, data from CoinMarketCap shows. 

The top three cryptocurrencies ranked by market value are bitcoin, worth $181.5 billion; ethereum, worth $23.4 billion; and XRP, worth $9.5 billion.

What is old is new again.

Y’all take care out there.

It turns out Facebook has been working on a cryptocurrency payments system to tack onto the app’s back-end, including its own digital coin users could send both to one another in the Facebook ecosystem, as well as elsewhere online y’all. Its code name is Project Libra.

A tall order, for sure dear readers, but we all buy things online out of pure convenience, if not outright necessity, these days, so it would be quite the achievement even if Facebook was able to convert just a fraction of its ~1.5 billion daily users.

In terms of financing to support the new digital coin, to avoid volatility many other coins experience on a near-hourly basis, the rumor is Facebook is looking to raise $1 billion for the effort, talking to such firms as Visa, MasterCard and First Data Corp.

This stable coin would help ensure acceptance by Facebook users as a legitimate currency, as it would be backed by government issued US dollars.

There is also talk of the digital coin operating as a loyalty rewards program for genuine interaction on Facebook, whether watching a video, or interacting with an ad, to help combat so much of the rampant bot activity currently clogging up Facebook feeds.

All very interesting news as BTC continues to hold above $5,000. Watch this space, we will absolutely be keeping an eye on this.

But will it stay there?

There are some who say BTC is proving to be a level of relative support at $5,000.

We shall see.

As always, stay the course during this second inning of crytpo, dear readers.

Oh dear readers, another day, another reversal.

Remember when Jamie Dimon was asked about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general? No? Here’s a refresher, he called it a scam. Not long ago either, August 2018.

Well flash forward six months and JP Morgan has announced it is launching “JPM Coin”, touting it as the first US-bank backed cryptocurrency.

Once again we must watch what these financial giants do, despite what they say. It’s been common knowledge that all the major banks have spent money putting together blockchain teams and diving into researching “digital assets”.

Color us as not surprised at Crypto Mouse, and rest assured, we will not be pouring any money into “JPM Coin” anytime soon.