While it’s still in beta, this user-friendly crypto asset portfolio management tool demonstrates the power of smart contracts.
With the market cap of all crypto assets quadrupling in the past few months to around $110 billion, and Bitcoin’s percentage of that plummeting over the last few months from 85% to below 50%, it’s clear that investors are interested not just in Bitcoin but in a whole host of other digital assets.
That is perhaps why Fidelity customers can now see their Coinbase bitcoin and ether balances, why almost 20 new hedge funds investing in diversified portfolios of crypto assets are launching this summer, and why initial coin offerings are raising more and more staggering sums of money with every passing hour.
However, as old hands in crypto know, for any non-accredited investors starting to invest in this space, it’s dangerous to leave your coins on an exchange. The history of Bitcoin and Ethereum is littered with monumental hacks and other mishaps at exchanges, ranging from the $470 million loss of coins from Mt. Gox to the flash crash of ether to $0.10 on Coinbase’s GDAX a couple months ago.
While traders have to keep their coins on an exchange, for the everyday buy-and-hold (or, buy-and-hodl, in bitcoin parlance) investor, that’s not a risk worth running. And buying a whole bunch of digital assets and then storing the private keys on your own hardware or paper wallets (a piece of paper spelling out the private keys) is risky in its own way. And then there’s the convenience factor. What if you want to quickly liquidate a position?
Enter crypto exchange Shapeshift’s recent investment product, Prism.
Source: Can’t Invest In A Crypto Hedge Fund? DIY With Shapeshift’s Prism
