The bitcoin community eagerly awaits the results of a government bitcoin auction that took place on Friday.
Circle Internet Financial, a Boston-based company headed by Jeremy Allaire, is one of a number of different entities that participated in said bitcoin auction, held by the United States Marshals Service.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Allaire suggested that the auction could cause a short-term drop in the price of bitcoin, but looking at the charts this morning, we’re looking at a high of $639 at Bitstamp and settled at $615 at the time of this writing.
“The government is doing [the auction] in a very controlled manner; they’re not flooding the market. They’re creating an opportunity for institutional investors, which is a big deal,” he said.
As of Monday morning, Allaire’s company has been waiting for a call from the Marshals service to learn whether or not they were the winning bidders of the auction, which also saw interest from a Coinbase executive, Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Investment Trust, and a BNP Paribas staffer [according to a list of email addresses inadvertently leaked by the Marshals Service].
“This is classic asset forfeiture. They’re washing these bitcoin clean, with the seal of approval of the US federal government,” Allaire added.
It all comes during a time where interest in bitcoin couldn’t seem to get any higher. The auction has attracted the attention of big market players, indeed. Further, Allaire suggests regulation surrounding bitcoin is becoming increasingly clearer.
“What we’re hearing is that some of the big broker dealers on Wall Street are setting up small trading desks just to get exposure to the asset and understand it. That’s the approach now as opposed to a year ago when people thought governments would never allow it, and banks just wanted it to go away. All of the major banks now have teams trying to make sense of bitcoin,” Allaire says.
“A year ago, most governments and big banks frankly just wanted bitcoin to go away. They were like: ‘this is a joke, I want this to go away. I’m just going to ignore it.’ It’s not going to go away. So now people are saying: ‘it’s not going away and there’s big money coming into this, this is a real innovation, we need to get our heads wrapped around it, and we need to figure out whatever rules we’re going to wrap around it.”
[textmarker color=”C24000″]Source[/textmarker] Wall Street Journal
