James Todaro, managing partner of Blocktown Capital has recently compared Blockfi’s 5 year Bitcoin interest payments and compared them to the returns of the S&P500 and US treasury notes over the same period.
James Todaro sees interest-bearing crypto savings accounts as a game changer
James Todaro founding partner of Blocktown Capital and co-founder of MedX protocol just made waves on Twitter by highlighting the returns on a Blockfi 5 year Bitcoin investment of $10,000 USD at 5.1% apy. Blockfi is one of the leading crypto-lending startups in the US, and has a variety of interest-bearing crypto savings offerings available.
Bitcoin interest vs S&P 500 & Treasury bonds over past 5 yrs at BlockFi’s 5.1% interest rate.
It’s easy to think in terms of fiat where interest earned is often negligible…This isn’t the case for BTC, where interest alone becomes a large sum of money. #Bitcoin @TheRealBlockFi pic.twitter.com/F3B2oMht7u
— James Todaro (@JamesTodaroMD) February 12, 2020
Blockfi utilizes an innovative fractional-reserve lending model on crypto deposits to provide extremely short-term liquidity loans to short sellers on trading exchanges. They use an algorithm to generate interests on deposits with a risk-minimized loan structure.
According to Todaro’s analysis, Bitcoin would have exponentially outperformed both the S&P 500’s returns and the returns of US Treasury Bills, both common investment vehicles used to outperform inflation.
If you would have invested $10,000 in a Blockfi Bitcoin savings account, you would have made an eye watering $122,380 just from interest over five years vs. $6,166 in returns on S&P 500, and only $725 on T-bills. This is strong food for thought for crypto investors looking for low-risk returns.
Hal Finney predicted Bitcoin banks in 2010
Hal Finney, an original member of the cypherpunks mailing, and the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi himself predicted Bitcoin banks, envisioning the base chain as a settlement layer as far back as 2010.
Finney even predicted altcoins, although his vision was more along the lines of current efforts towards Central Bank Digital Currencies (CDBCs).
Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoin-backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases.
Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve while others may be 100% Bitcoin backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others.
Finney’s vision for crypto banks did not even take into consideration the advances in scaling that crypto projects have made in the last decade. Startups like Blockfi, Celsius Network, Cryptolend and Pawnhub may be the first serious, regulatory compliant attempts at achieving Finney’s prophetic vision. Bitcoin and crypto-assets with interest could be the next big crypto trend.
What do you think of crypto savings accounts? Let us know in the comments!
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