COMMERCE GAINS: Although bitcoin adoption may move at a glacial pace, merchants are seeing sustained traction regardless of market dips. According to BitPay, the payment processor facilitated $1 billion in crypto transactions in 2019, while Coinbase said its commerce arm processed $135 million-worth – a 600 percent increase since 2018. Full story
WINKLEVOSS IP: The Winklevoss brothers, founders of the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, won a flurry of U.S. patents related to a stablecoin they say could be used by commercial banks. The six patents, awarded between August 2019 and January 2020 outline a system based on the brothers' Gemini dollar (GUSD) stablecoin. Full story
BITCOIN BRANDING: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced Sunday that Twitter users now have access to a bitcoin emoji that appears automatically after "#bitcoin" or "#btc" are posted in tweets. Dorsey's message also tagged Unicode, possibly pushing for the introduction of a BTC emoji that can be used across all web platforms. Full story
GREEN LIGHT: The Monetary Authority of Singapore granted approval for tokenized securities trading firm iSTOX to operate in the city-state after the startup graduated from the central bank’s fintech regulatory sandbox. Full story
NO PLEA: Reginald Fowler, a former investor of the U.S. football team Minnesota Vikings, has rejected a plea deal with the U.S. government in an ongoing case that accuses him of operating "shadow bank" services tied to crypto exchanges. Full story
CROSS COMING: Bitcoin's spike to three-month highs above $9,600 early on Monday was quickly undone with a drop back to $9,300. The pullback signals temporary bull fatigue and a downside break at the recent price range of $9,200-$9,600. Further dips, if any, are likely to be short-lived as key averages are about to produce a major bullish crossover that’s appearing for the first time since March 2019. Full story
MISTER MASTERCARD: On today's Markets Daily, Adam B Levine and John Biggs look into Ajay Banga, CEO of Mastercard's, statement as to why he pulled his company out of the Libra consortium. Banga said the altruistic idea for a global payments system lacked a clear business model. Listen in
NATIONAL STRATEGY: Michael Sung, a professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, spoke to CoinDesk’s Michael Casey at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about China's national prerogative to accelerate the development of the digital yuan in response to Facebook's Libra. Watch here
A billion in bitcoin