BlockFi Monthly Update – June 26th, 2019

As the first half of 2019 comes to a close, we can safely say that the blockchain sector has continued to be magnetic. Even in the last 30 days, we’ve seen meaningful development across the industry. On the retail side, crypto adoption continues to grow, with Facebook announcing plans to release their own Libra token to billions of users. On the institutional side, Bakkt and Ledger Prime have started physically settling futures, a huge step forward for our industry. And most importantly, the price of Bitcoin at publication is at a YTD high of $12,800.

On our end, BlockFi’s assets under management have grown to over $240M, based on current prices at publication, thanks to the continued support of our global community. We are excited to see increased demand for our products from Great Britain, Canada and South Africa.

This month we focused on continuing to share our internal research with our community. We published two articles shedding some light on what happens behind the scenes with our products and how our customers use them. The first article shared insights on what we are seeing from borrowers. As one of the largest crypto-backed loan providers in the space, we find it interesting that the biggest use case for crypto-backed loans are business purposes. Nearly one third of our loans go to entrepreneurs who are looking to start or expand a business. One anecdote we’re particularly proud of is that a number of these clients operate within the crypto industry.

Our second article shed some light on the Bitcoin lending market. Customers have often come to us asking why institutions borrow crypto. The main reason is that it allows exchanges to maximize its ability to provide a liquid marketplace, making it easier to execute trades quickly and efficiently.

We will continue to share our insights with the BlockFi community. Next week, we’ll be publishing research on our latest product, the BlockFi Interest Account. For the first time in history, crypto investors are able to earn interest on their cryptoassets. Since launching in March 2019, we have seen that BlockFi clients interact with their accounts very differently than how users treat other interest-bearing products outside of crypto.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be making meaningful updates to our login experience. We’ll be allowing clients to deposit, withdraw and view transactions for the BlockFi Interest Account in a single view, releasing an update to our crypto-backed loan application process to speed up approval time and streamlining the identity verification process. On the product side, starting July 1st, we’ll be removing the maximum amount to earn interest in GUSD and subjecting GUSD withdrawals of $250K or greater to a 30-day window.

Your needs are our priority. In July, we will be sending all existing BlockFi clients surveys to help us understand more about your experience with BlockFi and prioritize what we should improve next. In the meantime, you can always submit feedback here or feel free to reach out to our team by visiting our contact us page. We love hearing from you.

– The BlockFi Team

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