Nexon Co. said it bought $100 million worth of Bitcoin, joining a list of tech companies embracing the digital currency.

The online game provider acquired 1,717 Bitcoins at an average price of about $58,226 each, including fees and expenses. The purchase represents less than 2% of Nexon’s total cash and cash equivalents on hand, and is the largest-ever purchase of digital currency made by a company traded in Tokyo, Nexon said.

“Our purchase of bitcoin reflects a disciplined strategy for protecting shareholder value and for maintaining the purchasing power of our cash assets,” Owen Mahoney, Nexon’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “In the current economic environment, we believe Bitcoin offers long-term stability and liquidity while maintaining the value of our cash for future investments.”

A growing number of global firms including Tesla Inc. and Square Inc. have moved to purchase Bitcoin in recent months, with more starting to accept the cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Firms in Japan, which was an early leader in Bitcoin acceptance, have been slow to join this trend.

Nexon said it intended to guard itself against a potential drop in the value of non-digital currencies in case of inflation, with Mahoney seeing Bitcoin as a “form of cash likely to retain its value, even if it is not yet widely-recognized as such.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-28/nexon-joins-tesla-in-bitcoin-bet-with-100-million-purchase

Cryptocurrency ether broke past $3,000 on Monday to set a new record high in a dazzling rally that has outshone the bigger bitcoin, with investors betting that ether will be of ever greater use in a decentralised future financial system.

Ether , the token transacted on the ethereum blockchain, rose 3% on the Bitstamp exchange to $3,144.81 in morning deals in London. It is up 325% for the year so far, easily outpacing a 95% rise in the more popular bitcoin.

In part, the big rally is a catch-up to late 2020 gains in bitcoin, said James Quinn, managing director at Q9 Capital, a Hong Kong cryptocurrency private wealth manager.

It also reflects improvements to the ethereum blockchain, he said, and a growing shift towards "DeFi", or decentralised finance, which refers to transactions outside traditional banking for which the ethereum blockchain is a crucial platform.

"At first, the rally was really led by bitcoin because as a lot of the institutional investors came into the space, that would be their natural first port of call," Quinn said.

"But as the rally has matured over the last six months, you have DeFi and a lot of DeFi is built on ethereum."

The launch of ether exchange-traded funds in Canada and surging demand for ether wallets to transact non-fungible tokens such as digital art have also pushed up the price.

The ether/bitcoin cross rate has soared more than 100% this year and hit a 2.5-year high on Sunday, pointing to a degree of rotation into the second-biggest cryptocurrency as investors diversify their exposure.

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https://www.reuters.com/technology/ethereum-breaks-past-3000-2021-05-03/