2021 will be the year of institutionalization, says Wayne Trench, chief executive officer at OSL.

The institutionalization has already started in 2020 but of course, it is just the beginning and as legendary investor Bill Miller says, as

“more companies decide to diversify some small portion of their cash balances into bitcoin instead of cash, then the current relative trickle into bitcoin would become a torrent.”

Just this week, SkyBridge Capital co-founder Anthony Scaramucci launched a Bitcoin-centric fund for affluent investors with a minimum investment of $50k.

According to Scaramucci, “Bitcoin is better at being gold than gold is at being gold,” as such it has become the future storage of value.

Bitcoin supply liquidity is dropping faster than ever before in history.

Coins are being sucked out of exchanges at breakneck speed. https://t.co/gXM6bG53Jr

— Charles Edwards (@caprioleio) January 5, 2021

He believes Bitcoin is in its “early innings,” and noted in his opinion piece on MarketWatch that “the adoption floodgates are open.”

In his write up, while crediting Michael Saylor’s BTC accumulation as a reserve asset in its balance sheet as an “aha” moment, Scaramucci emphasized the supply shortage towards which BTC is heading. He wrote,

“There are 42-plus million people in the world with a net worth exceeding $1 million, meaning there are twice as many millionaires today as there will ever be bitcoins in circulation.”

“Today, the fact remains that bitcoin’s demand exceeds supply, and it is not even close… What more do you need to know?”

More and more this institutional activity will also curb down the volatility going forward, said Trench who noted that “whilst this rally has definitely been much more institutionally led we are seeing signs of retail interest.”

The number of times Bitcoin is being Googled is currently at five times what they were just a few months ago which means this rally is also garnering the attention of the retail.

Latest buying has been driven by participants who are long term holders. This is bullish, this rally is far from done.

This is the change in #Bitcoin's supply moving between participants. When more coins move from liquid (active traders) to the illiquid (HODLers), it's bullish. pic.twitter.com/jub3Ea1Zlm

— Willy Woo (@woonomic) January 6, 2021

While BTC is gaining attention as a store of value, Trench says in terms of its utility as a payment method, the integration into PayPal's platform is a step in the right direction there.

“We're beginning to add more and more functionality to cryptocurrencies,” is what PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has to say about the payment giant adding cryptos to its platform. It will also allow cryptos to be used as a funding source in the next couple of months. Shulman said,

“There's obviously a tremendous demand and we've seen of that on our platform to buy and to hold and sometimes sell cryptocurrencies but I think what we're most excited about is enabling people to take that cryptocurrency and effectively turn it into a currency to be able to use at any of our 28 million merchants and do that without any of the volatility.”

Meanwhile, besides a whole heap of additional scalability improvements being worked on for the technology itself, initiatives like China's CBDC “is another step towards a digital payment becoming mainstream more broadly,” said Trench which he believes will be good for the entire digital asset ecosystem.

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