Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po: Stablecoins and other digital assets have development potential, and international collaboration should be used to manage risks.

The post Is Putnam Global Technology A (PGTAX) a strong mutual fund pick right now? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. On the lookout for a Sector – Tech fund? Starting with Putnam Global Technology A (PGTAX – Free Report) should not be a possibility at this time. PGTAX possesses a Zacks Mutual Fund Rank of 4 (Sell), which is based on various forecasting factors like size, cost, and past performance. Objective We note that PGTAX is a Sector – Tech option, and this area is loaded with many options. Found in a wide number of industries such as semiconductors, software, internet, and networking, tech companies are everywhere. Thus, Sector – Tech mutual funds that invest in technology let investors own a stake in a notoriously volatile sector, but with a much more diversified approach. History of fund/manager Putnam Funds is based in Canton, MA, and is the manager of PGTAX. The Putnam Global Technology A made its debut in January of 2009 and PGTAX has managed to accumulate roughly $650.01 million in assets, as of the most recently available information. The fund is currently managed by Di Yao who has been in charge of the fund since December of 2012. Performance Obviously, what investors are looking for in these funds is strong performance relative to their peers. PGTAX has a 5-year annualized total return of 14.46%, and is in the middle third among its category peers. But if you are looking for a shorter time frame, it is also worth looking at its 3-year annualized total return of 27.02%, which places it in the middle third during this time-frame. It is important to note that the product’s returns may not reflect all its expenses. Any fees not reflected would lower the returns. Total returns do not reflect the fund’s [%] sale charge. If sales charges were included, total returns would have been lower. When looking at a fund’s performance, it…

Russia has become Europe’s leading crypto adopter with strong growth in institutional activity and DeFi usage. L’article Europe’s Crypto Adoption Shifts: Russia Now in the Lead est apparu en premier sur Cointribune.

Prominent analyst Cheeky Crypto (203,000 followers on YouTube) set out to verify a fast-spreading claim that XRP’s circulating supply could “vanish overnight,” and his conclusion is more nuanced than the headline suggests: nothing in the ledger disappears, but the amount of XRP that is truly liquid could be far smaller than most dashboards imply—small enough, in his view, to set the stage for an abrupt liquidity squeeze if demand spikes. XRP Supply Shock? The video opens with the host acknowledging his own skepticism—“I woke up to a rumor that XRP supply could vanish overnight. Sounds crazy, right?”—before committing to test the thesis rather than dismiss it. He frames the exercise as an attempt to reconcile a long-standing critique (“XRP’s supply is too large for high prices”) with a rival view taking hold among prominent community voices: that much of the supply counted as “circulating” is effectively unavailable to trade. His first step is a straightforward data check. Pulling public figures, he finds CoinMarketCap showing roughly 59.6 billion XRP as circulating, while XRPScan reports about 64.7 billion. The divergence prompts what becomes the video’s key methodological point: different sources count “circulating” differently. Related Reading: Analyst Sounds Major XRP Warning: Last Chance To Get In As Accumulation Balloons As he explains it, the higher on-ledger number likely includes balances that aggregators exclude or treat as restricted, most notably Ripple’s programmatic escrow. He highlights that Ripple still “holds a chunk of XRP in escrow, about 35.3 billion XRP locked up across multiple wallets, with a nominal schedule of up to 1 billion released per month and unused portions commonly re-escrowed. Those coins exist and are accounted for on-ledger, but “they aren’t actually sitting on exchanges” and are not immediately available to buyers. In his words, “for all intents and purposes, that escrow stash is effectively off of the market.” From there, the analysis moves from headline “circulating supply” to the subtler concept of effective float. Beyond escrow, he argues that large strategic holders—banks, fintechs, or other whales—may sit on material balances without supplying order books. When you strip out escrow and these non-selling stashes, he says, “the effective circulating supply… is actually way smaller than the 59 or even 64 billion figure.” He cites community estimates in the “20 or 30 billion” range for what might be truly liquid at any given moment, while emphasizing that nobody has a precise number. That effective-float framing underpins the crux of his thesis: a potential supply shock if demand accelerates faster than fresh sell-side supply appears. “Price is a dance between supply and demand,” he says; if institutional or sovereign-scale users suddenly need XRP and “the market finds that there isn’t enough XRP readily available,” order books could thin out and prices could “shoot on up, sometimes violently.” His phrase “circulating supply could collapse overnight” is presented not as a claim that tokens are destroyed or removed from the ledger, but as a market-structure scenario in which available inventory to sell dries up quickly because holders won’t part with it. How Could The XRP Supply Shock Happen? On the demand side, he anchors the hypothetical to tokenization. He points to the “very early stages of something huge in finance”—on-chain tokenization of debt, stablecoins, CBDCs and even gold—and argues the XRP Ledger aims to be “the settlement layer” for those assets.He references Ripple CTO David Schwartz’s earlier comments about an XRPL pivot toward tokenized assets and notes that an institutional research shop (Bitwise) has framed XRP as a way to play the tokenization theme. In his construction, if “trillions of dollars in value” begin settling across XRPL rails, working inventories of XRP for bridging, liquidity and settlement could rise sharply, tightening effective float. Related Reading: XRP Bearish Signal: Whales Offload $486 Million In Asset To illustrate, he offers two analogies. First, the “concert tickets” model: you think there are 100,000 tickets (100B supply), but 50,000 are held by the promoter (escrow) and 30,000 by corporate buyers (whales), leaving only 20,000 for the public; if a million people want in, prices explode. Second, a comparison to Bitcoin’s halving: while XRP has no programmatic halving, he proposes that a sudden adoption wave could function like a de facto halving of available supply—“XRP’s version of a halving could actually be the adoption event.” He also updates the narrative context that long dogged XRP. Once derided for “too much supply,” he argues the script has “totally flipped.” He cites the current cycle’s optics—“XRP is sitting above $3 with a market cap north of around $180 billion”—as evidence that raw supply counts did not cap price as tightly as critics claimed, and as a backdrop for why a scarcity narrative is gaining traction. Still, he declines to publish targets or timelines, repeatedly stressing uncertainty and risk. “I’m not a financial adviser… cryptocurrencies are highly volatile,” he reminds viewers, adding that tokenization could take off “on some other platform,” unfold more slowly than enthusiasts expect, or fail to get to “sudden shock” scale. The verdict he offers is deliberately bound. The theory that “XRP supply could vanish overnight” is imprecise on its face; the ledger will not erase coins. But after examining dashboard methodologies, escrow mechanics and the behavior of large holders, he concludes that the effective float could be meaningfully smaller than headline supply figures, and that a fast-developing tokenization use case could, under the right conditions, stress that float. “Overnight is a dramatic way to put it,” he concedes. “The change could actually be very sudden when it comes.” At press time, XRP traded at $3.0198. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com