In October 2017, I was at the SIBOS conference in Toronto. It’s one of the world’s biggest banking and finance conferences. Actually, it may be the biggest.
Anyway, it was at this conference that one of the biggest announcements of 2017 went live.
Now, seeing as it was a global banking and finance conference, you might think a bank made this announcement.
After all, when the like of Wells Fargo, ABN Amro, JP Morgan, CBA and ANZ are in attendance, you’d think big announcements would come from them.
Well, it didn’t.
These institutions may have put out announcements. But none of them were as big as the one that came from IBM and the Stellar Foundation.
It was at this conference where Stellar and IBM announced their partnership to build a global blockchain. This would enable payments through regions in the South Pacific using blockchain and crypto technology.
It was massive. And it still is massive.
And on the back of the news, the value of Stellar’s crypto tokens (XLM) rose from around US 1.7 cents before the announcement, to over US 4.5 cents after it. That’s a 164% return in a single day!
Even now, after the rapid boom and subsequent plummet in crypto fiat-converted prices, XLM still trades at around US 22 cents — a tidy 1,194% gain from early October before Stellar’s partnership with IBM.
That’s what can happen when big crypto partners with big global tech companies
The trick is to keep on top of all the crypto projects out there and the announcements they put out. But that’s pretty hard when you consider there are now thousands of crypto projects out there.
And there are thousands more trying to raise money to ‘build’ their projects and ideas.
Now, we’re pretty confident that a lot of the crypto projects out there are destined for failure. But we’re also pretty confident that a lot of ‘normal’ start-up companies out there are also destined for failure.
So, it’s not really a problem isolated to crypto. The fact is, businesses fail. In both the crypto world and traditional financial system, businesses fail.
Still, there are plenty who don’t.
In fact, there are some that are so incredible, they attract the interest of the world’s biggest companies.
We’ve seen this with Stellar and IBM. And we’re now starting to see it creep into other pioneering crypto projects.
There’s one in particular that has just released a massive new announcement with one of the world’s biggest tech companies. And we’re not just talking about any ‘big’ tech company. We mean one with a market cap of more than US$200 billion.
A true global giant.
If this new partnership replicates what Stellar and IBM have done, it could see this crypto skyrocket. But only time will tell. And right now, it’s a tough market for crypto.
However, it does provide another piece of evidence that crypto is here to stay. Companies like IBM don’t get involved with a ‘fad’ or ‘fraud’. And this other unnamed tech giant wouldn’t get involved so heavily in this space, if they didn’t think it would be around in another five, 10…50 years’ time.
The crypto revolution is here to stay, folks. Get on board.
Regards,
Sam Volkering
Sam Volkering is one of the editors at Money Morning New Zealand, and is its small-cap, cryptocurrency and technology expert. He’s not interested in boring blue-chip stocks. He’s after explosive investments; companies whose shares trade for cents on the dollar, cryptocurrencies that he believes could deliver life-changing returns. He looks for the ‘edge of the bell curve’ opportunities that are often shunned by those in the financial services industry. Sam specialises in finding new, cutting edge tech and translating that research into how the future will look — and where the opportunities lie. It’s his job to trawl the world to find, analyse, research and recommend investments in the world’s most revolutionary companies.