Consensus wrap up: Where was the bitcoin rally?

The news of deals and grand reveals at Consensus has been a constant flow for the past three days and all of it delivered with the usual fervor of futuristic big thinkers. But what we didn’t see this year was the bitcoin price rally peddled in the media last week by the fund manager Fundstrat.

During the previous three Consensus conferences, bitcoin rallied between 10 and 70 percent but Fundstrat managing partner Thomas Lee was even more bullish about prospects this year: “Already one of the largest crypto conferences in the world, attendance this year is up dramatically and coming at a time when bitcoin/crypto is down YTD. Hence, we expect the Consensus rally to be even larger than previous years.”

Going by the precedent of the 70 percent rally last year, Lee’s prediction implied a breakout in bitcoin to back above $15,000.

Lee, an experienced Wall St analyst of 25 years, has clocked up more airtime than most fund managers on mainstream financial media making definitive claims about the future price of cryptos with specific price and time targets. Lee and his Fundstrat managers make regular appearances on CNBC making prophetic predictions with definitive explanations on what is happening in the market, especially with bitcoin.

Lee has made the call that BTC will increase to “at least $25,000” by the end of this year, implying a tripling in value from where we are today.

Fundstrat this year also created a Bitcoin Misery Index (BMI) which is a contrarian index that signals a buy when the indicator, and confidence, is at its lowest. But as a proprietary tool there is little known about what goes into the composition of the index .

Amber Baldet reveals DApp store

Meanwhile, former head of JP Morgan’s blockchain project Quorum, Amber Baldet, revealed the details of her new project Clovyr at Consensus. Co-founded with another former lead blockchain developer at JP Morgan, Patrick Nielsen, Clovyr will be a sort of decentralized app store offering businesses and individuals tools to create their own Dapps and other blockchain solutions. It will also integrate with the Quorum project.

Baldet described the hesitance among businesses to adopt public blockchains as akin to the nascent stages of public cloud technology and the reluctance towards Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. Like then, companies are now spending big money and time trying to build their own private blockchains instead of using tried and tested networks, like Bitcoin’s or Ethereum’s.

Talking to Fortune Magazine, Baldet says companies will ultimately unwind their expensive private blockchain experiments, like they did with their private cloud efforts, and migrate to the public infrastructure already in place. “The conversation on the enterprise side right now feels a bit like that,” she says.

In a discussion with Ethereum developer Joe Lubin and bitcoin maximalist Jimmy Song after debuting Clovyr, Baldet asked Lubin what he thought of the project. Characteristically outspoken, Lubin wasn’t long bursting Baldet’s bubble. “I didn’t see anything other than buzzwords” he replied; even going as far as to dismiss decentralized applications (Dapps) in general as “magical blockchain dust”.

Startup-based blockchain ETF announced

Portfolio manager Brian Kelly, whose investment firm BKCM LLC focuses on digital currencies, announced at Consensus that it will create a blockchain-based startup exchange-traded fund (ETF).

Working in partnership with REX Shares founder Gregg King, Kelly will actively manage a portfolio of about 30 startup companies that are using blockchain technology.

The ETF will use the following criteria to screen the blockchain companies: ideas that streamline business processes; Wall Street “disruptors”; mining focused entities; exchange firms and startups creating a decentralized internet.

German exchange Deutsche Borse gets into crypto 

While most of the crypto world had its gaze firmly fixed on New York this week, one of Europe’s largest stock exchanges, Borse Stuttgart, announced that it will offer crypto trading through a subsidiary, Bison, which it claims will be the world’s first crypto trading app when released in September. It will offer trading on BTC, LTC, ETH and XRP.

Europe’s regulatory environment is arguably more conducive to blockchain innovation than the US and has attracted many startups to Malta, Switzerland and eastern Europe.

Follow @AndrewBNC

As the spotlights went out and the stages were deconstructed, what are we left with after the fourth edition of the world’s most prestigious blockchain conference?