Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
June 14, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- Overstock.com is one of
the few publicly-traded companies that are riding the crypto wave,
and despite this year’s market performance of coins, their former
chairman is touting the benefits. Jonathan Johnson, who remains a
board member of the company explained that cryptocurrencies are a
growing segment of the online retailer’s business at an address to
the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington,
D.C.
“We have somewhere between $68,000
and $120,000 a week in cryptocurrency revenues; people buying
sheets and toasters using bitcoin or ethereum or other coins.” This
currently makes up only about 0.2 percent of the company’s total
revenue stream, but he emphasized that the figure is “growing”
despite declining crypto valuations.
Cryptocurrency Stock
Correlation
Overstock's market performance has
been correlated to the cryptocurrency market. Last fall,
Overstock’s share price surged with the bitcoin bubble from
approximately $30 on October 1 to nearly $87 by early January. It
leveled off to the $60 range by early March, and has since dropped
further.
The news that tZero, an Overstock
subsidiary, had been issued a subpoena by the Securities and
Exchange Commission regarding its $250 million initial coin
offering (ICO) hurt the stock price badly. It is now nearing $40.
Overstock also has a blockchain-focused venture arm called Medici
Ventures.
Crypto is like a Cash
Transaction
“We pay a processing fee for credit
cards, and we employ about 40 people in our fraud department.
That’s a cost of doing business with credit cards. When we take
cryptocurrency, we have a very small transaction fee with Coinbase,
much smaller than our credit card processing fee, and we have no
fraud prevention department. It’s like a cash transaction. For us,
that is a much cheaper way of doing business.”
U.S. regulatory clarity
needed
Johnson insinuated that regulatory
uncertainty in the United States is constraining the use and
development of blockchain-based technologies and capital formation
methods, such as initial coin offerings. The SEC’s reliance on the
Howey Test in determining when a token offering is and is not a
security has created too much uncertainty in the space.
“Medici Ventures is not invested in
a single ICO, in large part because the regulation around them is
still very hazy. We should not be regulating this technology. If
there are uses of it that need regulation, maybe."
By: BGN Editorial Staff
News:
Overstock
Jonathan
Johnson
Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrency
Regulation
ICO
Blockchain