Triaconta Weekly #196

The following topics will be addressed in this weekly.

  • Bundle performance
  • Winners & Losers
  • Market overview

Bundle performance

Not a good start to 2022 for the bundles unless of course you were just planning to buy some more this year. An unexpectedly bad report from the US Federal Reserve (FED) spooked investors this first week. Many cryptocurrencies also fell. That is the flip side of the institutional money that is now in the sector. This week you can clearly see how diversification in your bundle ensures that the decline is smaller because there are also a few significant risers. Bitcoin fell more than 12% and Ethereum more than 14% this week.

Big 3:
1 Month: -18.40% | 7D: -12.00% | 24H: +0.15%

Top 30:
1 Month: -10.33% | 7D: -9.05% | 24H: 0.67%

Penny stock:
1 Month: -13.31% | 7D: -9.68% | 24H: -0.10%

DeFi:
1 Month: 1.87% | 7D: -5.26% | 24H: 0.55%

Winners & Losers

A great week for Cosmos (+37%) and Fantom (+21%), both of whom are almost at a new all-time high. Chainlink (+24%) with even more links provided. Ravencoin (+14%), probably because of the halving, but also because of the NFT trading on this blockchain. Internet Computer (+15%) has been rising for three weeks after bottoming out at $20.
The biggest decliners this week are the gaming tokens Gala (-25%) and Axie Infinity (-24%), with WhaleStats noting that the large Ethereum owners are now buying these tokens en masse. Finally, around 20% declines for many major cryptocurrencies such as IOTA, Aave, Terra and Solana.

Market overview

On January 1, the aggregate Bitcoin computing power broke through 200 Exahash/s (1 exahash is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hash), setting a new all-time high (207.53 EH/s) for the first time since April 15, 2021. Fortunately, many miners already run on electricity from sun, wind and hydropower because this is often the cheapest electricity and we hope and expect that this will increase further in 2022 under pressure from the climate discussion. Bitcoin mining is also perfectly suited to make use of the huge amount of energy that is wasted worldwide. For example, the gas flared by the US oil and gas industry alone could generate the 150 TWh of electricity needed today to run the Bitcoin network.

Cryptocurrency finally became the most read topic on the Reddit discussion platform in 2021, and within that category it was no longer Bitcoin but Dogecoin that was most mentioned. Also the groups that previously only allowed discussions about investing in stocks like Wallstreetbets are no longer anti-crypto. There is too much overlap in members and the dividing line is no longer clear due to, for example, the just announced marketplace for NFT from Gamestop and the collaboration of listed companies with various blockchains.

Chainalysis has calculated that crime-related crypto transactions worldwide have increased 79% in 2021 to a record $14 billion. In comparison with fiat money, in the Netherlands alone an estimated 16 billion euros in criminal money is laundered every year. The increase is dwarfed by the 567% increase in the total number of transactions. This brings the percentage of transactions related to criminal activities to 0.15%, the lowest percentage since 2017.

BTCS Inc. (formerly the Bitcoin shop) is a Nasdaq listed company that now offers staking as a service. They will be the first company to pay out Bividend in March. This is dividend that is paid in satoshis. Bloomberg calls it a stunt because the stock market value rose more than $15 million after this report. Not bad for a report of a dividend payment of about half a million dollars. BTCS Inc. however, is a pioneer in blockchain and crypto adoption. They were also the first US company to include Bitcoin on the balance sheet as a cash reserve long before Tesla and Microstrategy did the same.