Triaconta Weekly #207

The following topics will be addressed in this weekly.

  • Bundle performance
  • Winners & Losers
  • Market overview

Bundle performance
The overall crypto market finally rises above milestone $2,000,000,000,000 this week. Bitcoin finally breaks through the €40,000 mark (hopefully permanently) and as reported last week, these are the positive signs we’ve been waiting for. Bitcoin dominance (the value of Bitcoin as a share the total crypto market value) has risen from 39% to at most 44% this year and is now falling again. This means that altcoins are rising even faster than Bitcoin this week. Just look at the Top 30 relative to just Bitcoin (+10%). With these numbers, April 2022, like April 2018, might just become a new alt season.

Big 3:
1 Month: +18.84% | 7D: +9.97% | 24H: +1.83%

Top 30:
1 Month: +24.14% | 7D: +19.43% | 24H: +2.29%

Penny stock:
1 Month: +18.09% | 7D: +21.45% | 24H: +1.45%

DeFi:
1 Month: +23.48% | 7D: +13.06% | 24H: +2.92%

Winners & Losers
Ethereum Classic (+80%) pops up this week due to a short squeeze (see market overview) and a surprising rise for Bitcoin Gold (+53%) with no news so a bit suspect. Axie (+46%) passes the $4 billion mark in total NFT sales and rises ahead of the Origin (Battles V3) launch. Super green crypto Qtum (+44%) is the main sponsor of the Binance blockchain week in Dubai starting Monday. There were no losers this week and so the smallest risers Waves (+3%) and Nano (+4%) managed to hold on to last week’s gains nicely.

Market overview
A sudden rise in the price of Ethereum Classic (+80%). It happens often that the cheaper alternative gets a lot of social media attention when big brother Ethereum rises substantially (+12%) but now there seems to be more to it. Due to the rise, large short positions on ETC had to be closed (short squeeze) which caused much additional price increase. If Ethereum indeed manages to move to Proof of Stake this year, the Ethereum miners will have to do something else with their machines, and then, according to a recent blog post of this original Ethereum project, they are very welcome to join the network.

For (accredited US) investors who think Ethereum dominance will soon be over, Grayscale is launching a new mutual fund aptly named Smart Contract Platform Ex-Ethereum Fund consisting of seven Ethereum competitors ADA, SOL, AVAX, DOT, MATIC, ALGO and XLM. Ethereum plans to make a major change this year by moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. It is impossible to predict what the impact will be on the price. Currently, these competitors have only 35% of Ethereum’s market capitalization and the majority of 55% of the total value in DeFi is still tied up on the Ethereum network.

Terra bought $125 million worth of Bitcoin this week from reserves it holds for its own stablecoin UST. Terra’s treasury has decided to eventually buy $10 billion worth of Bitcoin by always spending a percentage of the money brought in by the purchase of UST on Bitcoin. Do Kwon, founder of Terraform Lab, described the move as a catalyst to usher in the “new monetary era of the Bitcoin standard.” The announcement caused both Bitcoin (+10%) and Luna (+11%) to rise nicely.

Gala games will release a major Walking Dead NFT series on March 28 in collaboration with VOX and AMC. Game developer Will Wright, known for The Sims, has built a VOXverse for the 8,888 new NFT characters. What makes these avatars special is that they can also roam in other Gala games like TOWN and Walking Dead Empires. They can only be purchased with Gala tokens so hopefully this series will be popular enough for a big increase in demand and thus of course the price of Gala.

The Japan Virtual and Crypto Assets Exchange Association, a self-regulatory organization for the Japanese cryptocurrency industry, has announced in a sort of major catch-up move that XRP may be listed alongside 17 other cryptocurrencies on crypto exchanges in Japan. Only a small number of approved cryptocurrencies are allowed to be traded in Japan. The most notable approval is of course for XRP while this coin is still blocked on U.S. cryptocurrency exchanges due to the company Ripple’s legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Whether XRP is a security only seems to be in doubt now by this US regulator, and hopefully the judge there will also soon decide that the rest of the world has seen it right all along.