Triaconta Weekly #212

The following topics will be addressed in this weekly.

  • Bundle performance
  • Winners & Losers
  • Market overview

Bundle performance
Bitcoin has fallen significantly in April and is back at the bottom of the slowly rising channel that started in late January. Next week almost certainly a rate hike in America and Europe is not participating so the Euro is also falling against the Dollar. While analysts expected U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) to grow by 1% in the first quarter of 2022, it instead fell by 1.4%. This makes upcoming interest rate hikes a little less likely but is of course not positive. Equity investors are currently very cautious and fat profits that can be put into crypto are out of the question. Still, they all want returns and the money has to go somewhere. The crypto sector right now is the only sector that is still growing (tremendously). Triaconta bunds are going down with the market this week.

Big 3:
1 Month: -16.64% | 7D: -3.53% | 24H: -2.57%

Top 30:
1 Month: -24.66% | 7D: -8.36% | 24H: -4.41%

Penny stock:
1 Month: -25.14% | 7D: -10.48% | 24H: -5.09%

DeFi:
1 Month: -24.01% | 7D: -11.31% | 24H: -7.94%

Winners & Losers
Kava (+14%) launches its mainnet May 10, which connects Cosmos and Ethereum. Kyber Network (+11%) is still doing fine while most of the coins are falling significantly. Only DogeCoin (+2%) held up due to Elon Musk’s possible acquisition of Twitter. Unfortunately, the losses are big for Lisk (-30%), Zilliqa (-24%), Waves (-23%), Axie infinity (-23%), Near Protocol (-22%) and many others.

Market overview
Investment giant Fidelity is going to allow American retirement savers to include up to 20% Bitcoin in their 401k. A 401k is a U.S. retirement plan to allow workers to save for their own retirement. They then do not have to pay taxes on the amount invested. This step is going to bring investing in cryptocurrency further into the mainstream by giving 23,000 employers the opportunity to offer this option to more than 20 million employees. The first company immediately signed up to do this: Microstrategy, of course.

The hashrate of the Bitcoin (BTC) network reached another new high of 258 EH/s, while the price is still struggling to get past $40,000. It seems that almost 50% of the mining capacity is now in the United States. The share of renewables has increased by 60% in a year due to public pressure on miners to prioritize green power. Norway leads the way in this with 100% green Bitcoins. Actually, the efficiency is even higher than 100% because the waste heat is used to dry wood and seaweed or to grow strawberries.

Tron is ramping up with a new stablecoin USDD with TRX as collateral as of May 5 and has given more clarity to the destination of a fund with over $1 billion ($1,111,111,111) which would first contribute more generally to the Tron ecosystem over the next 10 years. The focus is almost entirely on DeFi. 600 million will be spent on broadening the DeFi landscape by investing in a wide range of unique and innovative DeFi projects on the TRON network. This includes, for example, Just.

Demand for RippleNet which uses XRP to facilitate cross-border payments grew 8x in the first quarter compared to the first quarter of last year. That means billions more in revenue and all outside the United States. Due to the lawsuit in the US, the customer base now consists of 95% non-US banks and payment providers. CEO Garlinghouse and Ripple therefore want a ruling in the lawsuit as soon as possible to have clarity in the US but the prosecutor SEC has been employing a delaying tactic for over fifteen months now, constantly asking for more extensions and appealing every intermediate court decision. More and more US politicians believe that the SEC is going too far with its measures, thereby reducing US competitiveness and driving away jobs. Leading Republicans want a new regulator especially for “digital assets” such as crypto and stable coins. If so, they will first have to win a majority in the November 2022 elections. Most democrats do not seem to be fans of crypto or are poorly informed.