Triaconta Weekly #244

The following topics will be addressed in this weekly:

  • Bundle performance
  • Winners & Losers
  • Market overview

Bundle performance
We started the week on a positive note as Fed chairman Jerome Powell expressed his expectation that 2023 will be a year when inflation eases significantly. Hopes that interest rate hikes are over, and there might be an interest rate cut, were dashed on Thursday by another Fed member warning that interest rates can go much higher as long as the labour market remains as good as it is with record low unemployment. Bitcoin fell nearly 10% for the first time this year.

Big3:
1 Month: +19.83% | 7D: -4.50% | 24H: -3.21%

Top30:
1 Month: +28.42% | 7D: -4.46% | 24H: -5.15%

Penny:
1 Month: +30.91% | 7D: -0.50% | 24H: -6.96%

DeFi:
1 Month: +45.44% | 7D: +2.92% | 24H: -7.98%

Winners & Losers
The Graph (+58%) and Fetch.AI (+34%) stand out far above the other projects this week. The Graph price tripled already this year and kept pace with the increase in search queries. The Graph indexes other blockchains and makes them quick and easy to search for, for example, DeFi applications. Each search query has to be paid for, so this increased tremendously. AI is already the hype of the year as Google too is launching an AI variant of its search engine and Microsoft is integrating the well-known Chat GPT with its Bing search engine. Fetch.AI is actually a step further and can both integrate with existing AI platforms to enable commercial use and create autonomous agents, personal digital assistants, that have already answered your search question before you have even asked it. Fantom (-31%) is finally correcting on its ample doubling this year and Gala (-24%) is also taking a step back.

Market overview

There is growing concern in the US over enforcement of tentatively unclear crypto rules by the US regulator SEC. A major US crypto exchange stops offering staking (to US customers!) after four years and pays a $30 million settlement. The exchange offered staking to the full satisfaction of their customers, but according to the SEC, it lacked the proper licences to do so and stopping has improved consumer protection. However, one of the SEC committee members publicly condemned the action, stating that at the moment it is not at all clear how and with what licence offering staking is allowed in America. The lack of clarity on staking led to Ethereum’s flight to Lido DAO which is expected to fall outside US rules as a decentralised staking protocol. The TVL (total value locked) rose 33% to $8.5 billion in the past month and the price of the token by 20% immediately after the SEC’s action.

Cardano is getting its next major update, aptly named Valentine, on 14 February, which is going to provide more interoperability and more secure cross-chain dApps. Extensions to the Plutus programming language for smart-contracts on Cardano will allow developers to work with various new types of cryptography on other blockchains. Cardano development has increased significantly in 2022 and the project has the largest development activity on Github of any blockchain this year after Polkadot, with Ethereum at number three.

On 8 February, the first block of the new Layer-1 EVM compatible Chiliz blockchain was validated. The Chiliz project is now five years old and promises 8-10 major projects in the coming months including NFT ticket pilots, fan tokens for athletes and collaboration with Web3 infrastructure partners that are all about sports and entertainment.

Technical analysis (TA) is the study of charts of historical prices to try to make statements about future value. This week saw two important crosses and a first for Bitcoin. The 50-day moving average went up through the line of the 200-day average this week. This phenomenon is called a “golden cross” and in the past usually gave very positive momentum and confidence in a further rise. The significance increases when the price is close to a cross, and this cross was just below $20,000. So the Bitcoin price should have gone down a bit followed by a big rise. That this did not happen is possibly due to the first ever “death-cross” in the Bitcoin weekly chart, where the 50-week average dropped through the line of the 200-week average for the first time. That cross was close to $25,000 and usually heralds a significant drop. Bitcoin indeed almost reached $25,000 last week and fell this week and thus, according to the TA, may go all the way to support around $20,000.