Triaconta Weekly #269

The following topics will be addressed in this weekly:

  • Bundle performance
  • Winners & Losers
  • Market overview

Bundle performance
Next week is the US interest rate decision and the market is 97% assuming that a pause will be announced on 20 September. Europe did raise interest rates for the 10th time by 0.25% to 4.50%, but it is also assumed to be the last increase for the time being. China, meanwhile, has already started an interest rate cut to stimulate its economy. With Bitcoin (+2%) slightly higher, there are mainly many declines in the crypto market on the news that the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has court approval to sell billions worth of crypto to repay some of its debts. This will certainly not happen in 1x because they want to get as much revenue as possible but will give price pressure for some coins.

Big3:
1 Month: -10.34% | 7D: +1.14% | 24H: +2.32%

Top30:
1 Month: -16.61% | 7D: -1.96% | 24H: +2.61%

Penny:
1 Month: -19.93% | 7D: +0.32% | 24H: +2.39%

DeFi:
1 Month: -19.80% | 7D: -3.23% | 24H: +2.56%

Winners & Losers
The volatility of the smaller cryptos is increasing. The recently added PennyStock StormX (+31%) is suddenly soaring with the start of the American Football League (NFL), added to StormX Sports last week. Former PennyStock Spell Token (+20%) also suddenly had a fine week. Bitcoin Cash (+11%) seems to have found its way back up after finding support at $180. Vechain (+10%) accounted for PennyStock and Top30 after finally listing on Coinbase. The second settlement, this time for $1 million, between the SEC and an NFT issuer (Stoner Cats) spooked investors in ApeCoin (-16%). The coin has long been troubled by the fact that about $50 million or 11% of the tokens blocked for sale have been released to the market since its launch on 17 September. The PEPE coin’s (-16%) Telegram account was hacked and used for scams this week. This follows an earlier conflict between former and current founders in which unfortunately $15 million worth of Pepe Coin was swiped and that has almost halved the price in the past month. Arbitrum (-12%) falls despite a growing number of active users. The launch of the new DeFi options exchange Premia Blue on Arbitrum was apparently a reason for some big token owners to take profits.

Market overview

Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, will start offering customers the option of having their crypto managed by the bank. For the market leader, this marks a significant shift in the perception of cryptocurrencies from speculative assets to legitimate components of a diversified investment portfolio. Deutsche Bank’s asset management business, at over €1.3 trillion, is already larger than the entire crypto market combined. However, like other crypto service providers, they still need to neatly obtain a licence from the German financial regulator (BaFin).

According to a press release from the bank itself, ABN AMRO is the first Dutch bank to register a digital green bond on a public blockchain. With this innovative bond, housing investor and rental company Vesteda has raised EUR 5 million for its Green Finance Framework. The entire process of preparing, placing and documenting the bond was digital. The bond was issued as an ERC3643 token via Tokeny, an infrastructure platform used by Polygon to enable financial institutions to issue and manage securities and financial instruments. To store and secure investors’ unique keys, ABN AMRO uses a wallet to access the digital bond. For the proposed transaction, ABN AMRO also provided digital custody.

Ethereum switched from proof-of-work (PoW) mining to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus exactly a year ago today. PoS requires market participants to hold a minimum amount of ether to validate transactions in exchange for rewards in new ether. In one year, Ethereum distributed over 680 thousand new ether (ETH) and destroyed over 980 thousand ether, reducing the net supply by almost 300 thousand ether (0.25%). Without this major adjustment, ether was expected to have added about 3%. As predicted, the new mechanism where a bit of ether is destroyed with each transaction indeed causes a decreasing amount of Ethereum. Energy consumption has also naturally dropped by 99.9%.

Bitcoin mining, despite a quadrupling of computing power, is now done with more than half with sustainably generated power. Many new countries have started Bitcoin mining as a solution to temporary overcapacity or to harness energy unprofitable for other purposes, such as small gas fields. In Texas, Bitcoin mining is gratefully used as a stabiliser of the power grid because miners are the only industry that can be quickly turned on and off. With the global growth of wind and solar power, Bitcoin is thus going to play an increasing role in the energy transition.

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