Triaconta Weekly #291

The following topics will be addressed in this weekly:

  • Bundle performance
  • Winners & Losers
  • Market overview

Bundle performance
There is always plenty of volatility when Bitcoin breaks through the all-time highs. Almost every day a breakthrough followed by a rapid drop and then yet again further up. Since Thursday, though, market leader Bitcoin really seems to be taking a step back and many altcoins are following the trend. Weekly results are slightly negative for Big3 and the broad Top30. The PennyStock is holding up, mainly thanks to Gala and still a good result for DeFi on the back of Maker and Avalanche. The highly successful Bitcoin ETFs reached the milestone of $50 billion combined investment in Bitcoin this week. At last month’s pace, they are going to buy away ALL bitcoin currently on the exchanges within a year. Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade has succeeded and the odds for that ETF seem to have dropped significantly with about 70 days left until the final deadline. We hear nothing from the SEC about negotiations or requests for information which preceded the Bitcoin ETF approval.

Big3:
1 Month: +23.24% | 7D: -2.42% | 24H: -8.07%

Top30:
1 Month: +31.76% | 7D: -3.83% | 24H: -9.87%

Penny:
1 Month: +118.62% | 7D: -0.65% | 24H: -10.87%

DeFi:
1 Month: +32.96% | 7D: +4.13% | 24H: -9.91%

Bitcoin halving countdown: 34 days. This figure is a weekly new estimate based on the current blockchain hashrate.

Winners & Losers
0X Protocol, a decentralised exchange for tokens on the Ethereum blockchain founded in 2016, is back in the top 100 with a +137% this week and up +240% this year. However, the last protocol update in this project was from 2 years ago so this all seems speculative. It is true though that all Ethereum tokens have benefited from significantly reduced transaction costs since the Dencun upgrade. This week especially shows how useful it is to diversify as gaming token Gala (+49%) is compensating nicely for the declines in memecoins in PennyStock just as Near Protocol (+37%) is doing in the Top 30 and Maker (+37%) in the DeFi bundles. There is a lot of trading volume in these volatile times so Binance coin (+26%) and the recently added to the DeFi bundle THORchain (+25%), also a kind of decentralised exchange, are doing very well.

Market overview

El Salvador appears to hold far more Bitcoin than previously believed. Bukele publicly posted this week “our first #Bitcoin piggy bank in a physical vault on our national territory”. The picture showed a wallet containing 5,689.68 BTC, worth $411 million based on Thursday’s prices. Earlier estimates assumed less than 3,000 BTC. Earlier this week, President Bukele indicated that the country not only buys BTC but also receives it by selling passports, exchanging currency for businesses, government departments paid in BTC and through its own mining.

Indian cryptocurrency investment platform Mudrex will offer four of the US spot bitcoin ETFs to Indian individuals and first to institutional investors as well. With over 1.4 billion people, India is the most populous country and interest in crypto is high. Mudrex will initially offer four spot ETFs – BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton and Vanguard. The somewhat smaller VanEck decided this week to cut the fund’s management fees to zero until March 2025 to capture more market share. These low fees are also causing many investors to move investments to the US from European Bitcoin ETFs.

On Wednesday, Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade went live with a new mechanism to reduce transaction costs especially for layer-2 platforms that summarise multiple transactions before sending them to Ethereum. Latest polls show the upgrade is more than meeting expectations. The average cost of transactions on Optimism has fallen to almost 4 cents, a huge drop from the pre-upgrade average of around $1.40. The cost of Arbitrum also dropped significantly to 40 cents. That makes using these blockchains even more attractive.

With the Bitcoin halving just over a month away, we take a quick look back at the price movements at the previous three block reward halves. What has always happened so far is that only in the period after the halving did the price of Bitcoin go up to a new all-time high. This time, however, the price of Bitcoin has already set a new all-time high a month before the halving. If this is only because of the extra demand from Bitcoin ETFs, we may even get an acceleration of the rise after the halving. However, it is more likely that after 3x the same pattern, investors are expecting a repeat and are already anticipating it. For now, at least, the impending halving brings a lot of attention to Bitcoin, and in crypto, attention is always good for the price.