Triaconta Weekly #297

The following topics will be addressed in this weekly:

  • Bundle performance
  • Winners & Losers
  • Market overview

Bundle performance
Corporate interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is growing again due to the latest Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting and comments by Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. The central bank remains committed to possible interest rate cuts later this year. Bitcoin is an excellent long-term hedge against persistent inflation and is priced attractively again due to the declines in April. With the disappointing US jobs figures, Bitcoin is returning above $60,000. This is also likely to trigger a recovery in altcoins. DeFi is well represented in the Top 30 with Aave, Avalanche, Injective, Chainlink and Uniswap so both bunds declined this week due to an overall declining market sentiment. Then you are happy to see some Optimism (+18%) in the Top 30 due to its diversification.

Big3:
1 Month: -10.03% | 7D: -5.36% | 24H: +1.49%

Top30:
1 Month: -19.29% | 7D: -3.76% | 24H: +1.88%

Penny:
1 Month: -12.14% | 7D: -5.52% | 24H: +3.75%

DeFi:
1 Month: -29.17% | 7D: -7.27% | 24H: +1.86%

Winners & Losers
Optimism (+18%) keeps the Top30 from a larger decline. The project is very well funded and thus can buy many startups in addition to development as a scalability solution for Ethereum to start offering broader functionality. Cosmos (+5%), Lido DAO (+4%) and Pepe (+3%) rise slightly in a mostly declining market. As Bitcoin (-5%) declines, Stacks (-19%) will follow and vice versa! Theta Network (-16%) falls despite big plans with Blender, the world’s most popular 3D modeling and animation technology. Neo (-13%) delivered several more major updates on May 1 with improvements to its node implementation, API and Panel frontend application. These platforms are truly alive and well.

Market overview

April was the worst month for Bitcoin since June 2022. The launch of Bitcon ETFs in HongKong was disappointing in revenue with only $11 million on opening day. In contrast, best-selling futures for September are between $90,000 and $100,000 so there is still plenty of optimism for the rest of the year. Bitcoin, meanwhile, is quietly evolving with SegWit (2017), the separation of data and block verification, Taproot (2022) for scalability and Ordinals (2023) which gave each satoshi its own identity. Together, they enable a huge number of applications on the Bitcoin network that were previously reserved for specific altcoins.Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy presented in Las Vegas the company’s plans to launch a decentralized identity protocol based on Bitcoin.

May 15 is the deadline for companies to report their participation in Bitcoin ETFs to the U.S. SEC in a so-called 13F form. Those public notifications may well create positive momentum in the Bitcoin stock price. France’s BNB Paribas (the world’s ninth largest bank) reported buying 1030 shares in Blackrock’s ETF (for a total of $41,684). So not millions, but big banks daring to buy Bitcoin for themselves would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

For Ethereum, we are anxiously waiting to see if the SEC will approve or reject the ETF applications from VanEck and ARK. Ethereum is the second most popular crypto and there are probably many investors who would love to get into an ETF. The deadlines are May 23 and 24 and the outlook is not that good. According to rumors, the SEC has already classified Ethereum internally as a “security” and communication between fund providers and the regulator has also stopped. The move to proof-of-stake has got the SEC thinking about Ethereum’s qualification, and for ETFs, the staking revenue is also a problem. A rejection of the Ethereum ETF would be disappointing but a classification as a “security” would cause an outright crisis for both Ethereum and all tokens built on this network. Once again, it is high time for the U.S. Congress to come up with clear crypto legislation.