Cryptogram - 10FEB2023

Bitcoin YES 🟢, but Altcoins…

10 February 2023

The newsletter is put together by Giottus Crypto Platform and The News Minute’s Brand Studio. You can read all the previous issues of Cryptogram

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Hello!

Here are our Top 5 stories for the issue. 

1

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong sent shockwaves across the crypto industry by stating that he is hearing rumours of a ban on staking by the US SEC.

Coinbase doesn’t like it, but liquid staking platform

following this. This should also concern you, and we have spoken about this in our lead piece below.

2

Chingari

that it is going multichain with a partnership with Aptos blockchain, choosing the network as its preferred L1. GARI spiked. Sparks are flying in the India crypto space!

3

Binance is

assemble a consortium of crypto companies to rebuild trust in the industry, a source told Coindesk.

4

AI madness is not just restricted to ChatGPT and Bard. AI tokens saw

in the last week. More on this on our lead piece today.

5

Brave mobile browser added Solana dApps support for its iOS and Android, enabling users to connect with Solana NFT marketplaces Magic Eden and cryptocurrency exchanges Orca and Jupiter Exchange.

 WEEKLY MACROS

Total crypto market cap: $972 billion - 

6.45% 

Bitcoin market cap: $420 billion -

 7.2% 

The dollar index (DXY): 103.3 -

 1.4% 

Bitcoin Dominance: 43.4% - 

0.9%

Crypto Fear and Greed Index:

48

- The market is in neutral condition (from yesterday's greed) as all bullish signs evaporated as Kraken agrees with SEC to close their staking operations

 WEEKLY PRICE TRACKER

Price movements from last Friday

BTC Watch

 7% as Kraken Agreement to terminate crypto staking operations leaves investors in panic. BTC is volatile as the weekend approaches and might enter accumulation phase near $21,800.

ETH Watch

 5.85% with Ethereum quickly following Bitcoin losing the crucial $1,600 psychological level.

Altcoins Watch

ADA

:

 15% as Cardano's go-to-market pace has been relatively slow with no major DeFi utility to back its price

GRT

:

 58% as GRT network grows at a rapid phase & additionally due to the current AI narrative

HBAR

: 

 10% as Dell has become a member of the Hedera Governing Council to develop Dapps for its customers.

 WHAT'S HOT

  Coins to watch out for

Avalanche (AVAX)

- AVAX has been making waves in the crypto community especially after multiple partnerships with tech giants.  AVAX is in a good range to accumulate for the long term as its subnets (way to scale better) feature continue to attract new investors

Polygon (MATIC)

-  Polygon is about to launch its highly-anticipated zkEVM Ethereum scaling solution on the Ethereum mainnet. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal tweeted recently that the team developing Polygon’s zkEVM has set a date for its release. zkEVM, often called the holy grail of Ethereum scaling, stands for zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine, a type of scaling solution for Ethereum. MATIC is expected to hold strong under bearishness and might rally hard if BTC turns bullish.

Project to watch out for

Infinitypools

- InfinityPools is a new DeFi primitive built on top of Uniswap V3. It is a two-sided marketplace, with traders on one side and liquidity providers on the other. They claim its unique because it allows highly leveraged trading of any asset available on Uniswap. No counterparty risks. No liquidations. No oracles. A project to watch out for. 

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 THE HOT TAKE

Stick to Bitcoin, play safe with Altcoins

This year has been action packed so far, and it’s exciting. While the Bitcoin rally is certainly a good sign, there are some whale movements which we need to be wary of.

In this issue, we track four recent trends which you need to understand better so you can invest better.

1. AI is the hot new topic

AI has taken centre stage this year – with the adoption of ChatGPT and with global companies including Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) announcing their future big plays.

Google Trends has shown a significant interest in retail investors trying to catch the train quick.

Source: Google Trends

In crypto, the story is the same.

Source: CoinGecko

Top trending coins are majority AI based – Valot, GNY, SingularityNET and Fetch.ai have all surged in price in the last week or so.

If you are buying any of these coins, keep in mind these are ones with low market cap and even a couple of million dollars can be used to manipulate the prices.

2. Bitcoin is at the ‘cross’roads

Have you heard about a

in technical analysis? 

Well, Bitcoin just had (or is about to have) both! While the golden cross usually signals a great rally ahead, a death cross signals quite the opposite. The upcoming death cross on the weekly for Bitcoin will be the first ever such event in its history. Four out of the last five golden crosses led to a strong increase in BTC price. One didn’t – February 2020 with COVID-19 hit. Two articles on this,

, and

. 

Where is Bitcoin heading now? We believe that a strong pullback is possible by the end of March post which it will be able to consolidate and take on a sustained rally.

3. Whales have spiked the altcoin market

Whales (large crypto asset owners) often play the market by making strategic moves before retail investors try to copy them (and lose money since they are late in the game).

Recent surges in the altcoin market have all been whale-led according to

. Growing altcoins – FTM, LOOKS, LDO, FXS and GMX – have all benefited from their activity.

While this looks great, the concerning point to note is that

– this usually means a sell-off is incoming (such as the one witnessed today).

Whales – net deposit/withdrawals of Bitcoin from exchanges.Source: Glassnode

4. US SEC may crackdown on staking

This is a concerning development for the Ethereum and altcoin fanbase. Most altcoins are all on PoS consensus protocol and staking is usually a viable, safe way to earn rewards while contributing to network health. This also leads into the other securities v/s commodities debate emanating from the US. While Bitcoin is classified as a commodity, all other crypto assets including Ethereum maybe classified as a security (and thus inviting additional governmental intervention on them).

So, takeaways?

Invest in Bitcoin. Period. We have previously argued that Bitcoin dominance is likely to increase this quarter. Let the market noise settle around altcoins. Invest only when you are sure that altcoins won’t bleed more (against BTC or USD).

That’s it for this issue, see you next week.

If you have any questions or feedback for us, write to us at [email protected]. You can check out the previous issues here.

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