Cryptocurrency Market Overview 09/14/2023
News block
1. FTX has received court permission to sell assets
The FTX exchange received the green light in court yesterday to sell its digital assets as part of the bankruptcy procedure. FTX can now sell Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin and other assets worth $3.4 billion.
The sale will take place gradually and, with a high probability, transactions will be concluded on the OTC market.
2. The cryptocurrency sector leads in investments in the EU
In the midst of the global downturn in the fintech market, the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector managed to become the leader in investments in a number of major European markets.
According to the report "The State of European financial technologies" published by Amsterdam venture fund Finch Capital, in the region of Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the first half of 2023, there was a 50% drop in investment in financial technologies. The volume of financing fell from $27.3 billion in the first half of 2022 to $11.2 billion in the first half of 2023.
However, the crypto business stands out in the overall picture, occupying a leading position in terms of investments attracted in several large markets. In the UK, the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector accounted for 28% of all transactions concluded in the financial technology sector in the first half of 2023. In the Netherlands, this figure was even higher — 35% of all transactions. In Germany and France, the share of cryptocurrencies was 27% and 29%, respectively.
The main competitor of the cryptocurrency is the lending sector, which turned out to be the leader in terms of market share in Ireland and in the region as a whole in terms of transaction volume.
3. Coinbase integrates the Bitcoin Lightning Network
The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has confirmed its decision to integrate the Lightning Network second-level payment protocol.
The Lighting Network (LN) was created to help solve the problem of bitcoin scalability and compete with new cryptocurrency projects that have comparatively faster and cheaper transactions.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong confirmed the exchange's decision to integrate the Lightning Network: "Bitcoin is the most important asset in cryptocurrency and we are pleased to contribute to providing faster and cheaper transactions with BTC. The integration will take some time, so please be patient."
Overview of the crypto market
🔸 The current capitalization of the crypto market is $1.082 trillion
🔸 Trading volume for the last day is $39.02 billion
🔸 BTC dominance 47.1%
🔸 Fear and greed index:
- today 45, yesterday 41 a week ago 46
where 0 is extreme fear (may be a sign that investors are too scared - often it's a good time to buy), and 100 is extreme greed (the market needs correction).
The price of the first cryptocurrency practically did not change on the news that inflation in the US exceeded expectations, and the bankrupt FTX exchange received court permission to gradually sell its crypto assets.
It has been almost a month since bitcoin experienced a sharp drop, dropping from around $29.0k to below $26.0k in just a few hours. Since then, the cryptocurrency has tried several times to break out of the narrow area around $26.0k – both up and down – but quickly returned to this range.
And although BTC remains stable at current levels, some analysts note a deterioration in the technical picture for the largest cryptocurrency.
"We expect the inevitable decline to end this quarter," said QCP Capital, a cryptocurrency trading firm. In their opinion, a number of negative news in the coming weeks, such as a more aggressive meeting of the Federal Reserve System next week, the sale of FTX assets and the repayment of the Mt Gox fund may lead to a decrease in the BTC price to about $23.0k.
The value of the Toncoin (TON) cryptocurrency increased by 13% yesterday on the news that Telegram approved the TON network as its Web3 blockchain infrastructure and plans to integrate it into its application.
Whales purchased 42 million OP tokens
Wallets with a balance of 10 thousand to 1 million Optimism tokens (OP) have grown by 42.23 million OP over the past two months, which is equivalent to about $60 million:
Blue circle = purchase of whales worth more than $100 thousand;
Red circle = sales worth more than $100 thousand;
Black arrow = accumulation of wallets with a balance of 10 thousand - 1 million OP tokens.
Why are OP tokens interesting to big players?
Today, more and more projects are launching their Layer-2 networks based on OP Stack. Among them are Base, Debank, Zora, opBNB, Manta, Celo, Aevo and a dozen more projects.
Any Layer-2 network consists of three layers - consensus, execution and calculations. OP Stack is a set of software components consisting of certain standardized building units in each of these layers, the use of which significantly simplifies the process of creating a Layer-2 network. At the same time, thanks to such a common foundation, all these Layer-2 networks will have common security and sets of technologies that will allow them to communicate more easily with each other, thereby not fragmenting, but combining the liquidity of various Layer-2.
But in order for the Layer-2 network to become part of the Optimism ecosystem, it must be officially managed by the Optimism Collective, where management is carried out using the OP token.
Thus, the more Layer-2 networks will be launched based on OP Stack, the more valuable the OP token will become (especially in the long term).
Which projects are still actively developing now?
The activity of developers can say a lot about the effort that the team of a particular project puts into introducing innovations and improving existing products.
Here are three main reasons why developer activity on GitHub is so valuable:
- The project is expected to support more different functions;
- Regular high activity of developers increases the chances that the project will be successful;
- This reduces the likelihood of a scam project.
Here is a selection of projects whose developers have been the most active over the past 30 days:
As you can see, many of these projects are in the TOP 30 of the rating by market capitalization. And this is not accidental.
At the same time, the Chainlink (LINK) team has very noticeably increased the pace of development recently. The Filecoin (FIL) team has also been gaining momentum well since July:
And recall that the accumulation of tokens of those projects that continue to constantly work on improvement and innovation has never been a bad investment strategy.
