Bitcoin’s price is again at a critical support level. So far it has held despite the fact that major U.S. stock indices are making new 2022 lows. Investors are anxiously waiting for the next U.S. CPI print. There has been little action in the altcoin market. The same goes for the DeFi sector.
Bitcoin price is testing a key support level
Bitcoin’s price is almost exactly 19,000 dollars at the time of writing this article. This number is more than a thousand dollars lower than a week ago. Bitcoin’s price has settled again to a key support zone around 18,500-19,500 dollars. This floor has been tested constantly in the past three months. So far it holds.
The graph below shows Bitcoin’s price development on weekly candles in the past year. The blue trend line is the important 200-week moving average.
The previously mentioned support zone is marked with blue color. A weekly candle has not closed below 18,800 dollars in 2022 despite the fact that the price has briefly dipped below 18,000 dollars.
Bitcoin’s price is actually holding well considering the circumstances. The Nasdaq index is falling for the fifth consecutive week and for the third consecutive day. Nasdaq had been in the red in seven out of the previous eight weeks.
Other major U.S. indices have also made new lows for the year. In other words, they have broken June’s bottom. Bitcoin, however, is still about ten percent above its yearly low.
The current situation doesn’t look good for Bitcoin either. It’s worrying to see this 18,500-19,500 support zone being tested so many times. Especially now, when there is more downward pressure coming from the stock market every week. A well-known macro analyst Mohamed El-Erian gave a good overview of the macro situation in a CNBC interview yesterday.
Investors are currently waiting for new inflation data. The U.S. CPI print from September will be published on Thursday afternoon. The consensus of expectations is very close to the number we had a month ago. Hence, there is a good chance we won’t see a drop in CPI, which would result in a market selloff. There are also more important economic data points coming out of the U.S. this week.
Everyone hopes we’d see a quick drop in the U.S. inflation numbers. This would allow Fed to take a more supportive approach to its monetary policy and even stop the rate hikes. Currently, we are far away from the sustainable level of two percent inflation.
Unfortunately, Fed has chosen a path that has no good outcomes. Fed is trying to fix the errors it has made in the past years and regain its credibility. However, it is crashing the markets and pushing the U.S. into a recession while doing so.
Fed Policy errors:
1. Blowing it on inflation & printing too much too long
2. Reacting too slowly
3. Going too fast now to catch up.
4. Locking itself into a hawkish narrative to fix credibility leaving itself with no way out & no flexibility while risking financial stability.— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) October 11, 2022
We expect Bitcoin to have a high correlation with Nasdaq in the near future despite the fact it has decoupled a bit lately. Investors should remain pragmatic and simply expect new lows in the market later this year. This is not the time to start dreaming of a new bull market. Not yet.
No major moves in the altcoin market
Let’s look at the altcoin market next. We’ll begin with Bitcoin dominance, which is at 41.5% today. This number hasn’t really changed in seven days, which means you shouldn’t expect to see any major moves in the altcoin market. This is very much the case with the top 15 ranking list. As usual, all changes in the list are vs. Bitcoin (not vs. USD).
All moves in this list are between -5% and +5% except for one token: Ripple’s XRP. It has gained eight percent vs. Bitcoin in the last seven days. XRP has still momentum because investors keep speculating about a positive outcome from the SEC vs. Ripple case. This has moved XRP up a lot in recent weeks.
We’d also mention BNB Chain because it was hacked last week. Well, technically the chain wasn’t hacked but a token bridge between the BNB Beacon Chain and the BNB Smart Chain. A hacker managed to create two million BNB tokens out of nowhere to BNB Smart Chain worth 570 million dollars at the time.
Eventually, BNB Chain validators managed to limit losses to below 100 million dollars. The remaining BNB tokens are controlled by the administrators of the network. It’s a bit surprising that BNB didn’t really move because of all this. You can read more about the hack from this week’s news overview.
Ethereum has also made headlines this week. That is because Ether has been deflationary for seven days for the first time since the Merge upgrade.
ETH is turning deflationary again thanks solely to a token named XEN, which has consumed half of all Ethereum blockspace over the last day
Users have paid almost $1.8 million in gas fees to interact with the token contract, which has a marketcap of $500k pic.twitter.com/gJ8h2Zl0IF
— foobar (@0xfoobar) October 9, 2022
The reason is investor speculation with the XEN token. This has increased network activity a lot. The more the network is used, the more transaction fees are burned. If this burn is larger than the number of tokens given for validators, Ethereum becomes deflationary. This should be the default state once the activity returns to normal after the bear market.
This deflationary move hasn’t had an impact on the Ether price. Not yet, at least.
There are two coins with major gains in the top 100 ranking list. One of them is Casper Network’s native token CSPR. It’s getting a boost from the new enterprise-grade NFT standard that was announced recently.
Today we announced the release of CEP-78, an enterprise-grade NFT standard for the Casper Blockchain. CEP-78 brings the industry’s most customizable, secure and traceable standards to our growing NFT ecosystem: https://t.co/4DpVovu89a pic.twitter.com/CKOWuep08p
— CasperLabs (@Casper_Labs) October 5, 2022
Casper has gained about 20 percent vs. Bitcoin in the past seven days. This has also moved the CSPR token to the top 100 ranking list (93rd).
The best performer is the Huobi Token. If you don’t know, Huobi is one of the largest crypto exchanges in the market. Investors have been all over Huobi Token after an acquisition deal was announced a few days ago. An investment company titled About Capital has bought a majority share of Huobi. Justin Sun is one of the owners, who is best known as the founder of Tron and the owner of Poloniex exchange.
The new owners have stated they want to strengthen the status of the Huobi Token in the market. This has given a boost of 36% for HT vs. Bitcoin.
Still all quiet on the DeFi front
There has been very little to report from the DeFi market in recent months. The total liquidity of DeFi (TVL) has been going sideways for four months now. Today’s TVL is at 54,08 billion dollars, which is 1.3 billion less than last week.
We’d mention one interesting piece of news from the DeFi sector. For the first time, there was a hack in the Bitcoin DeFi! Not exactly in the Bitcoin blockchain, but on Sovryn. It is a DeFi ecosystem running on the Bitcoin sidechain called RSK. The losses were only a bit more than one million dollars.
There was also a hack on a small DEX called Transit Swap. Investors lost 23 million dollars in the incident. There was an interesting twist, though, since one of the hackers returned 2.75 million dollars worth of funds and claimed a 690,000 dollar bounty in the process.
The previously mentioned hack to BNB Chain didn’t impact any of its DeFi protocols. The top 10 ranking list of DeFi apps also remains unchanged.
All major protocols have lost a couple of percentages of TVL. September and October have been very poor in the DeFi sector in general since only Curve has managed to increase its TVL in the past 30 days. All other major DeFi protocols are in the red.
We have one small change in the blockchain top 10 rankings! There is a newcomer in the list called Mixin.
Mixin has claimed 10th place in the rankings. It’s a project that has been around for many years. Mixin has a focus on the popular interoperability sector, which means it wants to connect blockchains to each other. There is also the Mixin Messenger app. Mixing is in 10th place with a tiny margin, thanks to the downfall of Fantom.
Mixin is the only change in the top 10 rankings since the previous week. We have not seen many changes here in the past months.