The crypto market was in a nice uptrend last week. Unfortunately, this rally was cut short after Thursday. We’ve seen prices go down for the past four days now. Bitcoin’s price is trying to make the 200-week moving average support. There are some great performers in the altcoin top 100 ranking list.
Bitcoin’s price is at a key support level
Bitcoin’s price is 22,900 dollars at the time of writing this article. The price was just 21,100 dollars a week ago, which means we’ve seen a price rise of nine percent. This is nice, but Bitcoin’s price was closing 25,000 last week!
The graph below shows Bitcoin’s price development on weekly candles. The blue line is the important 200-week moving average.
Bitcoin’s price has moved back above the 200 WMA. This trend line has provided support in previous major price crashes, such as the March 2020 crash and the Jan-Feb 2019 bottom.
The crash of June 2022 sunk Bitcoin below this trendline, which surprised investors. The price has crawled back above the 200 WMA in July. Now Bitcoin is sitting exactly on this important support. It’s a great place to build the foundation for a new rally.
Bitcoin’s price almost reached 25,000 dollars last week. The reason for the surge was the press conference held by the Fed. We covered this topic also on our news overview.
Fed chairman Jerome Powell said that Fed wouldn’t be hiking rates on autopilot. In the future, Fed will be data-dependent and it’ll look at each possible rate increase case-by-case. Since the economic data of the US keeps getting worse, investors made their conclusions: rate hikes are soon over.
Bitcoin’s price was mooning in tandem with the major US stock indices Wednesday and Thursday. However, the price has fallen every day since: -0.28%, -0.59%, -1.36%, and -0.17%. Bitcoin is also down 1.6% today (on Tuesday).
The market is nervous right now because of the tensions around Taiwan. The speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, traveled to Taiwan yesterday. This has angered the Chinese and triggered quite tough Twitter commentary as well. Many have speculated that there could be a military conflict between US and China due to the Taiwan situation.
Have we finally reached the bottom of this bear market? This topic couldn’t be any hotter. Stock investors and crypto investors try to figure it out at the moment. Swedish Youtuber CTO Larsson made an interesting video about the subject yesterday. Check it out.
CTO Larsson analyzed previous bear market bottoms and compared those cases to the present day. He drew the conclusion that we haven’t seen a clear bottom signal just yet (from the TA perspective). We agree with CTO Larsson. We also believe there will be one more leg down before a new bull market begins.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel, though. Ever-worsening economic information from the US and the Fed comments suggest that interest rate hikes are soon over. We are likely at the final quarter of this bear market or entering it very soon.
Altcoins had a positive week
We can see lots of green colors in the altcoin market. Last week was a poor one, but altcoin investors are feeling great today. The list below shows the top 15 cryptocurrencies and how they have performed vs. Bitcoin.
There isn’t much to report, really. When we exclude stablecoins, only Cardano and Dogecoin have done worse than Bitcoin. The winners are mostly smart contract platforms. The best performer is Polkadot with a +8.98% price rise vs. Bitcoin.
When we look at the top 100 list, we find eight cryptocurrencies with a more significant than a 25% price rise against Bitcoin.
The best performer of the last week was Oasis Network’s native token Rose. It has moved up more than 58% vs. Bitcoin. Oasis Network is one of the many smart contract platforms out there. It has received a big boost from a partnership with Meta.
Oasis Labs Partners with @Meta to Assess Fairness for its AI Models
This is a first-of-its kind initiative enabling inclusiveness and fairness
Read more 👇🧵
— Oasis Labs (@OasisLabs) July 28, 2022
Filecoin is number three on the list of best performers. Its native token FIL is up 44% vs. Bitcoin. Filecoin is probably moving higher because of the news that it was added to the popular Brave browser wallet. There could be also increased demand for Filecoin services.
Lido (+41% vs. BTC) and Ethereum Classic (+39% vs. BTC) are next. We mentioned both cryptocurrencies also two weeks ago. Lido is a DeFi app providing liquid staking for the Ethereum 2.0 Proof of Stake chain. It seems to go up in price closer we get to The Merge update.
Ethereum Classic is the original branch of the Ethereum blockchain. It will remain as a Proof of Work blockchain. Investors are speculating that Ethereum Classic will see a rise in popularity after Ethereum moves to Proof of Stake.
After The Merge update is complete, Ethereum cannot be mined anymore. The question is: where will all the miners go? Many are speculating that Ethereum Classic is one of the targets. This would improve the security of the network significantly.
There is green color in the DeFi sector
The liquidity of the DeFi market has moved quite often in tandem with the altcoin market. Hence, it’s no surprise that the TVL is up six percent from last week. The total liquidity of the DeFi sector is now 86.53 billion dollars.
You’ll find up-to-date information at defillama.com.
The fresh liquidity is spread quite evenly among the major DeFi apps. Just one out of the top 26 protocols has increased its TVL by more than 20 percent. This is the tenth-placed InstaDapp.
The top 10 list of apps is unchanged from last week.
Popular Ethereum staking app Lido claimed second place a few weeks ago. Lido is now cementing this position by increasing its liquidity further. Lido’s popularity has increased every time we’ve seen more news regarding The Merge launch date. Check this week’s news overview for more information.
The buzz around Ethereum can be also seen in the blockchain rankings. Ethereum’s Layer 2 solution Optimism has moved to 10th place. It has witnessed 34% growth in TVL since last week. The native token of Optimism, OP, is also up 75% vs. Bitcoin. It didn’t make the cut earlier since OP is currently at 101st place in the crypto rankings.
Waves platform has fallen far from the top 10 list. It has lost over 51% of its liquidity in one week. Hence, there are now Ethereum Layer 2 solutions in 9th and 10th place.
There was also a major DeFi hack last week. The token bridge called Nomad was drained for about 200 million dollars worth of funds. This was the fourth 100+ million-dollar token bridge hack in 2022. Read more about the incident from the latest news overview.