Crypto Market Forecast: 9th March
The price of Bitcoin and other digital assets continued to slide over the last week. Bitcoin ended the week down ~3% after a drop of ~10% in a 12 hour period between Saturday and Sunday. The number two and three assets on Brave New Coin’s market cap table, ETH and XRP, fell 2% and 6% respectively. The overall market cap for crypto fell ~2%.
With prices now hovering back where they were at the start of the year, many in the industry are concerned that Bitcoin’s strong early-year price momentum - driven by strong macro fundamentals and the upcoming Bitcoin block reward halving - may be derailed. That said, the Bitcoin network’s fundamentals continue to look impressive despite the bearish price performance in recent weeks.
Bitcoin’s hash rate hit a new all-time high on March 1st of ~140 Quintillion Hashes per second, continuing the strong uptrend of the last 6 months. Other metrics like average transaction fees and Google Trends search interest are also up since the start of the year. Bullish fundamentals like these often translate into eventual price gains and Bitcoin bulls will hope this positive fundamental pressure helps provide some resistance against COVID-19 driven capital flight.
In the wider crypto market, two major altcoin projects made headlines as the Tron takeover of Steemit faced controversy and accusations of malicious practice. Justin Sun, the CEO of Tron convinced the operators of two leading cryptocurrency exchanges to pledge user STEEM tokens to prevent “malicious hackers” from compromising the blockchain. Controversy arose, however, because these weren’t really hackers; they were governance members of the Steem blockchain who had been democratically elected to manage the network.
The Steemit community had openly soft forked the network to prevent Justin Sun from acquiring ~US$12 million of pre-mined STEEM tokens that he would be receiving as part of a recent purchase of the Steemit.com entity. Sun, coordinating with the Huobi and Binance exchanges contrived to allocate voting power on the Blockchain to himself and a number of sock puppet accounts. Sun and his sock puppets ended up controlling Steem’s elite governing council before the Steemit community regained control and ousted Sun. Tron’s CEO also lost the support of the exchanges and a number of Steem developers chose to leave the project following the incident.
Following the Game of Thrones-esque episode, the price of both STEEM and TRX slid heavily over the weekend. Sun suggested the Steem communities soft fork was illegal and ‘not right’, while the Steemit community stood its ground.
This week in crypto events
March 11th- 13th BitTorrent token airdrop
It is difficult to keep Justin Sun out of the news, and another of his portfolio companies BitTorrent will airdrop a large chunk of internally held tokens to its community this week. Over the next 5 years, BitTorrent will return 10% of its total token supply back to BTT holders with the burns creating a “long term bond/interest rate equivalent” as the network evolves and develops. Over the last 7 days, the price of the network’s native BitTorrent token (XBTT) has fallen ~11%.
It was a similar story for most large-cap assets on Brave New Coin’s market cap table, with heavy sell offs over the weekend turning assets red across the board. EOS was one of the biggest losers of the week and has faced some negative fundamental headwinds following a reveal that Block.one’s leading Voice social media will run on a purpose-built private chain as opposed to the public chain which uses the EOS token.
It was a difficult weekend for Bitcoin bulls with the price of crypto’s original asset falling by over US$1000 over the weekend. The Bitcoin network’s growing activity and signs that a few whales may be driving the price drop by creating sell pressure on exchanges suggests Sunday’s price drop is temporary.
OhNoCrypto
via https://www.ohnocrypto.com
Aditya Das, Khareem Sudlow