Proactive Investors - Bitcoin stemmed its losses with a flat trade over the weekend, in what could be summed up as an ‘it could have been worse’ performance.
To get you up to speed, the BTC/USDT trading pair took a 5% nosedive last Thursday following yet another regulatory crackdown, this time on the act of staking.
Although bitcoin is not directly impacted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s latest target, sentiment across the crypto markets soured regardless, not helped by a muted performance on the equities markets.
Speaking to CNBC, SEC chair Gary Gensler accused cryptocurrency exchange Kraken of breaching securities law; Kraken’s US$30mln fine probably won’t be the last.
Luckily for those long on bitcoin, buyers’ support kicked in around US$21,600 and at the time of writing, BTC/USDT was changing hands dead on US$21,800.
Binance’s order book shows a bit of resistance at US$21,820, which the bulls will need to surpass in order to break above the key US$23,000 price point.
BTC/USDT bulls fend off further losses – Source: currency.com
Ethereum was fairly volatile over the weekend, having oscillated between US$1,490 and US$1,550 before opening Monday’s session at US$1,510 on the ETH/USDT pair.
ETH bulls have dug their heels in at US$1,495 per the Binance order book, implying some pretty stable support at current levels in the short term.
ETH/BTC has been an interesting play to watch lately, simply for how unpredictable the pair has become. Yet the pair’s bearish performance since Gensler’s staking warning on Thursday makes total sense, since Ethereum, as a proof-of-stake blockchain, has a lot more to lose than bitcoin.
In the altcoin space
The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) has dipped over 5.5% since last Thursday, indicating selling pressure across the wider altcoin space as traders weigh up the new regulatory battle lines.
Losses have been fairly uniform among the large caps, with Cardano (ADA), Dogecoin (DOGE), Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) all shedding approximately 10% in the past week.
Tron (TRX), on the other hand, has outperformed the market by staying in the green. TRX has been galvanised by a number of noteworthy announcements, including reduced trading fees on Binance, and a US$100mln AI development fund (no doubt capitalising on the groundswell of interest surrounding ChatGPT and other generative text protocols).
Top overnight riders include the Zilliqa (ZIL) blockchain, Render Token (RNDR) and Layer-1 protocol Stacks (STX).
Global cryptocurrency market capitalisation currently sits at US$1.01tn, with bitcoin’s market dominance chugging along at a fairly standard 43.63%.
In the decentralised finance (DeF) space, total value locked (TVL) shed half a percent to US$47.1bn overnight.
Liquid staking protocol Lido (LDO) remains the dominant DeFi protocol by TVL, constituting around 17% of the whole DeFi marketplace.
Read more on Proactive Investors UK
