It’d be fine if this ages like milk but it’s not an overly solid opening to the week for Bitcoin. If things keep tracking this way, BTC might be resembling Marcus Harris’s Test batting average pretty soon. (Caveat: but literally times 1,000.)

Meanwhile, altcoins are bathed in more blood than 11 seasons of The Walking Dead plus spin-offs, and another algorithmic stablecoin has just lost its US dollar pegging.

Any reasons to be crypto cheerful? Of course there are. Although it all depends on which timeframe you’re working towards.

How about the short term? Here’s an interesting Bitcoin trader’s take just now, which sounds pretty dicey if you’re an overexposed HODLer with a heart condition…

Let’s dive into today’s action…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at roughly US$1.33 trillion, down 1.8% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

After a relatively brief frisson above US$31k on Sunday to close out the week, Bitcoin has currently lost its $30k “peg” again, to borrow the most overused word in crypto at the moment.

And that’s a level proving pretty hard to crack and sustain right now. Still, according to PlanB, one of the most famous anonymous analysts in the crypto space, the Bitcoin-led bull run is in the middle of “creating a bottom”.

The creator of the now much-maligned Bitcoin Stock to Flow (s2F) model is of the belief we are a lot further into the bear market than perhaps a lot of people realise, suggesting the peak of the most recent bull run was actually more than a year ago, back in April 2021.

And that’s despite the BTC price actually reaching an all-time high of about US$69k in November.

It’s a theory that on-chain and Bitcoin cycle analyst “The Rational Root” agrees with, broken down in depth in a tweet thread (see below). A few of his points…

• The first peak of 2021 has “an enormous increase in short-term holder supply while the second has none”.

• The RSI (relative strength index) peaked in April 2021, and is now reaching what might be considered lows – a sign of potentially bottoming out.

• Bitcoin has been showing clear signs of consolidation for more than a year, “increasing our chances that a bottom is near”.

Still, a timely reminder below, from nuclear-engineer-turned-crypto-head Benjamin Cowen. Take any calls that predict the exact BTC bottom… with more grains of salt than the Dead Sea.

 

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$11.6 billion to about US$576 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time.

DAILY PUMPERS

• Chain (XCN), (market cap: US$1.73 billion) 12%

• Kusama (KSM), (market cap: US$704 million) 9%

• eCash (XEC), (market cap: US$889 million) 7%

• Synthetix (SNX), (market cap: US$641 million) 5%

• Monero (XMR), (market cap: US$3 billion) 3%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• TerraUSD (UST), (mc: US$664 million) -62% ($0.06)

• Terra (LUNA), (mc: US$877 million) -45%

• Arweave (AR), (mc: US$817 million) -11%

• The Graph (GRT), (mc: US$1.23 billion) -11%

• Dash (DASH), (mc: US$604 million) -7%

 

 

Uppers and downers: lower caps

Moving below the crypto unicorns (in some cases well below), here’s just a selection catching our eye…

DAILY PUMPERS

• Beefy.Finance (BIFI), (market cap: US$64 million) +72%

• Gains Network (GNS), (mc: US$26m) +44%

• Ampleforth Gevernance Token (FORTH), (mc: US$36m) +34%

• Clover Finance (CLV), (mc: US$49m) +28%

• Orchid Protocol (OXT), (mc: US$97m) +24%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• DEI (DEI), (mc: US$58m) -33%

• Anchor Protocol (ANC), (mc: US$43m) -33%

• Efinity (EFI), (mc: US$72m) -18%

• DEUS Finance (DEUS), (mc: US$22m) -12%

• Wilder World (WILD), (mc: US$30m) -11%

Another “stable”coin, Deus Finance’s DEI, has lost its peg to the US dollar, as of Sunday. It seems Terra’s UST has begun an unfortunate trend.

DEI, is a Fantom-ecosystem stablecoin that maintains its peg in a system that adjusts its collateral ratio via arbitrage bots that continually trade US$1 worth of underlying tokens for 1 DEI.

It’s another interesting idea, and that’s nowhere near the half of it. You’ll get a better idea of it here… before likely thanking yourself for keeping your powder dry in a centralised, fiat-backed stablecoin such as USDC instead.

 

Around the blocks

As charts watcher/analyst Justin Bennett notes, Bitcoin is now on a seven-week losing streak. That’s apparently a record for the most sustained week-by-week downtrend. What goes down, must go up?

There’s been a bit of a furore (when isn’t there in crypto?) around a few comments made by a prominent figure in the space. The CEO and founder of the FTX crypto exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried told the Financial Times  on Monday that he believes Bitcoin is not a suitable payments network, or an effective scaling network.

More specifically, “SBF” thinks Bitcoin’s mining-based Proof of Work network isn’t set up to handle millions of transactions.

Naturally, this went down like an algo stablecoin in an NFT of a lead zeppelin with certain sections of the Bitcoin faithful… particularly those building BTC Lightning Network payments solutions. Such as Jack Dorsey’s CashApp, for example…

Just sort it out would ya, crypto? There’s surely still room for all – Bitcoin maxis, Solana-spruiking billionaires and risky AF algo stablecoins alike… right?

 

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