Bitcoin can’t seem to make up its mind around $20k, which leaves most of the rest of the crypto market scratching heads as well. That said, Cardano appears to have caught a healthy, Vasil hard fork-related weekend glow.

Why is US$20k for BTC such a talked about level in crypto circles? Aside from being a nice round number, which us humans seem to like, it also represents roughly the peak of the 2017-2018 bull market and supposedly has some technical support and resistance.

However, as the YouTuber Crypto Zombie points out in a recent video, BTC back then really only hit that level and stayed there for about a day and a half. He notes that a level well below that – about US$13,900 – is what traders and investors should probably pay more attention to…

Some notable analysts tend to think the OG crypto has bottomed or is bottoming out, so could it still come down that far? Absolutely it could, if a trad Septembear Revenant-style savaging plays out.

Source: YouTube – Crypto Zombie

As for Cardano… let’s take a look at what’s going on there in just a sec…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.03 trillion and up about 1% since yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

What’s going on? In a word… Vasil. This is Cardano’s latest “hard fork” upgrade, and is touted as the major Ethereum rival’s biggest and most significant yet.

Probably more than most, Cardano has been heavily criticised in the past for its snail-like pace when it comes to its progression and development. Delayed three months from its original target date, the Vasil hard fork has now been set in stone (hopefully something like granite and not pumice) for September 22.

That’s just one week after the far-more publicised Ethereum Merge upgrade, which is said to be occurring around September 15. It’s the Stake of Origin of crypto upgrades. Mate against (former*) mate, proof-of-stake against proof-of-stake. Or something.

(* Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson was a co-founder of Ethereum along with Vitalik Buterin and others. Although there hasn’t been any particular public beef between the two for some time, it’s well known that the relationship has cooled ever since Hoskinson left Ethereum due to, let’s call it “creative differences”. These days, we imagine the Hosk is unlikely to be Buterin’s top pick for a night out on the sauce…)

“Vasil is the most significant Cardano update to date, bringing increased network capacity and lower cost transactions,” Cardano developer Input Output tweeted late last week.

Meanwhile, Hoskinson said: “What’s so amazing about that date is it randomly and just so happenly [sic] falls on the independence day of Bulgaria,” adding that: “[it’s] probably the hardest update we’ve ever had to do as an ecosystem.”

The hard fork upgrade is named after Bulgarian mathematician Vasil Dabov, a prominent Cardano ambassador who passed away last December.

Meanwhile, back on Bitcoin and the rest again for a moment, Dutch trader/analyst Michaël van de Poppe keeps always keeps things pretty real with the market’s down trends, but he’s actually seeing some upside potential for crypto in the near term…

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$8.4 billion to about US$430 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPERS

• GMX (GMX), (market cap: US$454 million) +9%

• DeFiChain (DFI), (mc: US$688 million) +9%

• The Sandbox (SAND), (mc: US$1.45 billion) +5%

• Cosmos Hub (ATOM), (mc: US$3.8 billion) +4%

• Loopring (LRC), (mc: US$461 million) +4%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS: Helium out of gas

• Celsius (CEL), (market cap: US$611 million) -4%

• Axie Infinity (AXS), (mc: US$1.3 billion) -3%

• EOS (EOS), (mc: US$1.49 billion) -3%

• Filecoin (FIL), (mc: US$1.72 billion) -2%

• Chiliz (CHZ), (mc: US$1.13 million) -2%

 

Around the blocks

A selection of randomness and pertinence that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse…

Apparently Bitcoin’s dying… again…

And here’s an interesting observation from noted trader Gareth Soloway, who has been predicting very bearish medium-term outcomes for Bitcoin, crypto and most risk assets so far this year. Is this the first sign that tune might be set to change? He does say “it will take a while”, though…

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