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The Bitcoin and crypto markets seem a little skittish today, and that’s very likely because the next lot of US inflation data is imminent and making people a little antsy.

The latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report is set to drop some time on Aug 10 Stateside… which has signalled a “fun” time in the markets of late.

How will it play out this time, then? Depends on the data, natch. If the figure come in lower than the previous month’s record-breaking 9.1%, as many seem to believe it will, then it could prove Elon Musk right. Last week he predicted that US inflation has likely peaked out and any recession from here may be “mild to moderate”.

Could a lower CPI number have a further rallying effect from knee-jerk-reactionary crypto traders anticipating a softening of rate hikes from the Fed? More than possible. But then, so is a sense of vindication from the Fed that its aggressive rate-hiking is working, so why stop just yet?

In any case, the Fed’s hand won’t be shown for a little while, as they’re all chilling out until their September powwow – fixing things round the house in plaid shirts… working on their swings… asking Nancy Pelosi for trading tips.

 

Top 10 overview: A technical ‘alt season’?

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.15 trillion and down 2.5% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Usual crypto-dippage story here on the daily timeframe… Bitcoin shows the way, altcoins react a bit harder.

An interesting metric, however, is the Bitcoin dominance figure – the ratio of the market capitalisation of BTC to that of the rest of the cryptocurrency market.

We just read on Cointelegraph that this figure has now reached a six-month low – about 41% on CoinMarketCap and a bit lower still (38.8%) on CoinGecko.

Apparently technically speaking, this means we’re in some kind of “alt season” right now – generally a frothy period in the crypto market where altcoins outperform Bitcoin by a considerable margin.

And it’s true that there has been a bit of an alt rally, led by bull goose altcoin Ethereum, going on for a few weeks now.

If that’s passed you by a bit, though, perhaps you’ve been here a while and are feeling misty-eyed for the 1,000%-gain alt seasons of yore. The retail crowd may have been FOMOing in a tad lately, but this doesn’t feel like a true alt season, tbh.

Is “the worst over” for the 2022 crypto recession, though? Galaxy Digital boss Mike Novogratz thinks so. But then again, he’s a bloke with an embarrasingly MASSIVE tattoo of a LUNA wolf on his left arm… so we’ll take what he says with the level of salt your local fish’n’chip shop bungs on your order.

 

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100: Curve exchange compromised

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$9.2 billion to about US$500 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

• Mina Protocol (MINA), (market cap: US$565 million) +6%

• ZCash (ZEC), (mc: US$1 billion) +4%

• Celsius (CEL), (mc: US$811 million) +4%

• Chain (XCN), (mc: US$1.92 billion) +3%

• Kava (KAVA), (mc: US$555 million) +2%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• Curve DAO (CRV), (mc: US$509 million) -10%

• Helium (HNT), (mc: US$1 billion) -8%

• Filecoin (FIL), (market cap: US$2.1 billion) -8%

• BitDAO (BIT), (mc: US$785 million) -7%

• Kusama (KSM), (mc: US$543 million) -7%

 

Seems slightly unusual to see the recently strong-performing DeFi OG Curve heading this list today. And that’s because something’s afoot… specifically with a frontend breach on its exchange website.

“Don’t use the frontend yet. Investigating!” Curve Finance tweeted a few hours ago.

According to Decrypt, hackers apparently compromised a Curve website or domain name to redirect the transactions of unsuspecting users “to a malicious destination”.

Hopefully the $570k quoted below by blockchain detective ZachXBT is the worst of it…

 

Around the blocks

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

It seems an anonymous troll isn’t having a bar of yesterday’s US government ban on ETH mixing service Tornado Cash. Whoever this is, he/she (just hedging my bets in a non-woke way) has been “dusting” celebrity Ethereum wallets with small amounts of ETH, sent from a Tornado Cash wallet.

Apparently lucky recipients so far have included Jimmy Fallon, YouTuber Logan Paul, Shaquille O’Neal, digital artist Beeple and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong… among others.

Olimpio has a new airdrop heads up…

And apropos of nothing, really… this…

 

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