Buckle up, because the end of this week shapes as pivotal. Reflecting that, the Crypto Fear & Greed Index yesterday hit its highest level since mid November 2021 – around Bitcoin’s all-time high. Also… XRP – what the?

We’ll look at possible reasons for why the latter has pumped 24% over the past 24 hours, further below.

But first, let’s examine why the crypto dial flipped to “Greed” just lately. It all has a helluva lot to do with the US banking woes. Probably.

Which in turn, ties in with the Bitcoin digital gold safe-haven narrative along with the possibility the US Fed will, on Thursday morning AEDT, pause or even cut its interest-rate hiking while it continues to inject a stupendous amount of freshly minted USD into the system to help bail out said banks.

(Or will the Fed opt for Quantitative Confusion and keep hiking while bank bailing?)

There are also lingering concerns around the fact the USDC stablecoin depegged recently related to the American government’s supposed “Choke Point 2.0” plan to debank the US crypto industry. This may have caused a rush into certain other top cryptos.

Whether those US gov efforts continue remains to be seen, but one thing is certain for crypto true believers, Bitcoin suddenly looks even more attractive as a store of value when compared with stablecoins pegged to a rapidly devaluing US dollar.

Here, enjoy this stirring montage from crypto analyst Kevin Svenson, set to a Mötley Crüe classic…

 

Who’s getting a little greedy?

Plenty of crypto heads right now, seemingly.

That level of 68 (above) for the crypto market’s leading sentiment tracker (which, by the way is based on a mix of market momentum, volatility, social media, surveys, trends and more) is the highest level the index has seen since November 16, 2021.

On that day, Bitcoin (BTC) was fidgeting around US$64,000, a few days after its $69k (“dude”) all-time high of November 10.

The market may well be being spurred on by the now-famous/infamous bet by former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, who has laid down US$2 million in two separate wagers on his belief BTC will hit… (Dr Evil close-up) $1 MILLION dollars by June 17 due to rapid hyperinflation and the devaluation of the USD.

Meanwhile, here’s Bloomberg Senior Commodity Strategist Mike McGlone tweeting about the possibility of a crypto supercycle, pointing to Bitcoin vastly outperforming gold.

One of Bitcoin’s key advantages over gold, McGlone notes, is its low and rising adoption plus diminishing supply.

McGlone also said earlier this week that he’d be shocked if the US/world does not have a recession, noting:

“Look what gold and bonds and Bitcoin are doing. Those to me are going to be some of the things that people are going to be looking to buy in dips as we tilt in a recession.”

Another prominent analyst and former Wall Street hedge fund manager with Goldman Sachs, Raoul Pal has updated his outlook on BTC, calling an 80% increase within the next year.

That’d put it around US$50k possibly before the end of the year if his prediction proves correct.

One thing, though… the longer the Fear & Greed Index keeps pushing to the right, best just keep in the back of the mind the old Warren Buffett maxim, eh? (“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful”.)

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.22 trillion, up about 1.2% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Yesterday, the altcoins appeared to all be flowing into Bitcoin, the long-term dominant crypto. Today, alts are getting some love as the crypto greed/hopium spreads ahead of the Fed rates announcement – which, incidentally, will hit around 5am on Thursday (AEDT).

It’s a green scene across the board in the majors, then but we’d better talk about XRP and its 22.7% rise (24% on the weekly timeframe). What’s going on there?!

 

XRP surges on legal-case sentiment and whale splashing

Here’s what’s going on there. It’s regarding optimistic sentiment swirling around a positive outcome in the Ripple Labs vs SEC case – the biggest legal event since Jimmy McGill humiliated his sanctimonious elder brother in Better Call Saul.

Recap: In December 2020, the SEC claimed Ripple Labs, along with CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Christian Larsen, the company’s cofounder, had raised more than US$1.3 billion by selling the XRP tokens as an unregistered securities offering to investors.

Ripple Labs said… yeahnah, that’s not right, and more than two years and a stack of legal fees later, it seems like the case might be about to find a conclusion.

John Deaton, a pro-Ripple/XRP lawyer, has predicted that the public will get to see an important piece of evidence in the case – the so-called Hinman emails and speech drafts. These reportedly contain internal SEC deliberations about the former SEC official William Hinman’s stance in 2018 that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities.

The documents could show certain biases the SEC might have with regards to picking winners and losers in its attempt to classify crypto assets. The SEC has repeatedly tried to keep the documents out of the courtroom.

Another reason for the XRP surge is very much due to the fact whales (large holders) have been buying up the asset just lately. This is based on data from on-chain analytics firm Santiment, as pointed out by crypto analyst Ali Martinez, below.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$8.69 billion to about US$424 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.)

PUMPERS

• Stellar (XLM), (market cap: US$2.56 billion) +10%

• Algorand (ALGO), (mc: US$1.6 billion) +7%

• Ethereum Classic (ETC), (mc: US$2.92 billion) +5%

• Fantom (FTM), (mc: US$1.35 billion) +5%

• Optimism (OP), (mc: US$828 million) +5%

 

SLUMPERS

• Synthetix Network (SNX), (market cap: US$898 million) -6%

• MultiverX (EGLD), (mc: US$1.11 billion) -6%

• Stacks (STX), (mc: US$1.57 billion) -4%

• Render (RNDR), (mc: US$485 million) -1%

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

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