Previously, on Stranger Crypto Kai Things of Power… the supposedly riskiest of risky asset classes was looking for a potential spark (as were we) based on the latest US jobs data report. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

To be clear, the American jobs report happened, but it was a fizzer for risk markets, which were hoping (somewhat selfishly and perversely perhaps) for a more significant slowdown of growth.

The unemployment rate declined to 3.5% versus expectations of 3.7%, and the labour participation rate was 62.3% – pretty much the same as the 62.4% rate the month before.

As Christian “And the Winner is… Sydenham” Edwards put it in his excellent Trader’s Diary roundup: “A hot labour market begets a higher wage spiral which begets further Fed aggression which begets fears of a recession. We know the drill by now.”

Consequently, Bitcoin, which was looking to try to hold a position above the round, juicy psychological level of US$20k, slipped right back under 19.5k again, where it’s hovering now and scratching its chin as it waits around several hours for the US stock markets to open on their Monday morning.

 

Onto some general daily crypto price action and other happenings.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$983 billion, trading pretty flat since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Did we say daily price action? Not much to text home about there, apart from two things – BNB and XRP.

BNB looks like it’s successfully stemmed its wound after the Binance Chain exploit news on Friday. For Binance CEO CZ and co. it’ll likely be a case of “the dog barks, but the caravan moves on”. Also, Crypto Twitter gets bored easily and will probably swiftly move past it, too.

As for XRP, that near 4% 24-hour gain and 13% on the weekly timeframe stands out like a stream of bat’s piss – “a shaft of gold when all around is darkness”, to quote Monty Python.

XRP chatter certainly seems voluminous on Twitter right now. Hope for a positive outcome in Ripple Labs’ legal battle with the SEC seems to be growing stronger. There’s no boredom with that narrative from the “XRP Army”, anyway.

And Ripple Labs, meanwhile, is still hiring, currently looking for a full-stack engineer. As reported by U.Today, the blockchain payments-rail firm said it would be able to continue hiring even during a severe bear market, which sets it apart from many other crypto companies that have been making staffing cuts, such as Coinbase and OpenSea.

 

Visa to launch crypto debit cards in 40 countries

And here’s something for fans of crypto-adoption news stories. Payments titan Visa (which, along with Mastercard has been showing increasing interest in cryptocurrencies for the best part of a year) has announced it plans to launch crypto debit cards in more than 40 countries in partnership with crypto exchange FTX.

Not small.

“As a part of the alliance, FTX will begin by offering FTX-branded Visa debit cards to FTX customers internationally – with a focus on countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia in the initial phases of the rollout,” the Visa announcement details further.

Visa already supports debit cards issued by Coinbase, Binance and other exchanges, including an FTX card for US customers. The debit cards are linked directly to users’ FTX accounts and “are now being rolled out globally in over 40 additional countries”.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$7.47 billion to about US$400 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

• Elrond (EGLD), (market cap: US$1.34 billion) +5%

• Terra Luna Classic (LUNC), (mc: US$2.1 billion) +4%

• Tokenize Xchange (TKX), (mc: US$917 million) +4%

• Quant (QNT), (mc: US$2 billion) +3%

• Stacks (STX), (mc: US$453 million) +3%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Huobi (HT), (market cap: US$541 million) -3%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: US$978 million) -2%

• Monero (XMR), (mc: US$2.63 billion) -1%

• Hedera (HBAR), (mc: US$1.45 billion) -1%

• OKB (OKB), (mc: US$3.9 million) -1%

 

Around the blocks

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

Australia’s NFT community seems to be building some enthusiasm amid the bear market with an #aussiefollowaussie rallying hashtag. And it appears to be partly based around growing interest for next month’s NFT Fest in Melbourne’s St Kilda, on November 23 and 24.

Finally, a reminder about why Bitcoin is game-changing tech, from Julian Assange circa 2014:

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