Welcome to the Three Ts with CoinJar. Each fortnight we explore a big Theme, an interesting Trade and some good, old-fashioned Technical Analysis (courtesy of Tom from trading gurus FX Evolution).

Welcome to the airdrop economy

For a long time, airdrops were the crypto equivalent of spam. No-hoper projects with no product, no community and no prospects of ever being listed by a reputable exchange would send worthless tokens to your Ethereum wallet that you’d only discover months or years later.

But then Uniswap changed the game. Rather than dishing out tokens for a project that would in all likelihood never go anywhere, Uniswap waited until they were the biggest DEX in the world and then dished out 400 tokens to anyone who had ever made a transaction on the platform.

Not only did it instantly turn Uniswap into a billion-dollar platform, it also created a new model for building community-supported blockchain projects. Since then we’ve seen 1Inch, Shapeshift, dYdX, Bybit and a whole host of others replicate the retroactive airdrop process.

This culminated in last week’s absolute barnstormer of an airdrop from the Ethereum Name Service ($ENS), which has produced six-figure paydays for some early adopters.

While it’s hard to predict exactly who’s going to jump on the bandwagon next (although here’s a spreadsheet covering the rumours), you could do worse than simply making a one-off transaction at every token-less project of even moderate popularity and seeing what happens. 

ETH: The next BTC?

I promise this column isn’t going to become a hub for fractal porn. However, it is difficult to ignore the similarities between the multi-year charts for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Basically, the argument is that to date Ethereum has matched Bitcoin’s ascent, simply four years behind. So, for ETH this bull run is the equivalent of the 2017 bull run for BTC, meaning we could expect a peak somewhere in the vicinity of US$20k per ETH.

As to why this would play out, well, that’s open to argument. However, there’s a case to be made that crypto price may function as a product of adoption and that BTC and ETH, being similar, are being adopted at a similar rate (see also: the Internet). 

Although in order for this to happen ETH would need to hit a market cap of more than US$2 trillion, which is, I think we can agree… a lot of money.

But in the meantime…

There’s short-term weakness in the air, according to Tom from FX Evolution.

Bitcoin has pushed below the daily 20EMA once again. While so far during this run-up each violation of the line has led to a swift reversal, we may be overdue for a more significant correction. If so, look to the 50EMA around US$59,000 for support. While bullish structure remains intact for now, we can expect more volatility as BTC pushes towards new highs at the end of the year.

Unsurprisingly, ETH is also looking shaky. While recently ETH has been stronger than BTC (it hasn’t lost the daily 20EMA since reclaiming it in early October), losing it with such conviction suggests that the largely untested supports at US$4,000 and US$3,650 could be in play.

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