It’s time again to look back at the week in crypto, through the prism of memes. It’s been a particularly crazy one for price action, and a scary one for newcomers.
In fact, newbie crypto traders are the source of much of the blame for the massive midweek market dip, which resulted in a cascade of liquidations from over-leveraged trades unwinding.
It was a crash that saw Bitcoin lose US$9,000 in the space of a couple of hours and the entire crypto market come tumbling down with it, wiping out US$400 billion in total market value.
Still, a big dip in crypto is always a great buying opportunity… isn’t it?
No choice but to HODL
Actually, if you did want to buy the dip on the day, or panic sell for that matter, some of the biggest crypto exchanges weren’t making it easy, due to technical difficulties.
Coinbase, for instance, responded to a flood of complaints from customers on Twitter, citing “a sudden increase in network traffic and market activity,” which it said “led to a degradation in our services.”
Bitcoin Day
The big September 7 dip just happened to coincide with “Bitcoin Day” – the day El Salvador officially launched its new law marking BTC as a legal-tender option across the nation.
Negative price action corresponding with an otherwise positive event is never much of a surprise, according to the “buy-the-rumour-sell-the-news” crowd of OG crypto investors…
Still, plenty of Bitcoiners have been ignoring the negative price correlation, remaining positive about the new El Salvador law and how it could inspire other countries to follow suit.
DOGE fans, too, judging by this meme…
Coinbase targeted by the SEC
Meanwhile, the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s regulators have been busy this week – and not just with XRP.
They’ve served the Coinbase exchange a “Wells notice”, which is a letter of intent to sue a company in court. It’s with regard to Coinbase’s proposed “Lend” yield-earning service, which the SEC contends is a security.
If Coinbase goes ahead with it as planned, then SEC Chairman Gary Gensler and his crack team of crypto party poopers (presumably excluding Commissioner Hester “Crypto Mom” Peirce) will do their worst and take the exchange to court. In between sifting through a million of XRP’s Slack messages, that is.
Don’t they have anything better to do, such as approving a Bitcoin ETF, for instance? Obviously not.
“Layer 1” price action
Despite the pervading uncertainty in the market right now, this week has at times seen one crypto narrative somewhat erratically pump. And that narrative belongs to the up-and-coming “layer 1” smart-contract blockchain platforms – a competitive lot.
Not all of them, mind – it hasn’t been the greatest of weeks for Cardano’s price, although it has had an extremely good run in general this year, to be fair.
If it can deliver its main-net smart contracts to the world without too much of a hitch on September 12, then things could be looking up for ADA once again.
In the meantime, it has this sort of sentiment to contend with …
Solana (SOL), on the other hand has been experiencing plenty of FOMO just lately…
NFTs still in the picture
NFTs might be down considerably on trading volume on OpenSea this week, but they’re still making headlines.
Bizarre new projects are still popping up, for instance, such as “Unsolicited 8-Bit Dick Pics“. Perhaps the following meme creator wasn’t quite aware of the “project’s” lofty floor price of 2 ETH (currently US$6,620)…
Not financial advice (it never is)
Almost press time here, and just checking the current state of the market… it’s not too pretty right now, to be honest.
The overall crypto market cap has come down 3.7% since this time yesterday and Bitcoin has currently dipped back below the 200-day moving average line of support. Technical analysts generally want to see that line held, in order to remain short-term bullish.
BTC is down 4.3% and changing hands for US$45,300, while other significant coins have been hit even harder at the time of writing, including Ethereum (-8.3%), Cardano (-10.1%), Solana (-14.5%) and Algorand (-17.8%).
Time to shut off the laptop, switch off the phone (yeah, right), have a beer and zoom out? Probably.