Recurring market commentary on what’s happening in the crypto markets, summarized by the Crypto Broker team at Crypto Finance AG.
Market commentary
Good morning!
Bitcoin (BTC) is currently trading at $21.8k (-8.94% in 7 days), Ethereum (ETH) is trading at $1.7k (-7.75% in 7 days), and the ETH/BTC spread is trading at 0.07969 (+1.44% in 7 days).
Traditional markets rally
On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve released its rather murky minutes from their meeting in July, where they raised interest rates by 75 basis points. US stocks closed lower on Wednesday. The minutes did a pretty good job in keeping investors guessing as to whether the Fed's stance was more dovish or hawkish. On the one hand, Fed officials agreed on the necessity to move interest rates to sufficient levels, in order to ensure that inflation is firmly on a path back to 2%, but, on the other hand, they are afraid they might tighten more than necessary, which would lead to negative growth implications. Also, both the UK and Europe released CPI numbers for July.
The UK CPI figures were released on Wednesday.
- CPI YoY at 10.1% (forecast 9.8%; previous 9.4%)
- CPI MoM at 0.6% (forecast 0.4%; previous 0.8%)
The European CPI figures were released on Thursday.
- CPI YoY at 8.9% (forecast 8.9%; previous 8.6%)
- CPI MoM at 0.1% (forecast 0.1%; previous 0.8%)
Regardless, the stock market reacted optimistically (maybe too optimistically) to Chairman Powell's July press conference and the July economic reports as the Nasdaq Composite, S&P 500, and Dow Jones are all still experiencing strong upward momentum.
Memecoins experiencing a comeback
Both Bitcoin and Ether were in a downtrend this week, after reaching new local highs around $25.2k and $2,030 at the start of the week. Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Dogecoin (DOGE) were among top gainers this week, up 18.8% and 13.1%, respectively, on Thursday.
One reason for this could be due to the fact that DOGE received its own EVM-compatible chain, Dogechain, on Polygon Edge. DOGE holders can now bridge their coins over to Dogechain to receive wDOGE, enabling them to interact with DeFi applications and NFT marketplaces. Please note that this is not an official Dogecoin project, as confirmed by the foundation. I do not expect that this project will get any real traction; it seems to be more of an expansion of the memecoin speculators' paradise.
Another stablecoin fails to hold dollar peg
It was no surprise that there was another stablecoin de-pegging event this week. On Sunday, aUSD depegged 99% after hackers minted 1.2 billion tokens. aUSD is the native stablecoin of Acala, a Polkadot-based DeFi Platform. According to developers, the hack was possible due to a misconfiguration of the iBTC/aUSD liquidity pool. The stablecoin has since returned to $0.89, after the community voted to burn the 1.2 billion aUSD tokens that were minted by exploiters.
In other news, the Ethereum Merge is less than one month away from the expected Merge date. The Ethereum Foundation recently updated their Merge documentation. You can read about some common misconceptions about the Merge here. And their calculations of the impact that the Merge will have on the ETH supply can be found here.
Happy Trading!
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