As the year comes to an end, investors will be keenly watching for a Santa Claus rally on Wall Street as many believe that if the rally does not happen, the next year may either remain flat or turn negative. Jurrien Timmer, director of global macro at asset management giant Fidelity Investments, tweeted on Dec. 19 that the United States equities markets may remain “sideways” and choppy in 2023. He expects “one or more retests of the 2022 low, but not necessarily much worse than that.” Daily cryptocurrency market performance. Source: Coin360 The cryptocurrency market has been largely correlated with the S&P 500 in 2022. Unless both markets decouple, the sideways or negative action in the equities markets may not bode well for the cryptocurrency market. Analysts remain divided on t...
NFT music on Winamp Old school classic PC-friendly media player Winamp has rolled out support for Ethereum and Polygon-based music nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in the latest update of its desktop player. Winamp has been around since 1997 and was one of the most popular media players for PC users but has since been overtaken by Windows Media Player and Apple’s dominant iTunes. It has a reputation for supporting a wide range of media files, and in the latest update announcement on Dec. 7 the Winamp team noted that NFT support is officially live and ready to go. @winamp I have fond memories of Winamp from back in my youth. Are we ever going to see a official integration with @Spotify? I’d love some sweet early 2000’s visualizations with my beats — Sjoerd Stottelaar (@sjoerds) Decembe...
Non-farm payrolls in the United States rose by 263,000 in November, exceeding economists’ expectations of an increase of 200,000. Analysts believe that the numbers remain hot and do not allow much scope for the Federal Reserve to slow down its aggressive rate hikes. This is contrary to Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s remarks delivered at the Brookings Institution where he said that the central bank could reduce the pace of rate hikes “as soon as December.” That triggered a sharp rally in risk assets. After the latest jobs report, the market participants will closely watch the Fed’s comments and decision in its Dec. 13 and Dec.14 meeting. Daily cryptocurrency market performance. Source: Coin360 The Fed’s decision may also affect Bitcoin (BTC), which remains in a firm bear grip. Co...
Disparities in information access and data analytics technology are what give institutional players an edge over regular retail investors in the digital asset space. The core idea behind Markets Pro, Cointelegraph’s crypto-intelligence platform powered by data analytics firm The Tie, is to equalize the information asymmetries present in the cryptocurrency market. Markets Pro bridges the gap of these asymmetries with its world-class functionality: the quant-style VORTECS™ Score. The VORTECS™ Score is an algorithmic comparison of several key market metrics for each coin utilizing years of historical data that assesses whether the outlook for an asset is bullish, bearish or neutral at any given moment based on the historical record of price action. The VORTECS™ Score is d...
The world is quick to blame inflation for the rising prices at grocery stores and retailers. This was the #1 political issue for recent Election Day voters in the United States. For example, media sources recently reported poll data that 85% of Americans could not afford to spend $200 on a Thanksgiving meal in November 2022, and only 25% could afford $100. However, few recognize inflation is only part of the problem. Higher costs for products and services are also directly attributable to settlement fees paid by transportation providers who are forced to take out the equivalent of payday loans against their freight invoices. Shipper payment terms in the transportation industry are known to be egregious, and most transportation carriers cannot afford to wait 30–180 days to get paid. Wh...
FTX’s collapse dealt a major blow to the already fragile sentiment among cryptocurrency investors. Although a quick recovery is unlikely, Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said that the crypto universe could emerge stronger from this crisis. Chainalysis’ research lead Eric Jardine arrived at the conclusion after comparing FTX’s fall to that of Mt. Gox. Another calming statement came from Bloomberg Intelligence exchange-traded fund analyst James Seyffart, who said that there was a “99.9% chance” that the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) held the Bitcoin (BTC) it claimed. He added that GBTC was “unlikely” to be liquidated. Daily cryptocurrency market performance. Source: Coin360 The negative events of the past few days do not seem to have scared away the small investors who remain on an acc...
The collapse of FTX cryptocurrency exchange has created a liquidity crisis in the crypto space, which could extend the crypto winter through the end of 2023, according to a research report by Coinbase. According to analysts, the FTX implosion could keep the institutional investors at bay because they are even more likely to tread cautiously for some time. The crisis has negatively impacted several crypto-focused companies who have assets stuck on FTX following the company’s bankruptcy filing on Nov. 11. Investors also fear the contagion could spread, causing further damage to the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Daily cryptocurrency market performance. Source: Coin360 Although several investors were rattled by the collapse of FTX, billionaire venture capitalist and serial blockchain in...
In the past year, Polygon (MATIC) has focused on growing their list of high-profile partners which includes luminaries like Disney, Starbucks and Robinhood. The recent announcements of partnerships with both Instagram and JPMorgan have speculators pushing the token price up nearly 200%. In addition to partnerships, blockchain adoption through network usage is important to analyze. Blockchain adoption can be analyzed by looking into daily active users of the blockchain, protocols using the technology, number of transactions and total locked value. Total value locked on Polygon rises above $1B Total value locked (TVL) is one cryptocurrency indicator used to assess the market’s sentiment towards a particular blockchain. TVL on Polygon requires utilizing the MATIC blockchain and locking ...
Solana (SOL) has been in a steady downtrend for the past 3 months, but some traders believe that it may have bottomed at $26.80 on Oct. 21. Lately, there’s been a lot of speculation on the causes for the underperformance and some analysts are pointing to competition from Aptos Network. Solana price at FTX, USD. Source: TradingView The Aptos blockchain launched on Oct. 17 and it claims to handle three times more transactions per second than Solana. Yet, after four years of development and millions of dollars in funding, the debut of the layer-1 smart contract solution was rather unimpressive. It is essential to highlight that Solana presently holds an $11.5 billion market capitalization at the $32 nominal price level, ranking it as the seventh largest cryptocurrency when excluding sta...
The year 2022 in crypto was eventful in many ways. However, the negative impacts of a bear market dampened the excitement around the blockchain upgrades that significantly brought crypto ecosystems closer to the future of finance. For Bitcoin, it was the Taproot soft fork upgrade, which was aimed at improving the scripting capabilities and privacy of the Bitcoin network. Ethereum underwent the Merge upgrade to transition from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Leading decentralized Ethereum scaling platform Polygon kicked off the year with mainnet upgrades based on Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-1559, otherwise known as the London hard fork. The upgrade was accompanied by Polygon (MATIC) token burning and better fee visibility. On Jan. 25, Ryan Wyatt joined...
After an impressive 23.7% rally between Oct. 25 and Oct. 31, Binance’s BNB (BNB) coin has faced a strong rejection from the $330 resistance. Is it possible that the two-day 6% sell-off from the $337.80 peak could indicate that further trouble is ahead? Let’s take a look at what the data shows. BNB 12-hour chart on Binance, USD. Source: TradingView Analysts pinned the recent rally to the Oct. 28 news that Binance invested $500 million in Twitter. However, the network’s deposits and decentralized application (DApp) metrics have not accompanied the improvement in sentiment. The strong upward movement was largely based on reports that Binance was preparing to assist Twitter in eradicating bots. The speculation emerged after billionaire Elon Musk raised the $44 billion required to complete...
Cross-chain platform Axelar has announced a partnership with Polygon to deliver secure cross-chain communications to Polygon Supernets. The company said that Axelar’s partnership with Polygon will serve as infrastructure for an interoperable internet of dedicated Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchains powered by Polygon Edge. Speaking with Cointelegraph, CEO and co-founder of Axelar Sergey Gorbunov shared that this partnership is important to the Web3 ecosystem because the industry needs to scale from thousands of developers to millions. According to Gorbunov: “Application-specific chains are critical infrastructure for that step, but they present huge challenges without interoperability. Axelar and Polygon Supernets are enabling developers to build on chains that make it easy to...