The modest gains Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest of the Altcoin market achieved over the weekend quickly disintegrated in the early market moves following a widespread sell-off.
Bitcoin dipped nearly 11% to lows of $58,638 while Ethereum dropped by almost 13% to touch lows of $4,108 on Nov. 16. This was followed by significant losses (more than 10%) across the board with nearly all the tokens in the top 100 trading in red as of press time.
A few outliers to the market dip such as Powerledger (POWR, +116.70%), UMA (UMA, +17.61%), BORA (BORA, +64.04%), Gala (GALA, +19.15%), Polymath (POLY, +16.54%), Hive (HIVE, +13.37%) remained in green as of the time of publication.
The timing of the present market selloff coincides with the signing into law, the $1 trillion infrastructure bill — criticized by many crypto advocates. In a ceremony in front of the White House on Monday, President Joe Biden signed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill which might implement tighter rules on businesses handling cryptocurrencies and expand the reporting requirements for brokers. The bill mandates that going forward, digital asset transactions worth more than $10,000 be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.
The U.S dollar index (DXY) reached a fresh 16-month high of 95.50 early today on inflation concerns.
Also, souring comments by Twitter CFO Ned Segal who stated that Twitter would have to change its investment policy to hold more volatile assets on its balance sheet as the company prefers to hold less volatile assets, such as securities may have contributed likewise. The CFO as quoted by the Wall Street Journal had stated that investing in cryptocurrencies “doesn’t make sense right now”.
Ethereum suffered a more significant loss than Bitcoin as an on-chain data tracker, Santiment indicated that an internal Kraken transfer may have likely triggered the sell-off.
It noted on Nov. 15 that there has been a significant uptick in Ethereum’s Age Consumed. Referencing to its ETH’s Dormant Circulation metric, it states that many coins – over 1.82m ETH – have not been moved for as long as 5 years before the time. Its Top Transaction table also showed that most of this ETH came from a known Kraken wallet to an as of yet unlabeled address. Ethereum traded at $4,166 as of press time while bitcoin was at $59,263.
Power Ledger (POWR) is an Ethereum token that powers the Powerledger platform, which aims to enable peer-to-peer energy trading. The surge in price for Powerledger on Nov. 16 follows a Coinbase pro announcement:
”Inbound transfers for ALCX, ENS, GALA, MUSD & POWR are now available in the regions where trading is supported. Traders cannot place orders and no orders will be filled. Trading will begin on or after 9 AM PT on Tues Nov 16, if liquidity conditions are met.”
BORA describes itself as a decentralized entertainment platform that distributes digital content and provides incentives to participants. Bora is gaining ground against Bitcoin today. The network announced in the prior week:
”BORA token is now alive on KLAYswap pool, please check the below URLs and get some air-drops on KLAY/BORA, KSP/BORA pools”.
Security token platform Polymath revealed in a tweet on Nov. 16 that the Polymesh Network was now ready for user onboarding. Polymesh refers to a securities-specific blockchain, purpose-built to address these issues with identity, compliance, confidentiality, governance, and settlement.
Polymath’s idea to build Polymesh arose from a need to align blockchain with the requirements of regulated capital markets. Universal Market Access protocol, or UMA, is an Ethereum blockchain-based project focused on the creation of synthetic assets that are self-executing, self-enforcing financial contracts that allow counter-parties to digitize and automate any real-world financial derivative.
The spike in UMA price comes after the mainnet launch of the Sherlock DeFi protocol, which is an insurance protocol that utilizes UMA’s Optimistic Oracle solution to adjudicate claims and provide exploit protection to other protocols.
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