Weekly Digest - December 26, 2022

HitBTC Team

• 6 min read
Weekly Digest - December 26, 2022

Merry Christmas!

Past week was fairly quiet. The CVI is down (66.6 at press time), fear and greed index is flat (29) and total market cap has not changed from past Monday ($809 billion as of today). BTC and ETH prices remain nearly the same (0.3% and 2.2% increase in the past 7 days) and even two of the top gainers and top losers are the same as in our digest a week ago. But a few interesting things still happened and we noticed at least one Christmas miracle!

Market indices and prices:

  • Fear and greed index is at 28 today, one point below the level as of last Monday, December 19, 2022. The index declined to 26 in anticipation of the US GDP third quarter 2022 figures release, but mainly stayed at 29 over the past week.
  • Crypto Volatility Index (CVI) is 66.6 at press time on December 26. The CVI declined during the past week by 10%. The index is substantially lower than the 90-day average of 80.2 and 180-day average of 84.5.
  • Total market capitalization is $809 billion at press time. Total market cap fluctuated in the range of $790 to $812 billion during the past week.
  • The bitcoin dominance on December 26 is 39.95%, an increase of 1.08% from 38.87% as of December 12.

BTC price as of today (4:00am UTC) was $16,900, which is only 0.5% off from the 7-day VWMA (volume weighted moving average) of $18,838.3. During the past week, BTC experienced little volatility, with the highest price of $17,013.1 on December 20, and the lowest price of $16,398.1 on December 19. The 20-day EMA (exponential moving average) is currently at $16,926.1.

ETH price as of today (4:00am UTC) was $1,222.2. The 7-day VWMA is currently at $1,218.4 and the 20-day EMA level is at $1,228.

Two of the top-3 gainers from the past week’s digest, XDC and OKB, remain on this week’s list, but we also have a newcomer:

  • XDC (XDC Network) continued to rally. This week the price increased by 12.2% compared to 15.5% last week. A big boost to the price was last week’s announcement that EURS stablecoin had been added to the XDC network. The XDC price has increased approximately by 20% since December 1, 2022.
  • OKB (OKB) price surged by 5.91% compared to 4.6% increase last week. OKB is the currency of our competitor, the OKEX cryptocurrency exchange. The OKB price has increased by 7.1% since December 1, 2022.
  • LTC (Litecoin) price went up by 6.1%. LTC is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies in existence. It is also one of the largest PoW (proof-of-work) coins by the market cap. Similar to BTC, LTC is subject to halving, which is the 50% reduction of rewards earned by miners every four years. As a result of halving, less coins are minted at each block, hence the supply of coins grows at a slower pace. Prices have historically been rising in anticipation of halving events. The next halving of LTC is expected in the first half of 2023.

The top 3 losers were XCN, TWT and USDN. TWT (Trust Wallet Token) and XCN (Chain) were in the losers’ list last week.

  • XCN price declined by 32.8%. Overall, XCN price has been in the red for the past 90 days with a decline of approximately 80% from the price level on September 1,2022.
  • TWT price declined by 20%, compared to 36.4% decline a week before. The cryptocurrency lost all of its November and December gains. As we noted in our previous blog post, the price surge had been mostly attributed to the growing popularity of self-custody wallets, but as we could see over the past two weeks, it was not long-lasting.
  • USDN is an algorithmic stablecoin issued by Waves. USDN started losing its dollar peg in early November and it is currently trading at $0.53. The Waves founder, Sasha Ivanov, announced last week a plan to revive USDN along with the creation of a new stablecoin.

What else happened:

  • Elon Musk decided to quit his CEO job at Twitter after the poll he created suggested users do not want him in this role.
  • Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”), a disgraced former CEO of FTX, signed extradition papers and arrived in New York last Wednesday. On Thursday, he was released on $250 bail by the US Federal Judge and in three days was spotted in one of the NYC airports chilling before his business class flight to San Francisco.
  • $1.7 million worth of bitcoins were transferred from the cold wallets of now-defunct Quadriga exchange to a crypto mixer. Quadriga, once the largest Canadian exchange, went bankrupt after its founder, Gerald Cotton, died in India under mysterious circumstances. The private keys to Quadriga’s cold wallets were gone with the founder, as were all the customer’s funds stored on them. The recent transfer of funds revived the idea that Mr. Cotton faked his own death as part of a fraudulent exit scam.
  • Despite all the bad news about crypto for most of the year, there is at least one excitement - a new report from Coinmetrics indicated that in 2022 stablecoins set a new record for total settlement volume this year, beating out every major credit card provider except for Visa.

What is new on HitBTC:

  • Last week we launched 150+ pairs with USDC as a quoted currency. We plan to continue adding them until all currencies with USDT pairs will have the USDC pair as well. While USDT remains the most popular stablecoin on the market, the lack of transparency indicates to us that in current market conditions, we have to diversify our stablecoin exposure. Circle, which issues USDC, releases monthly audits into their reserves and keeps them in the top list of the US-based banks.
  • We have completed the integration of the Optimism layer-2 blockchain on top of Ethereum and expect OP (Optimism) to appear on HitBTC soon.

Optimism benefits from the security of the Ethereum mainnet and helps scale the Ethereum ecosystem by using optimistic rollups. That means transactions are trustlessly recorded on Optimism but ultimately secured on Ethereum. Optimism is one of the biggest scaling solutions for Ethereum with over $300 million in TVL. It is home to 35 protocols, with the largest being Synthetix (SNX), a derivatives exchange, Uniswap (UNI), a DEX, and Velodrome (VELO), an AMM.

New listings on HitBTC:

  • SILK (SILK) is the game token of Spider Tanks, which is a Play and Earn (P&E) Ecosystem that revolves around playing Spider Tanks matches and receiving Victory Points that can be submitted for game token reward distribution.
  • LOKA (League of Kingdoms Arena) is a governance token of the League of Kingdoms Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) strategy game. During gameplay, users can build kingdoms, raise armies, form alliances and compete on the battlefields for power and wealth. The game supports player-versus-environment (PvE), player-versus-player (PvP) and party-play (MMO) gaming modes. LOKA allows holders to take part in the decision-making process on the platform and purchase in-game items.

Coming soon to HitBTC:

  • Radix (XRD) is the native cryptocurrency of Radix, which is a layer 1 smart contract platform. The platform’s smart contracts operate on the Scrypto programming language developed by the in-house team. To attract DeFi dApp developers, Radix rewards them with royalty fees each time their code is used in the transaction. The creators also claim that the underlying blockchain has unlimited scalability.
  • BitDAO (BitDAO) is a governance token by the BitDAO organization built on the ERC-20 standard. BitDAO aims to build core products that will help the functionality and effectiveness of BitDAO and other DAOs. The core product includes a set of on-chain and off-chain governance solutions and products, with the DAO’s treasury management able to deploy and monitor assets to earn yield.
  • Town Start (TOWN) is a token that was created by Gala Games exclusively as a reward for playing-to-earn with Town Star NFTs. Town Star is a competitive farming game. Players top the leaderboard with the chance to win big prizes, and complete challenges to collect Town Points. The goal of the game is to grow, gather and craft your way to building the most efficient and productive town imaginable. Uses of TOWN include in-game purchases, upgrades and benefits and, of course, trading since TOWN has already been listed by several major exchanges.

If you have not done so yet, please do not forget to download our trading app on Android and iOS. And remember: bear market is the best time to start building your crypto portfolio! (And our latest article may help you with that!)

Cheers,

HitBTC team