One week in review:
April 25–May 1 We've selected the hottest materials of the past week for you to stay up to date with the latest crypto news: | | #1. Altcoins rally as bulls pile into large-cap tokens and layer-one projects | | | Ether delivered a stunning surge that took its price above $3,000 for the very first time, breaking new records throughout the week. On Saturday, ETH remained in uncharted territory after racing to highs of $3,800. | | | ETH is in good company, too. EOS rallied by more than 100% this week following a recent protocol that increases the project's inflation rate. Litecoin has hit a one-year high against Bitcoin, with many analysts predicting extended upside momentum. And Bitcoin Cash jumped 68% amid rumors that a looming hard fork could boost the network's user base. | | | Even Ethereum Classic, the hard fork sparked by disagreements after a devastating 2016 hack, has pumped 130% in the past week. | | #2. May 8 "day to watch" for Dogecoin amid warning it can suffer an XRP-style crash | | | DOGE has seemed unstoppable in recent weeks. It hit unprecedented highs of $0.7376 early on Saturday. To put into context how bonkers the joke cryptocurrency's surge really is, $1 invested on Jan. 1 would now be worth $139 at current prices. | | | Mania over the financial homage to Shiba Inus everywhere may be about to reach a climax when DOGE enthusiast and mega-billionaire Elon Musk hosts Saturday Night Live. It's inevitable that his appearance will feature endless sketches about Dogecoin, and that could pump prices even further. | | | But not everyone is finding DOGE's surge to be a cause for celebration. Lowstrife, a popular account on Twitter, believes the end is nigh, with the crypto trader spotting eerie similarities between DOGE's current charts and XRP in the heady days of 2018. | | | Back then, XRP had hit all-time highs of $3.20 that remain true to this day, but then slowly faded to lows of $0.14 — a loss of 95.6%. | | | Warning of an impending apocalypse for DOGE, Lowstrife wrote: "Each of DOGE's major rallies this year has been smaller and less aggressive. What took 18 hours at first has been ongoing for 2 days now. I suspect this is the final push before it's all over for good. May 8th is the day to watch." | | | Even Musk himself has been cooling the hype, reminding followers that crypto investments remain speculative. | | #3. Coinbase stock plunges to record low, further decoupling from crypto | | | The celebratory atmosphere isn't universal. Coinbase shares tumbled to fresh lows on Thursday as Wall Street investors continued to cycle out of high-flying tech stocks. | | | COIN bottomed at $255.15, where it was in danger of breaching the $250 reference price set on the eve of its public listing in April. All of this comes despite the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies surging beyond $2.4 trillion. | | | FBB Capital Partners' director of research, Mike Bailey, told Bloomberg: "We saw a mini-bubble in SPACs, IPOs, crypto, clean-tech and hyper-growth in late 2020 and early 2021 and many of these asset classes are nursing bad hangovers." | | | (That said, his assertion that crypto is nursing a "bad hangover" is misplaced.) | | | Coinbase's woes may be linked to increasing competition among crypto exchanges, which has left retail investors spoiled for choice. 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Prediction of the week: They see ETH rollin': Why did Ether price reach $3,500, and what's next? | | | Ether's booming price has prompted feverish talk about a long-fabled "flippening" where ETH overtakes BTC as the world's largest cryptocurrency. | | | Although that's fanciful right now, there are a number of bullish predictions when it comes to where Ether's price is headed next. | | | One of them comes from Nikhil Shamapant, a retail investor who recently published a research report where he argued ETH could be worth $150,000 by 2023. | | | He told Cointelegraph: "It definitely can go much higher. I think we can see the price go to $10,000, where a lot of ETH bull price targets begin to kick in and people take profits. I think we'll head up to that $10,000-to-$25,000 range, hit a lot of supply and could see some big drawdowns and consolidation at that point." | | #5. FUD of the week: The fees sting, but Uniswap v3 sees more volume on launch day than v2's first month | | | Data suggests that Uniswap v3 had a successful first 24 hours — processing more than twice the volume that v2 did in its first month. | | | But not everyone's been enamored with the latest iteration of the world's most popular decentralized exchange, with some users complaining about the costs associated with using it. | | | One person wrote on Twitter: "Even more expensive to make mistakes now. Tried to migrate my UNI/ETH liquidity to V3, failed and paid 108.09 usd worth of gas." | | | Dragonfly Capital's managing partner, Haseeb Qureshi, also wasn't impressed. On Twitter, he wrote: "Looks like Uniswap v3 is more gas expensive than v2, roughly as expected. [...] Specifically, it's about 28% more expensive for single-hop transactions it looks like. For larger transactions that cross multiple ticks/buckets, the gas costs should be slightly larger." | | #6. FUD of the week: New York bill proposes ban on crypto mining for three years over carbon concerns | | | A Democrat senator in New York, Kevin S. Parker, is proposing a three-year ban on crypto mining. | | | Data centers would only be allowed to operate if they pass an environmental impact review, amid concerns that BTC mining could cause the state to miss ambitious targets designed to tackle climate change. | | | New York Senate Bill 6486 said: "A single cryptocurrency transaction uses the same amount of energy that an average American household uses in one month, with an estimated level of global energy usage equivalent to that of the country of Sweden." | | | The bill is yet to receive widespread backing from other senators. However, the Democrats do control the lower house and senate. | | | Feel free to explore the most important news with Hodler's Digest: | | | |
