The XBO Weekly #9 – Crypto News
Bitcoin defies gravity and edges higher
Despite the Federal Reserve presenting its fourth straight rate hike of the year (to the highest range since 2008) and traditional markets suffering weekly losses, cryptocurrency markets soared to a 7-week high, with Bitcoin momentarily breaking above $21,000. While the sustained decoupling of crypto from stocks might suggest that the bear market is nearing its end, investors remain cautious as the geopolitical and economic macro-outlook remains bleak, and Bitcoin has only had the opportunity to demonstrate its resilience during periods of economic growth. Another source of concern is the existence of "cash flow negative" bitcoin mining companies, which are currently forced to liquidate their BTC holdings and mining equipment. On the other hand, an unprecedented mining difficulty suggests that the unit price of Bitcoin is actually undervalued.
Fidelity expands crypto service offerings to retail investor
Multinational financial services provider Fidelity announced the launch of a new crypto app that will allow retail clients to trade Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), as well as provide market information and crypto education. The move, which will potentially allow crypto access to 34 million investors, is an example of demand-driven crypto adoption, as well as confirmation from one of the world's top financial institutions that crypto is here to stay. Fidelity's Digital Assets subsidiary began offering Bitcoin to institutions, as early as 2018. Earlier this year, Fidelity also revealed a plan to allow employees to save a percentage of their retirement funds in Bitcoin.
Meta develops new NFT minting and trading tools for creators and web3
The Instagram app will soon include a toolkit that will enable developers to produce and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The Polygon blockchain will be used to mint the digital collectibles, and the application will retrieve NFT metadata from OpenSea (so that collection names and descriptions may be read on Instagram). While parent firm Meta aims to waive costs for NFT sales through its app until 2024, in-app purchases are still subject to Apple's 30% app store fees. The price of Polygon's native token, MATIC, rose by more than 50 percent in the days following the announcement, from $0.86 to $1.20, before retracing some gains and is now trading near an important resistance zone at $1.20.
XBO featured Coin of the Week – Solana (SOL)
SOL is the native utility token of Solana, a platform for developing decentralized applications with uses in decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), markets, gaming, and e-commerce. What differentiates it from competing smart contract platforms is its use of a consensus process that combines Proof-of-Stake (PoS) with a new timestamp system called Proof-of-History (PoH), which was developed by Solana's key founder, Anatoly Yakovenko. This method apparently allows the network to process up to 65,000 transactions per second. Despite numerous outages, Solana has considerable crypto community support.
At is current price of $31.8 SOL has a market cap of $11.4 billion, making it the 10th largest crypto. It is up 21.6% from this cycle’s low and 88% down from its November 2021 all-time high of $260.
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