Bitcoin Flipflops; MATIC, LINK Surge as Dim Market Action Continues

• Bitcoin (BTC) trades sideways between $59,900 and $61,000. The overall crypto market cap slightly retreated to $2.1 trillion after failing to break through the $2.15 trillion mark.
• Major tokens like ETH, SOL, and BNB saw minor gains, while TRX dropped after a rally. Spot Bitcoin ETF inflows were weak, indicating a lack of new institutional interest.
• Meanwhile, as one firm predicted, the total value locked in Ether Liquid Staking Derivatives (LSDs) is on track to double by August 2025.

Bitcoin {{BTC}} zigzagged between $61,000 and $59,900 in the past 24 hours, continuing its sideways price action amid the lack of notable catalysts to fuel a move in either direction.

BTC spiked late Wednesday as U.S. job growth for the 12-months ending in March 2024 was 818,000 lower than previously reported.

Separately, some news outlets reported that Robert Kennedy Jr. was planning to drop out of the 2024 presidential race by the end of this week and would endorse Republican Donald Trump, who has positioned himself as a pro-crypto President if elected. Polymarket bettors give it an almost 94% chance of it happening, a major shift from earlier in the week.

The price jump was short-lived, however, as traders quickly took profits and sent BTC tumbling back to as low as $59,900. It recovered to over $60,800 in Asian trading hours Thursday, leading to slight market-wide gains.

“The crypto market once again failed to break through the $2.15 trillion cap mark, falling 2.3% to $2.1 trillion, almost back to where it started Tuesday,” shared FxPro’s Alex Kuptsikevich in a note. “From the technical analysis side, Bitcoin retreated to the downside after another test of its 50-day average - ranging for the past six days.

“Yesterday, the main institutional demand seemed to be for other assets, such as gold,” he added. The precious metal set record highs on Tuesday amid a weaker dollar and buying by investors favoring safer assets.

Inflows into U.S.-listed spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) remained muted, with only $39 million in net flows on Wednesday. Slow inflows are signaling a lack of new demand among professional investors, as reported, putting bearish pressure on BTC.

Meanwhile, major tokens ether {{ETH}}, Solana’s SOL, and BNB Chain’s BNB rose as much as 2%, while dogecoin {{DOGE}} and xrp (XRP) were little changed. Tron’s TRX dropped 4.5% after a Wednesday rally on the back of a newly released memecoin generator.

The liquid CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index, which tracks the largest tokens by market cap, rose 1.54%.

Polygon’s MATIC rose 12% as it neared a token migration that will switch the existing MATIC to POL - a unified token that can be used across all of Polygon’s blockchains. Chainlink’s LINK rose 15% as its data feeds were implemented on the lending market Aave’s new release on the zkSync blockchain - signalling more demand for the token.

As part of the integration, @chainlink will provide secure and reliable price feeds.@bgdlabs deployed the integration on behalf of Aave DAO, with risk analysis completed by @chaos_labs.

— Aave Labs (@aave) August 21, 2024

LSD on track to doubling

One year ago, HashKey Capital forecasted that Ether Liquid Staking Derivatives would double from their August 2023 total value locked of roughly $22 billion to $44 billion by August 2025. Half way through that forecast, and it looks like things are on track per their forecast.

According to data from DeFiLlama, the TVL of Ether LSD's hit $36.25 billion with Lido claiming a 70% market share.

"Despite relatively stagnant ETH prices recently, demand for staking continues to rise, with the validator entry queue surging to an all-time high of around 7,400, HashKey Capital analysts wrote in a note to CoinDesk. "However, annualized staking yields have remained at around 3.5% for the past four months. This creates a situation where more validators want to join but rewards are not increasing substantially."

Over the past year, analysts noted, ETH staking and LSDs have experienced significant growth, despite challenges related to incentives and ETH’s long-term role within its ecosystem.