SHIB & DOGE Face Off as Gas Prices Rise
- Most of the crypto market was sidelined by liquidations, while dog coin connoisseurs showed up in a big way. SHIB recorded a whopping $23B in volume on the top two spot exchanges yesterday.
- As the market bounced back today, the dog coin surge could be a symptom of investors developing a higher risk appetite. Or perhaps normie capital is back in the market again.
- As the two dog coins faced off today, DOGE bounced upward while SHIB wound up remaining relatively flat. Despite DOGE seeing better price action, SHIB still has a slightly higher market cap.
- Ironically, while coins in a category tend to be highly correlated, we’re seeing the opposite with DOGE and SHIB. The two could have made a decent pair trade today (long DOGE, short SHIB), which may indicate the same capital moving to and from the two assets. If true, a SHIB rally could signal a coming DOGE dump.
- Arbitrum’s transactions went parabolic in early September, less than 2 weeks after its August 31st launch (Optimism, which went live in July, also saw a jolt of adoption from the excitement). In subsequent weeks, however, both L2s saw transactions fall and plateau for most of October.
- Currently, several projects on Arbitrum are holding back from full-scale deployments due to the current cap on network gas. Once that’s lifted, we could see more activity on the L2 as various dApp incentive levers get pulled.
- Ethereum gas prices look like they’re about to make a run higher as demand picks up.
- Historically, when gas gets expensive, we’ve seen activity spike on alternative L1s. But now that Arbitrum and Optimism are live, L2s could wind up being the primary beneficiaries.
Biden’s $1.85T Spending Bill Would Make Avoiding Capital Gains Taxes on Crypto Harder
- Talk in Washington for the past month has been centered on President Biden’s multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better spending framework.
- The bill’s price tag has been halved to appeal to key Senate holdouts, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been trying to wrangle progressive Democrats unhappy with the cuts to paid family leave and free college. How things will shake out—and whether the bill will clear a narrowly divided Congress—remains unclear, but the $1.85 trillion bill isn’t without some methods to pay for its expansive (and expensive) policies.
More than 40 digital currency ETFs await US regulatory approval
- Fund managers appear to be scrambling to match demand from investors as major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) teeter around record price levels. According to a Bloomberg Terminal screenshot taken by Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart, over 40 cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, are now awaiting listing in the United States.
- The source indicated that four have already been approved by the Securities Exchange Commission, the most notable of which is the Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF, created in a joint effort by 21 Shares and ARK Invest.
Facebook Goes All In on Metaverse With New Company Name Meta, NFT Push
- Social media giant Facebook sees the growing metaverse as the future of its business, and today the firm made that increasing focus formal by announcing that it will go by the name Meta.
- Meta will be the name for the overall company, although it appears that some its individual apps and services—such as Facebook itself, as well as WhatsApp—will maintain their current branding under the Meta umbrella.
Bitcoin hodling rate reaches 9-month high, boosting hopes of ‘bull flag’ rally to $70K
- A yearlong price rally in the Bitcoin (BTC) market and hopes for more upside moves in the future has prompted traders to hold the token instead of trading it for other assets, Glassnode data shows.
- The blockchain data analytics service revealed on Oct. 28 that the total amount of “hodled or lost coins” reached a nine-month high of over 7.21 million BTC. In simple terms, the Bitcoin metric reflected an increase in out-of-circulation tokens — those that may have been stored in cold wallets by long-term holders or lost due to human errors, with little chance of recovery.
Eth2’s Altair upgrade goes off smoothly, with 98.7% of nodes now upgraded
- The Ethereum 2.0 Altair Beacon Chain update has gotten off to a successful start, with 98.7% of nodes already upgraded.
- On Wednesday, Eth2 developer Preston Vanloon tweeted that the Altair upgrade had been “activated successfully.”
- Altair is the first upgrade to the Beacon Chain since it went online in December 2020 and is likely the last before the merge with the Ethereum mainnet and the change to proof-of-stake (PoS).
- The upgrade brings light-client support to the core consensus, cleans up beacon state incentive accounting, fixes some issues with validator incentives, and steps up the punitive parameters (penalties for offline validators) per Ethereum Improvement Proposal 2982.
New Bitcoin hash rate highs remove any trace of China mining ban
- Bitcoin (BTC) has all but deleted any trace of the mining ban, which saw its hash rate dive 50% this year.
- According to the latest estimates, the network hash rate is now back at levels from May, just before China outlawed its Bitcoin mining industry.
