Friday, 3 September 2021

Market Summary

Market Summary 3 September 2021

L1 Performance, Funding Spikes, Options Get More Expensive 02 Sept.2021

Layer one coins have done extremely well over August, thanks in part to several announcements of ecosystem-wide liquidity mining. AVAX ripped upon the announcement of a $180M liquidity mining program, followed by a relentless bid on SOL. Fantom’s liquidity mining, though misunderstood, also sparked a rally in FTM. KSM and DOT look primed to join the party.
Funding was at healthy levels throughout August, but made a massive push up as traders aped into ETH perp longs. Funding began to spike just before ETH’s monster candle yesterday, which makes it clear that the perp market played a key role in pushing ETH above $3,500.
As ETH and other crypto assets started to run, a narrative that trend structure is similar to summer 2020 — where BTC consolidated and everything else rallied — began to emerge. The spike in funding, however, shows us that there’s still demand for BTC in the market as traders began to long BTC in anticipation of it catching up.
Implied volatility for short-term options is beginning to increase again, which means the cost of buying these options is going up too. Realized volatility for ETH is also starting to increase after a flat August.

The Delphi Chartbook – August 2021

Bitcoin has been flirting with $50k for over a week, but the world’s largest crypto asset has been met with serious resistance following its best 30-day performance since February. One of the key levels we’re still watching is ~$51,100, which marks the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement level, a key area of short-term resistance.
ETH has broken out from its recent consolidation and is now trading at its highest level since mid-May. After breaking through key resistance around ~$3,350 it now has its sights set on ~$3,750, which represents the next resistance based on Fibonacci retracement levels. As of this writing, ETH had broken above this level and is now trading near $3,775; a bit of a pause here is to be expected before its attempt to test $4k.
The amount of BTC exiting centralized exchanges is higher than it has been at any other moment in history. Uncertainty around regulations, mandatory KYC, and the emergence of an adjacent decentralized finance ecosystem are all contributing factors to this exodus of BTC from exchanges.
The Crypto Fear & Greed index saw one of its largest increases in recent weeks. Sentiment turned from overwhelmingly bearish to strikingly bullish. While this is some cause for concern, the index often fluctuates within trend cycles, so this doesn’t necessarily mean the end is nigh.
Over 150,000 ETH have been burned since EIP-1559 went live on Aug. 5. For reference, that’s 2.2M ETH annualized — or $8.8B per year. OpenSea and the NFT mania have been the primary catalysts for so much ETH being burnt. OpenSea alone accounted for 16% of all ETH burned as of Sep. 1.

SushiSwap unveils website for its yet-to-launch Shoyu NFT platform

The website for SushiSwap’s forthcoming non-fungible token (NFT) platform, Shoyu, is now live.

Fractionalized Doge NFT valued at $225 million after SushiSwap auction

The original Doge meme image became one of the highest valued NFTs after its owner broke it into tokenized shares and auctioned a portion of those shares off using SushiSwap.

Bitcoin futures volume climbed to $1.73 trillion in August

Volumes across major markets for bitcoin futures hit $1.73 trillion in August, representing an increase from July, according to data collected by The Block Research.
The August figure represents a 17 percent increase from July’s $1.47 trillion in futures volume. The futures market’s peak occurred in May, when volumes reached $2.56 trillion. As shown in the chart, Binance once again took the most market share for bitcoin futures during August.

NFT projects and high-yield opportunities back Zilliqa’s strong rebound

Three reasons for the bullish momentum seen in ZIL are a rapidly growing ecosystem that is attracting new participants, the launch of nonfungible token (NFT) projects on the network, and attractive staking and decentralized finance opportunities that remove tokens from the circulating supply.
The most recent quarterly report from Zilliqa shows that the project’s ecosystem now has more than 180 partners and projects building on the network, indicating that there is significant interest in the capabilities of the protocol.

Solana Stablecoin UXD Raises $3M, Aims to Expand DeFi Outside Ethereum

Stablecoin provider UXD Protocol, formerly Soteria, has raised $3 million in a funding round led by Multicoin Capital. The round also included Alameda Research, CMS Holdings, Defiance Capital, and others. UXD Protocol is built on Solana, a blockchain network optimized for high throughput.

Blockchain streaming platform Audius announces Solana NFT integration