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BLINK AND YOU'LL MISS IT
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BEQUANT Crypto&Coffee

As noted in the recent commentary the price action this week is expected to be impacted by the looming derivatives expiries, said otherwise range bound trade and any dips are expected to be bought up promptly. Still, despite the aforementioned expiries the curve structure remained rather steep and the open interest (OI) rose to a new record high. Unlike the dynamic recently, this boost in the OI was led by Bitcoin margined products, with the OI on Huobi rising towards $750mln and OKEx through the $1.2bln. 

Interestingly, the OI also rose on Bitmex, where the metric is now at its highest level since late September at around $750mln. Elsewhere, XRP continued to surge higher and is now up 196% month-to-date. Alongside it, XLM’s strong positive correlation finally came to fruition and Stellar also posted strong gains, at the time of writing it was trading up close to 30%. As a reminder, only recently it was reported that Ripple for the first time bought $46mln worth of XRP in the Q3 of 2020, that is despite already owning nearly half of the supply. The company said the purchase was made to support "healthy markets," possibly referring to creating interest around XRP.

Ethereum traded through the $600 level and more importantly from fundamental standpoint, it is set to enter the new era after the smart contract required for triggering the first phase of Ethereum 2.0 reached enough funds to begin activation of Ethereum’s most ambitious upgrade yet. The Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract, which was released in early November, has accrued more than 540,000 ETH (worth over $325 million) late Monday night, ensuring that the beacon chain for Ethereum 2.0 will launch next week, formally beginning the second-largest cryptocurrency’s shift from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake one in hopes of solving a number of issues, including scalability. As a reminder, the Ethereum Foundation had previously set a soft launch date for Dec. 1.

Broadly speaking this is also very bullish development for all things DeFi as the eventual transition to PoS, alongside various upgrades will enable greater network scaling, With that, cheaper transaction and more efficient running of the network. The amount locked across various DeFi platforms stands just over $14bln (according to DeFi Pulse data) and while the trend of locking Ethereum on Bitcoin has abated somewhat, the actual deployment of wbtc is accelerating, as is the daily trading of Btc on Ethereum. 

Also of note, SushiSwap (SUSHI) continues to cement its position as the leading DEX and while the competition with Uniswap (UNI) will only heat up going forward, the two assets are expected to gain more volume and liquidity going forward. With that, the two remain by far the cheapest of the leading protocols, SUSHI is trading at a very modest 7x (price/sales ratio) and UNI is at 11x, while the likes of Curve and Balancer at 109x and 83x respectively.

Earlier this year, Ethereum Classic sought to position itself as one of the key beneficiaries of the aforementioned transition by Ethereum to PoS. However, the sentiment towards the network has changed somewhat since then, not helped by the falling hashrate and malicious attacks on the network. More recently, ETC Labs released Wrapped Ethereum Classic tokens (WETC) to gain exposure to the fast-growing world of DeFi. However, while the price of ETC has benefited from broad based risk on sentiment, the hashrate that the network commands remains very low. Another asset that has been defying gravity is Litecoin (LTC), which is up over 60% MTD, which may be similar to that posted by Cardano (ADA). But unlike Cardano, where the number of transactions are on an up-trend, Litecoin’s transaction count is decreasing.

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