Cryptocurrency Market Analysis

Admittedly, the week for Bitcoin (BTC) was not very interesting. According to the data Coinmarketrate.com , there was no real breakthrough, and the price has been hanging in the same range for more than two weeks. Shortly before the weekend, Bitcoin lost its grip at $29,000, but now the price is again above this mark.

Fears in the market are still extremely high. However, Bitcoin failed to grow significantly, and it ended a record nine consecutive weeks in the red.

A week ago, the Bitcoin price was just above $30,000, then rose to $30,500 by Monday morning, where it was rejected again. Subsequently, Bitcoin fell significantly, but first found support around $ 29,300 and briefly rose above $30,000.

However, by Thursday morning, Bitcoin had lost stability at $29,600 and subsequently dropped below $29k. The price fluctuated several more times around $29,000, but by Friday evening it fell to $28,300, and then could not regain $29k.

The day before yesterday, Bitcoin made a small rebound and still recovered to $ 29,000. Bitcoin seemed to want to grow further for a while this morning, but it is currently correcting back to the $29,000 level. Thus, BTC prices rose by 1% today, but decreased by 1.5% this week.

• Expectations of the price of BTC this week

It is expected that the situation may become volatile this week, and the price will finally break out of this range, which was also expected this week. It won’t be a big surprise if Bitcoin experiences a small rally after one of the longest downtrends in its history. It has been in a downtrend for 200 days.

Stock markets such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, with which Bitcoin has recently had a very high correlation, were already able to grow last week. However, it is far from clear whether Bitcoin will follow this example next week, or whether the division will continue to the detriment of the cryptocurrency.

There is also a possibility that if the BTC sees a slight increase, it will be rejected again around $ 30,500, and then continue its downward trend. Although analysts still strongly disagree on whether BTC has bottomed out or not, there are concerns that the price may still aim for a 200-week moving average around $22k.

However, the second half of May was “the fiercest accumulation period of 2022.” This could be a bullish sign in the medium term.

In addition, the number of Bitcoin addresses with at least 1 BTC has reached a new historical high – 866,568:

Meanwhile, the dominance of Bitcoin may approach the percentage value of 47, and currently it is 46.4%. In January, dominance was still at a low level – just under 39 percent.

Ethereum Dropped 39% in May

Ethereum (ETH) hit a low of $1,720 on Friday evening, which is even lower than the July 2021 low. Then ETH started to recover a bit, but the night before last it was rejected at the level of $ 1,800. At the time of writing, the price of Ether is probably going to test the $1,800 mark again. This brings ETH to 2% plus today, but it is 9.5% minus this week and as much as 39% minus this month.

The not-so-good news is that the Ethereum upgrade is running into problems, but things seem to be worse than they really are.

All members of the crypto community are looking forward to the appearance of Ethereum 2.0, a new Ethereum network that will work on the proof-of-stake (PoS) principle. However, this major update is still in the testing stage, and the past week has once again proved that testing is definitely necessary. The test network has encountered quite a big problem.

• Ethereum’s Beacon Chain Faces Challenges

Currently, Ethereum is running on a proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism. This means that Ethereum miners perform complex calculations and thereby contribute to transaction processing and network security. However, this requires a lot of energy and is not easily scaled if the number of transactions increases.

Therefore, Ethereum developers have been working on a major update for some time. After this update, the need for miners will disappear, and ETH owners will be able to give up their cryptocurrency. Currently, this PoS network is already operating in the form of a Beacon Chain. However, the blockchain has run into problems this week.

The problem was the so-called reorganization. This is a situation in the blockchain network when two blocks of transactions are presented simultaneously, as a result of which one of them is pushed into the background. But due to the differences between Ethereum clients, the network was unable to gather its strength within 7 blocks of transactions. Usually the reorganization is solved quickly.

This means that for 7 blocks of transactions in a row, no transaction could be processed. If this happened in a situation with large amounts of money, as, for example, in the current Ethereum network, the consequences could be catastrophic.

• Is the launch of the ETH 2.0 “merger” postponed again?

According to the developers, the problem is not as critical as it seems. This is due to the fact that the mechanism to resolve such a situation has not yet been fully deployed for all Ethereum clients. Ethereum developer Preston van Loon tweets:

“This restructuring is not a sign of an erroneous “fork choice”, but a non-trivial segmentation of updated and outdated client software.”

Whether this will ultimately lead to a delay in the merger, which is the official transition to PoS, is still unclear. The merger is expected to take place in August.

The cryptocurrency market at a glance

And so, from the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market, it can be seen that the value of the asset class is now at the lows of the summer of 2021. The market capitalization has been declining for 7 weeks.

The same can be seen in the trading volume. Accordingly, the trading volume should be increased so that any trend movement continues for a long period of time.

In bear markets, Bitcoin’s dominance usually increases. This has quite a logical background: being the largest and oldest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin itself is considered the most “safe” cryptocurrency.

Although in bear markets, capital is usually withdrawn from risky assets, this also happens in the cryptocurrency asset class itself. Altcoins are losing more and more in price, and large cryptocurrencies such as BTC, but to some extent ETH, are strengthening their dominance in relation to the general market due to their relative stability.

Well, the best 10 today looks like this:

• BTC 12 869 299
• ETH 8 819 366
• LUNC 3 159 045
• DOGE 1 711 190
• XTZ 1 568 981
• GMT 1 299 779
• USTC 1 090 727
• CAKE 1 077 713
• UST 1 025 625
• ADA 974 791