1. Top 5 cryptocurrencies to watch this week: BTC, ETH, BNB, MATIC, FTM
Bitcoin is witnessing modest profit-booking, but the long-term trend remains intact and altcoins like ETH, BNB, MATIC and FTM may remain in focus in the short term.
The weekend failed to ignite a bullish momentum from crypto investors and both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) turned down on Oct. 31. The bulls will now try to achieve the third successive weekly close and the first-ever monthly close above the psychological $60,000 level.
Another level of interest for traders is $63,000 because the stock-to-flow creator PlanB projected this level as the “worst-case scenario” for October. In the recent past, PlanB’s worst-case theory was proven to be correct in August and September.
Apart from the near-term interest, investors should remember that Bitcoin was launched on Jan. 3, 2009, at a price of $0.0008 and from there rallied 8,374,999,900% to hit a high at $67,000.
The journey for the hodlers was not easy as there were several gut-wrenching corrections along the way and each time a handful of analysts called for the end of Bitcoin. However, in hindsight, all these dips turned out to be good buying opportunities.
Today marks the thirteenth birthday of the Bitcoin white paper released on Oct. 31, 2008, paving the way for possibly the biggest financial disruption in recent history.
Let’s analyze the charts of the top 5 cryptocurrencies that could attract traders’ attention in the next few days.
2. Binance Temporarily Disables All Crypto Withdrawals, Cites Backlog
Withdrawals resumed about 25 minutes after the stoppage was announced, before being disabled and then resumed again.
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, temporarily disabled all crypto withdrawals for a time on Monday due to a large backlog.
Withdrawals were resumed about 25 minutes after the stoppage was announced to customers on its Twitter account Monday. Twenty minutes after that announcement, however, the company tweeted an update that withdrawals had been closed again. At 13:48 UTC (9:49 a.m. ET), the company tweeted that withdrawals had resumed once again.
“There will be a temporary delay in withdrawal processing as the backlog is cleared. We expect this to last about 30 minutes,” Binance said in a tweet following the initial resumption.
3. Digital Currency Group Achieves $10B Valuation in $700M Secondary Sale
Two SoftBank funds, GIC Capital, Ribbit Capital and CapitalG, the private equity arm of Google’s holding company, Alphabet, took part.
Digital Currency Group (DCG), the crypto investment company whose holdings include asset manager Grayscale, crypto lender Genesis and independent news outlet CoinDesk, sold $700 million of stock in a private sale led by a pair of SoftBank funds.
The sale valued the firm at $10 billion and was led by SoftBank funds Vision Fund 2 and Latin America Fund. GIC Capital, Ribbit Capital and CapitalG, the private equity arm of Google’s holding company, Alphabet, also participated, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Marcelo Claure, chief executive of SoftBank, described DCG as the “single-best asset that gives us the diversity of exposure to crypto, A-Z.”
SoftBank’s previous forays into crypto include blockchain analytics firm Elliptic and Block.one’s new subsidiary crypto exchange, Bullish.
4. Avalanche Developers and Investors Form $200M ‘Blizzard’ Investment Fund
The early-stage investment firm and incubator will be operated by former Ava Labs and Avalanche Foundation staff.
The Avalanche ecosystem is getting yet another injection of liquidity with the launch of Blizzard, an AVAX-focused venture capital and incubation fund.
Blizzard is kicking off with an initial seed investment of $200 million, including participation from the Avalanche Foundation, Ava Labs, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital and CMS Holdings, among others. AVAX is the native asset of the Avalanche blockchain.
The new fund comes on the heels of a separate pair of big-budget investment programs, including a $230 million fund primarily devoted to providing liquidity, as well as Avalanche Rush, a $180 million liquidity mining incentive fund.
Ava Labs President John Wu, who will also be leading Blizzard, said the new fund will invest in early-stage projects across the Avalanche ecosystem, including decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), social tokens and “all that stuff.”
Rival base layers to Ethereum have been exploding in popularity as of late, and venture capital firms see ample opportunity on each chain to re-create popular Ethereum-native verticals and services at much lower valuations.
A half-dozen current Ava Labs employees will migrate to Blizzard to provide business development and technical support for young teams, and the fund is being envisioned as closer to an incubator in the vein of Y Combinator rather than a pure, cash-only investment outfit. Services for selected projects will include “community building, marketing, introduction to service providers” such as security audits.
The structure of the fund does mean that the Avalanche Foundation and Ava Labs will become owners of governance tokens controlling products in the Avalanche ecosystem, but Wu said that Blizzard will be distributing portions of those tokens to the fund’s founders rather than holding them.
“We want decentralization, as all projects do. And a unique aspect of this fund is that the tokens that get distributed to Blizzard, they will be passed on to the Polychains, the Three Arrows, the Dragonflies, all these guys in the fund.”
Wu is also confident that the $200 million can be quickly deployed.
“We already have deals that we’re warehousing for the fund. The team has seen over 1,100 deals over the last ten months, and the deal flow has only accelerated.”
Wu told that Ava Labs has offered some form of networking, grants or marketing assistance to some 400 teams of the 1,100 that have passed through its doors, and that the team directly invested in 40 of those projects.
“Our biggest regret is not having this set for our partners earlier, because we may have invested in more,” he said.
At the time of writing Avalanche’s closely watched total value locked (TVL) metric sits at $8.46 billion, up over 100% on the month.
5. November Is Crypto Literacy Month
Few people in the world possess even basic knowledge of cryptocurrency. Crypto Literacy Month aims to change that.
Crypto is on the rise. Crypto knowledge, however, is stuck on the runway: It turns out that 96% of U.S. adults can’t pass a test on crypto basics.
That’s according to the results of a survey that polled over 1,000 people in the U.S. and thousands more worldwide. Nine out of 10 people were not aware of bitcoin’s supply cap of 21 million, and less than half had an understanding of how the asset’s price is determined.
Perhaps more concerningly, the results suggest cryptocurrency isn’t doing much to break down the barriers of financial inclusion for certain groups: Crypto owners tend to steer young, educated, wealthy and male. In addition, basic crypto knowledge plummeted even further outside the U.S., with 99% of respondents in Brazil and Mexico getting a failing grade.
While overall awareness of crypto may be at an all-time high, clearly the industry has work to do to equip more investors with the knowledge and tools to take part in this new asset class. That’s the impetus behind Crypto Literacy Month, an initiative that aims to promote greater consumer education about crypto and bitcoin, the concepts behind them and the ways investors of all types can integrate digital assets into their financial planning.
CryptoLiteracy.org was created by Coinme, a cryptocurrency cash exchange that powers thousands of physical locations through partnerships with Coinstar and MoneyGram. Visitors to the site can take the same survey that created the initial results.
Every week in November, CryptoLiteracy.org will highlight a specific topic in crypto, starting with bitcoin. Subsequent weeks will dive into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi) and important security basics every crypto investor should know.
When you’re on the outside looking in, the world of crypto often seems impenetrable. Knowledge is the key to getting in, and Crypto Literacy Month aims to spread that knowledge — one day at a time.
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November 1, 2021
