1. Market Wrap: Ethereum Classic Steals Show From Bitcoin, Ether, Even DOGE
Ethereum Classic pops 53%, while bitcoin recovers and ether pushes back toward its all-time high.
In a reminder that easy money prevails, cryptocurrencies rallied on Wednesday with bitcoin (BTC) up about 5% over the last 24-hours. It was trading at $57,133 at the time of writing.
Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency, bounced back from Tuesday’s sell-off, pushing toward the all-time high of around $3,500.
News that Fidelity National has teamed up with NYDIG, a crypto custody firm, to allow U.S. banks to offer customers the ability to buy, sell and hold bitcoin contributed to bullish trading activity on Wednesday.
“Bitcoin could see continued momentum back above $60,000 just on the Fidelity news,” Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda, a foreign exchange broker, wrote, describing the news as a “game-changer.”
Additionally, news that Galaxy Digital, a crypto-focused financial services firm, agreed to buy BitGo, the U.S. regulated crypto custody specialist, was another positive development for cryptocurrencies.
But the big story of the day was a 53% jump over the past 24 hours in price for ethereum classic (ETC), born of a contentious split a few years ago from the dominant Ethereum blockchain.
Bitcoin trading around $57,133 as of 21:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 5% over the previous 24 hours.
Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $53,633-$57,356
Ether trading around $3,476 as of 21:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 2.6% over the previous 24 hours.
Ether’s 24-hour range: $3,237-$3,530
2. Uniswap v3 Is Live as DEX Aims to Become Ethereum’s Indisputable №1
The leading automated market maker now offers “concentrated liquidity,” which many believe will attract even more liquidity than Uniswap has already.
Uniswap version 3.0 is live, an upgrade widely expected to make the automated market maker much more attractive for the cryptocurrency traders and funds with the deepest pockets.
The decentralized exchange, which appeared on Ethereum in late 2018, is currently the fourth-largest decentralized finance (DeFi) application on that blockchain, as ranked by DeFi Pulse, with $7 billion in assets staked. According to its own stats, Uniswap’s v2 accrued $1.6 billion in trade volume over the last 24 hours.
The company behind the Uniswap protocol announced version 3 was coming in late March and now the automated market maker (AMM) is rolling it out in the middle of a crypto bull run that has pushed ether (ETH, +4.84%) (ETH) to all-time highs. ETH is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and the native token of Ethereum, where DeFi was born and much of the action still takes place.
3. E-Commerce Giant MercadoLibre Discloses $7.8M Bitcoin Buy
The Latin American retailer said the purchase was in the last quarter.
Latin American e-commerce giant MercadoLibre disclosed a $7.8 million bitcoin (BTC, +4.09%) purchase on Wednesday, making it the latest publicly traded company to park bitcoin on its balance sheet.
The Argentina-based company said in an earnings report the purchase happened in the last quarter and was part of its treasury strategy. MercadoLibre trades on Nasdaq as MELI.
Though far from the lofty bitcoin acquisitions of MicroStrategy (roughly $2.2 billion) or Tesla ($1.5 billion), the investment by MercadoLibre represents a strong step toward mainstreaming bitcoin as a payment option.
The largest e-commerce player in Latin America, MercadoLibre unveiled a bitcoin-only real estate platform just last week. Its MercadoPago payments platform integrated bitcoin in 2015.
4. PayPal Q1 Transaction Revenue Rose 33% YOY as Total Revenue, EPS Topped Views
The payments giant raised yearly forecasts for net new accounts, total payment volume, revenue and earnings.
PayPal’s (PYPL) Q1 transaction revenue rose 33% to $5.62 billion from $4.22 billion in the year-earlier period as the payments giant posted better-than-expected earnings and sales. The company boosted its year forecasts.
Quarter over quarter, transaction revenue fell slightly to the $5.68 billion reported in the holiday-spending boosted Q4.
Part of PayPal’s transaction revenue was from the company’s crypto buy, sell, and hold product. The payments giant also added 14.5 million in net new active accounts, down from 16 million added in the last quarter. (The company excludes crypto payments from total payment volume.)
5. Crypto Derivatives Boom Leaves Small Traders Vulnerable to Liquidation: Carnegie Mellon
Sophisticated actors are taking from amateur investors in bitcoin derivatives trading, according to Carnegie Mellon researchers using data from BitMEX.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are warning that sharp price swings and liquidations could disproportionately impact smaller traders as the market for crypto derivatives booms.
A recent study by the Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab found trading volume in cryptocurrency derivatives exceeds that of the underlying spot markets.
“Sophisticated actors are taking from amateur investors,” Kyle Soska, a researcher at the lab who co-authored the report, said in an interview. “Wealth centralization is taking place and there are a few big players.”
Liquidation events occur when traders cannot fulfill margin requirements for holding crypto derivative positions and often exacerbate price moves. In April, bitcoin (BTC, +4.2%) futures had a record $10 billion worth of liquidations in one day after data showed leveraged traders were excessively skewed bullish. The liquidation coincided with a near 15% drop in BTC from an all-time high of around $65,000.
“When markets are trending up everybody makes money, but during a wipeout a few big actors take everything and the little guys are taken out,” Soska said.
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May 6, 2021
