Weekly recap: New Year’s Eve downtrend of the crypto market

Crypto market in numbers

Crypto market capitalisation has been attempting to gain a foothold above $2.4 trillion for most of the week, according to CoinMarketCap. However, having reached a local maximum of $2.44 trillion on 27th December, the market began to fall again, dropping on 30th December to a local minimum of $2.16 trillion. The median value of the indicator over the previous 7 days was $2.39 trillion. Nevertheless, over the year, the crypto market cap has almost tripled.

Reduced trading activity persisted during the week. The greatest revival of activity was observed during a massive cryptocurrency sell-off on 28th December. Average daily trading volumes for the previous 7 days amounted to $86 billion. For comparison, on 30th November, the indicator was $128 billion, and on 31st October – $138 billion.

On 30th December, the crypto Fear and Greed Index returned to the “Extreme Fear” zone with a value of 22 points. During the entire month of December, the index was unable to rise above the “Fear” zone. The median value for the week stood at 39 and 28 for the month.

The dominance of bitcoin during the week remained almost unchanged and as of 30th December is 40.3%. Bitcoin’s 30-day Volatility Index has dropped 0.3% to 3.27% over the past 7 days, according to CryptoCompare.

Gainers of the week (23rd – 30th December)

Losers of the week (23rd – 30th December)

Easily track gainers and losers within the Simple trade section on EXMO. Check real-time updates in the last 24 hours, week and month.

Most traded coins (22nd – 29th December)

Top crypto market driving factors

Overall crypto market

▼ 22.12.2021 – According to Sergei Mendeleev, CEO of Indefibank, the Russian government has made a final decision to ban crypto assets.

▲ 22.12.2021 – U.S. Commerce Department: U.S. GDP increased at an annual rate of 2.3% during the third quarter of 2021.

▲ 22.12.2021 – Conference Board: the index of consumer confidence rose to 115.8 in December, which is 5 points more than expected.

▼ 23.12.2021 – Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund (ETF) listing has been disapproved by the SEC.

▲ 23.12.2021 – Swift plans to experiment with tokenised assets and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in the first quarter of 2022.

▼ 24.12.2021 – Forbes: The Bank of Russia is considering blocking debit card payments to crypto exchanges using merchant category codes as one possible crypto restriction method.

▼ 27.12.2021 – President Joe Biden signed the 2022 defense spending bill into law, without amendments that could clarify the regulation of cryptocurrencies.

▲ 28.12.2021 – South China Morning Post: Chinese investors have not given up on crypto, despite regulatory hostility and the absence of cryptocurrency platforms in the country.

Bitcoin (BTC)

▲ 22.12.2021 – Michael Saylor has revealed that he personally owns 17,000 bitcoins worth over $850 million.

▲ 23.12.2021 – Bloomberg chief commodity strategist, Mike McGlone, believes that bitcoin has bottomed out the current correction, which is at $45,000. According to the analyst, the asset will recover to $70,000 in the near future.

▲ 23.12.2021 – Arcane Research: in 2021, bitcoin’s share of the total crypto circulating supply on exchanges decreased by 1.19%, while the shares of corporation balances, investment funds, old wallets and Ethereum tokens increased.

▲ 23.12.2021 – Fidelity Investments: Argo Blockchain ranked third among the top five stocks most actively traded by its customers.

▲▼ 26.12.2021 – The CEO of Real Vision TV, Raoul Pal: the fall in BTC’s price is caused by profit taking by large investors.

▼ 27.12.2021 – Glassnode: over the course of the last week, another reversal from net exchange outflows back to net exchange inflows was observed.

▲▼ 27.12.2021 – Glassnode: total open interest in bitcoin futures saw an increase of $2.5 billion over the past week. Whilst futures open interest is still some way off all-time-highs, rapid increases in leverage can indicate a clustering of stop-losses and liquidation levels in close proximity to the current price. This adds higher probabilities to a potential short, or long squeeze in the more immediate term.

▲ 27.12.2021 – Glassnode: exchange balances recorded a net yearly outflow of 67,800 BTC, which is just 2.5%. In the long term, this change turned out to be insignificant. Net inflows were observed only between May and July.

▼ 27.12.2021 – Glassnode: over the year, long-term holders added over 1.8 million BTC to their holdings (16% of their total supply), while short-term holder supply declined by more than 1.4 million BTC or 32%. Such on-chain behavior is more typically observed during Bitcoin bear markets, which in hindsight are effectively lengthy periods of coin redistribution from weaker hands to those with stronger ones.

▲▼ 27.12.2021 – Glassnode: since the beginning of the year, bitcoin futures open interest has increased by $9.57 billion (97%), whilst futures trading volume declined by 16%.

▲ 27.12.2021 – Glassnode: aggregate miner revenue has grown by 58% since the beginning of the year and by over 440% since the halving event in May 2020.

▲ 27.12.2021 – Glassnode: sovereign supply, defined as all coins held outside exchange reserves, is currently at an all-time high of 13.3 million BTC, which is 86% of all mined coins.

▲ 28.12.2021 – The Block Research: the combined trading volume of bitcoin and ether futures increased by a record 338% in 2021, surging over $32 trillion. The combined trading volume of BTC and ETH options grew by 443%.

Ethereum (ETH)

▼ 22.12.2021 – Micro ether futures contracts introduced on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) on 6th December received relatively modest attention from investors. Over the past two weeks, the new offering has seen 115,000 contracts change hands, which is twice less compared to the bitcoin equivalents.

▼ 23.12.2021 – СryptoQuant: since 13th December, ETH inflows to exchanges have exceeded outflows, which may indicate the upcoming ETH price correction.

▲ 28.12.2021 – The Block Research: the combined trading volume of bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) futures increased by a record 338% in 2021, surging over $32 trillion. The combined trading volume of bitcoin and ether options grew by 443%.

▼ 28.12.2021 – Glassnode: on 27th December, the number of Ethereum addresses with at least 1,000 ETH dropped to 6,292, the lowest level since April 2017. At the beginning of this year, the number of Ethereum whales was 7,239.

Cardano (ADA)

▲ 24.12.2021 – COTI payment system: a pre-released version of the Djed stablecoin will be delivered in the next few days.

▲ 25.12.2021 – Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson: the deployment framework for decentralised applications (dApps) will appear in the Cardano ecosystem in 2022.

XRP (XRP)

▲ 22.12.2021 – Ripple CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, stated that this year was the most successful for his company thanks to its operational activity. XRP on-demand liquidity (ODL) transactions account for 25% of total dollar volume across the network and are up 25 times compared to the third quarter of 2020.

▲ 22.12.2021 – Visa has announced it completed the acquisition of Currencycloud, a global cross-border payment platform that has been Ripple’s partner since 2020.

▲ 24.12.2021 – A snapshot of XRP balances for the SOLO airdrop has been taken.

Dogecoin (DOGE)

▲ 23.12.2021 – Dogecoin Foundation laid out its first-ever roadmap. The company also announced that they are working with Vitalik Buterin to develop a unique DOGE staking mechanism.

▼ 27.12.2021 – Co-founder of the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, Billy Markus, has stated that he will never work on the project again due to the community’s attitude.

Shiba Inu (SHIB)

▲ 23.12.2021 – WhaleStats: shiba inu (SHIB) is now the most-held token among the top 1000 Ethereum wallets.

▲ 25.12.2021 – Shiba Inu is set to hold its first-ever AMA session on Twitter on 29th December.

▲▼ 27.12.2021 – Santiment: since the beginning of November, whale addresses holding from 100,000 to 10 million SUSHI have accumulated a whopping +9.7% of the total altcoin supply.

Uniswap (UNI)

▲ 22.12.2021 – Uniswap developers announced that all V3 contracts had been successfully deployed on the leading layer-2 scaling solution Polygon.

Cosmos (ATOM)

▲ 22.12.2021 – ATOM started growing alongside ​​LUNA, a native token of the algorithmic stablecoin platform Terra that is based on the Cosmos blockchain.

TON (TONCOIN)

▲ 23.12.2021 – Telegram founder Pavel Durov has expressed public support for Toncoin developers.

▲ 24.12.2021 – The Toncoin team announced the release of 10,000 unique NFTs on the TON network.

Velas (VLX)

▲ 27.12.2021 – Starting from 2022, Velas Network AG will become the premium partner of Formula 1 Scuderia Ferrari team to create digital content for its fans.

EXMO news

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EXMO Coin (EXM) quarterly burn. The next burn of all EXM tokens received from EXMO Premium Cashback and the EXMO store sales is scheduled on 4th January 2022. This time, we will also burn all the tokens collected as fees for EXM trading in November.

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That’s all for this week! Follow EXMO on YouTube, Twitter and Telegram to stay tuned to the main events and trends in the crypto market.