The price of Bitcoin continued its slow slump this past week. But worse could be coming, if predictions of an incoming “death cross” are to be believed.
A death cross occurs when an asset’s short-term moving average falls below its long-term moving average and generally indicates that a sell-off is imminent.
This grim-sounding occasion was due to occur on December 18, when Bitcoin’s 20-day exponential moving average (EMA) closed below its 200-day EMA.
When the same happened on May 30, 2021, it was the precursor to a BTC crash which saw its price fall from $36,500 to $28,800.
Bitcoin is currently hovering at just under $47,000, after dropping from a high of almost $60,000 over the past month.
The bears are claiming Bitcoin right now, so where are the bulls? Here are a few clues and some other stories from the past week in crypto.
Yearn For Success
The best performer of the past week was Yearn. Finance (YFI), which experienced 40% growth over the past few days to surge over $31,000.
The rally came after the team behind Yearn announced a massive buyback program and tweeted: “Yearn has purchased $7,526,343 worth of YFI from the open market. We got 282.4 YFI (0.77% of total supply) at an average price of $26,651. More YFI has been bought back in the past month than in the prior year.”
Adam Cochran, a partner at the venture capital firm Cinneamhain Ventures, summed up the importance of the buyback in a Twitter thread, in which he said: “Yearn has started massively buying back YFI. The ratios are insane.
“Yearn is probably one of the only truly 100% decentralized defi projects, and it manages to deliver an incredible product that makes defi easy and is profitable for the protocol.
“Outside of holding $ETH, $YFI is actually my top pick for all of 2022.”
We’ve edited the thread a little, but the message remains the same. Adam is excited about Yearn-Finance and YFI. Are you?
Avalanche Climbs
Unlike the natural phenomenon which inspired its name, Avalanche (AVAX) has been heading upwards. It also experienced a 40% climb to rise to a price of $115.77 at the time of writing on the back of positive institutional feedback.
The Bank of America issued a research note praising Avalanche’s ability to scale, meaning it could serve as an alternative to Ethereum for NFTS, DeFi, and other crypto-assets. More than 380 projects have been built on the platform.
Avalanche describes itself as the “fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry." It features sub-nets, which are a unique approach to consensus, the mechanism by which data on a network and transactions are verified as genuine. This allows the use of multiple blockchains.
A team of analysts led by Alkesh Shah wrote in the note. Time-to-finality describes how long it takes to reach the stage where crypto transactions cannot be altered, reversed, or canceled after they are completed. Avalanche allows the validation of around 4,500 transactions per second.
Earlier this year, Deloitte said it was working with Avalance on a project that will use blockchain to “improve state and local governments’ recovery from natural disasters and public health emergencies”.
Crypto for Christmas
What do you buy the crypto investor that has everything? More crypto, obviously.
Which just became a little bit easier after Robinhood announced a new gifting program that lets users send crypto to friends and family from the Robinhood app.
The new “experience” allows seven cryptocurrencies to be sent along with “a unique design and personal message”.
“As always, crypto gifts are 0% commission,” Robinhood wrote.
“Crypto is not just for the holidays, it’s for life!”
The gifting scheme launches on December 22, which means it's perfect for festive laggards who’ve left their shopping until the very last minute.
Data Dump
James Howells, from Wales in the UK, became world famous when he threw away a harddrive containing a Bitcoin cache now worth more than $450 million.
Howell has hired investigators who worked with Nasa to help his hunt for the drive, which was put in a trash bag and dumped at a local landfill site during an office cleanout.
Howells’ "consortium of experts" includes Ontrack, a data-recovery firm that salvaged a hard drive from the Columbia Space Shuttle after it crashed to Earth in 2003.
“They were able to recover from a shuttle that exploded and they don't seem to think that being at a landfill will be a problem,” Howells told The Sun.
So what’s stopping them from finding the buried treasure? Local bureaucrats.
Howells has been begging the local authorities to let him dig at the dump since 2014, but they have repeatedly refused.
"The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds - without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order,” a spokeswoman said.
If you want to start digging in the dirt to find buried Bitcoin, head for Newport in Wales. The crypto is likely to be found somewhere in a 200 metre squared area where trash is piled 15 metres deep.
This makes me think of the famous old British phrase: “Where there’s muck, there’s brass.”
Crypto Glitch
For a few brief moments, Bitcoin was worth $900 billion and Ether was valued at $81 billion. Not the dawning of a new age of astonishing crypto plenty, but a glitch on CoinMarketCap that appeared to send prices rocketing to the moon.
Sadly, gravity quickly interjected and dragged the prices down to Earth.
The Next Step For Doge?
Two pieces of interesting Doge news surfaced over the past week. The first was Elon Musk’s announcement that Telsa would accept Doge, but only for merchandise.
“Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes,” the self-professed DogeFather said.
This week, a whale moved ??an anonymous whale transferred 5.4 billion Doge worth $973 million in Dogecoin to two separate wallets, according to WhaleStats. This transaction cost just 4.49 DOGE or roughly 70 cents.
Super-cheap transfers. Growing mainstream adoption. It’s all getting very serious. Is anyone laughing about Doge now?
