Posted on

Fetch.AI Soars 14.5% As AI Tokens Surge, Can FET Reach $4?

The crypto market is 5.1% up today, with a total market capitalization of $2.3 trillion. The recent pump has propelled different sectors, with memecoins being 9% up and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tokens increasing 11.2% in the last 24 hours.

Fetch.AI (FET) is at the forefront of the AI sector with its remarkable 14.5% increase in the past day. Some analysts foresee a bullish breakout for the token soon.

Are AI Tokens Taking The Lead?

As reported by NewsBTC, many market experts consider Artificial intelligence tokens a contender for the cycle’s biggest narrative in round 2.

Alex Wacy said the artificial intelligence industry is “on the brink of a multi-trillion-dollar boom” due to the increasing interest over the last year. As a result, the analyst considers the sector could create a market valued in the trillions, reaching $2 trillion by 2030.

This week, AI tokens have performed strongly. Altcoin Sherpa pointed out that the sector is “looking decent overall,” with tokens like Arweave (AR), Ocean Protocol (OCEAN), and Fetch.ai performing the best.

Renowned traded Daan Crypto considers the AI sector to be “bouncing the strongest” on this new market move, while memecoins seem to be the “weakest.” The trader shared his thoughts on Fetch.AI’s recent performance.

Daan highlighted the token’s attempt to break above the diagonal trendline. Per the chart, FET is testing the diagonal resistance, with the $2.35 mark being the first resistance level to reclaim.

AI, FET

A breakout above this level could be a “good start to a further trend change.” Moreover, the token broke “above the 4H 200MA/EMA already.” Per the trader, FET would need to test the $2.5 mark and remain above the $2.35 price range to “break the trend and head higher over the next couple of weeks.”

Similarly, crypto trader Scient considers the token consolidating inside a one-day ascending bullish triangle. His chart highlights the $2.12 mark as support for the diagonal trendline.

He forecasted a deviation below the trendline “towards 1D 100EMA” before reclaiming the $2.12 price range and moving back inside the triangle. If a retest and confirmation of the trendline reclaim occurred, the trader suggested he “would long it.”

Analysts Forecast $4 For FET

Crypto analyst World of Charts identified a “textbook” bullish pennant pattern on FET’s chart. The analyst expects an upside breakout soon, potentially leading to a 2x bullish wave. If the breakout is successful, the token’s price could move above the $4 price range.

Moreover, CryptoBoss seems to concur with this forecast. The trader shared a similar chart, signaling a possible breakout that could drive the token to double its price. In the post, he stated, “$FET 4$ exe loading…”

In the past 24 hours, the token has surged an impressive 14.5%, going from $2.04 to hover between the $2.3-$2.32 price range. This increase represents 7.5% and 13.2% in the weekly and monthly timeframes.

Similarly, FET has seen a rise in market activity. Its daily trading volume increased by 102%, with $354.2 million traded on the last day.

AI, AI tokens, FET, FETUSDT

Posted on

Crypto Traders Discuss Why Memecoins Have Been 2024’s Most Profitable Narrative

Journalist and host Laura Shin interviewed crypto traders Ansem and Kel, known on X as blkoiz06 and Kelxyz, for her Unchained Podcast.  They discussed why memecoins had become the most profitable crypto trade this cycle and what the future might hold for the sector.

Is There Value In A Memecoin?

To begin with, Shin asked the traders whether there was substance in tokens based on memes, as it has been a big argument against them. To Ansem, people “think too hard” about the value of memecoins as projects. Moreover, he considers there’s no real gain in comparing whether other altcoins deserve or have more value than meme-based tokens.

Ansem further explains that the crypto community is “very internet-centered,” with its members being “internet people” since crypto’s origin.  As a result, the community is knowledgeable about the financial aspect but is also knees-deep in online culture.

The trader believes “there’s value in memes and culture on the internet.” People in the community are “financializing” meme virality and realizing that it’s a possibility with crypto.

Shin jokingly added that if this trend had been popular in 2016, the Drake meme creator would be a “bazillionaire” by now. The host seemingly referenced the still-popular meme that originated from Drake’s Hotline Bling music video.

Agreeing with this argument, Kel asserted that, over the last 20 years, many trillion-dollar businesses have capitalized attention as their “winning trade businesses idea.”

All these trillion-dollar businesses (…) facilitate directing attention and the way they’ve done that successfully has been, oftentimes, via memes. One could even make the argument that memes are the core engine of the entire Internet.

The Risks And Criticisms Of Memecoin Mania

To understand why memecoins have become the narrative of Q1 2024, the traders discussed the risks and arguments against the tokens.

One of the biggest criticisms of memecoins is their high-risk nature. Because they are much smaller and not backed by institutional money, they can “be riskier” and “more easily go to 0.”

Despite this, traders consider that many investors, especially new ones, find memecoins attractive because they have the potential to give 100x to 1000x returns.

Moreover, losing money is not exclusive to memecoins. To illustrate his point, Ansem compared the people who bought Doge’s top to those who bought Bitcoin at $69,000 last cycle before it fell to $15,000.

To the trader, how much a token can drop and investors buying the top is part of the general market dynamics instead of a characteristic of memecoins. However, he clarifies that there is better criticism of the sector.

Ansem considers the shady behavior behind the projects’ teams a crucial issue to address. To him, a framework could prevent creators from controlling a large supply of the tokens and dumping them immediately after launch or rug-pulling investors.

In the replies to the podcast, a user argued that the reason behind the recent frenzy is driven by “the Financial nihilism and the lack of liquidity that the youth has.” Adding that investors are “Buying a mere coin is like a lottery ticket.”

It is worth mentioning that trading memecoins like lottery tickets is not an unseen phenomenon. On-chain research platform Lookonchain recently reported a trader seeing 4,906x gains in one day by precisely doing that.

Per the report, the trader invests 0.1/0.2/0.3 SOL for each memecoin. Yesterday, the investor turned $30 into $147,000 by turning 0.2 SOL into 2 million AGORA.

What’s In Memecoins’ Future?

When asked what is in store for the sector, both traders concurred that memecoins are not going away. To Ansem, the community behavior towards memecoins is like that of NFTs last cycle. With NFTs, investors felt like they were part of a community and were working towards developing it.

The shared experience of relating is another crucial factor in the craze of meme-based tokens, as seen in communities of tokens like Dogwifhat (WIF).

Adding to that idea, Kel asserted that “all memes will become coins” in the next ten years.  Moreover, the trader wouldn’t be surprised if “the creation of a meme was natively financialized” by then, as the trend of financialization of things continues to increase.

Ultimately, he believes the sector is in the early stages of this trend as the community tries to “capture the moment of a meme” and capitalize on it now that crypto has made financialization “trivial from a tech perspective.”

crypto, crypto market cap, memecoins

Posted on

Strategic Exploit: Crypto Traders Harvested $3 Billion From ‘Kimchi Premium’?

South Korea’s local media, Newsis, recently reported the case of certain crypto traders who had sent about $3 billion overseas in a bid to profit from the ‘Kimichi Premium.’ Interestingly, the court found 14 out of 16 of these traders not guilty despite their alleged actions. 

How This Group Of Crypto Traders Operated

These crypto traders are said to have sent these sums of money through local banks under the guise of these transactions being foreign exchange remittances. However, this was allegedly not the case, as they would then use the funds to purchase virtual currencies abroad and send those crypto assets back to domestic exchanges, where they eventually offload them. 

This was done to allegedly profit from the ‘Kimichi Premium.’ This phenomenon occurs when crypto assets are more expensive in South Korea than overseas due to the country’s particular regulations.

This has created an arbitrage opportunity that crypto traders have sought to exploit. Meanwhile, the Korean government has tried to prevent traders from doing so. 

That is why the prosecution charged 16 people, including someone referred to as Mr. A in the news report, with violating the Specific Financial Information Act. Mr. A and others were accused of illegally transferring foreign currency worth 4.3 trillion won ($3 billion) overseas between April 2021 and August 2022 to exploit the Kimichi premium allegedly. 

The prosecution believes these crypto traders made a market profit of as much as 210 billion won ($158 million). In their defense, the defendants argued against any wrongdoing since they weren’t precisely the ones facilitating the foreign exchange business but the bank.

The traders argued they were platform users, not virtual asset business operators. The bank involved also tried to absolve itself from the case as it claimed it carried out the transaction based on the “false evidence” the defendants submitted. 

Court Finds The Defendants Not Guilty

The court agreed with most defendants’ arguments, acquitting 14 (including Mr. A) out of the 16 persons charged. A local Judge who ruled over the case opined that their actions didn’t violate the objective of the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act and, therefore, could not be punished under that law. 

The Judge added that there was “nothing to suggest that the defendants operated as virtual asset business operators.” If the reverse was the case, they could have been punished for not registering their business or making certain disclosures as required by the law. 

Interestingly, Judge Park further distinguished the current case from a Supreme Court precedent as he noted that the highest court did not “explicitly judge the issues in this case.” The prosecution already submitted an appeal, dissatisfied with the court’s ruling. 

crypto traders ethereum eth ethusdt erc-404

Chart from Tradingview

Posted on

Bitcoin Bounce Above $35,000 Puts Holder Profitability At Yearly Highs

Bitcoin has had an eventful week in terms of price action. The world’s largest crypto saw an 18% increase in the past seven days, its highest percentage increase this year. This unexpected surge caused a flurry of short position liquidations, and according to Glassnode, 60,000 BTC worth of futures positions were closed. Amidst all the price surge, data from Glassnode has shown a large portion of investors are now breaking above profit. 

Bitcoin Surges Past $35,000, Flipping Millions of Coins Into Profit

Bitcoin bulls managed to push Bitcoin price above $35,100 in the past 24 hours, marking the biggest one-day increase this year. The upward movement began near the $25,000 level and continued until it reached its new yearly high. 

A blockchain analytics platform Glassnode report showed that Bitcoin zooming past $35,000 is a big deal for holders. At this price level, millions of BTC holdings were pushed into profitability. During this rally, the percent of supply in profit from the $25,000 to $35,000 price jump increased by a massive 4.7M BTC, equivalent to 24% of the total circulating supply. 

Long-term investors, in particular, had a big break in profit at this price point. Although approximately 29.6% of long-term holder supply is still held at a loss, their aggregate holdings recently broke into a new all-time high of 14.899 million BTC.

Bitcoin profit 1
Source: Glassnode

Short-term holders were also not left out, as investor confidence has recovered from bearish to neutral on the cost-basis models. We’re now at a crossover point to a positive bullish sentiment for short-term holders. A look into the average buy price of short-term holders puts the majority of entry into the market at $28,000, indicating a profit margin for both short and long-term traders. 

What’s Behind Bitcoin’s Sudden Price Surge?

The sudden surge in Bitcoin can be attributed to the excitement behind the approval of BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETFs application. Bitcoin backers pointed to the listing of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust on the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) website, suggesting that BlackRock had begun seeding money for the ETF. 

Although Bitcoin has since shed off some of this price gain and is now trading at $33,860 at the time of this writing, metrics show that 80% of holders are making money at the current price. Exchange signals also point to bullish momentum, as traders are now exchanging their assets for BTC on crypto exchanges.

The rise in the value of Bitcoin to $35,000 was reflected in the stock prices of crypto-related companies like Coinbase and MicroStrategy. At that price, MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin holdings would have generated a profit of $857 million for the company.

Bitcoin price chart from Tradingview.com (BTC profit)

Posted on

Stablecoins Interest Spikes As Traders Look To Exit Market

Data shows there has been a large spike in interest around stablecoins recently, a sign that investors of Bitcoin and other assets may be looking to exit.

Stablecoins Have Observed A Sharp Rise In Social Volume Recently

According to data from the on-chain analytics firm Santiment, there has been a major uptick in the social volume of the stablecoins recently. The “social volume” refers to an indicator that measures the total number of social media text documents that are talking about a certain topic or term.

The social media text documents here have been collected by Santiment and include a variety of sources like Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, and other internet forums.

Something to note about the metric is that it only tells us about the unique number of such posts that are mentioning the given term at least once. This means that even if a thread includes several mentions of the topic, its contribution towards the social volume will still remain only one unit.

The social volume can provide insight into the degree of attention any particular coin is getting on social media platforms. Whenever this indicator’s value goes up, it means that the general interest in the asset among investors is rising currently.

Now, here is a chart that shows the 7-day change in the social volume for the various assets in the cryptocurrency sector (including the stablecoins):

Stablecoin and Bitcoin Social Volume

As displayed in the above graph, the social volume of a lot of the volatile assets has registered a negative 7-day change, implying that there is a lesser amount of discussion happening related to them right now as compared to a week ago.

Some of the assets like Bitcoin have seen a positive 7-day change in the metric, but the increase has only been minuscule for them, implying that their social volume is relatively unchanged.

Interestingly, while the volatile assets may have seen decreasing or sideways-moving social volumes, the stablecoins have seen a completely different trend with the metric; their social volumes have sharply surged in the past week.

USD Coin (USDC), which is the stablecoin second only to Tether (USDT) in terms of market cap, has seen an extraordinary rise of more than 300% in terms of this metric. This suggests that discussions around the coin have increased by more than 300% during the past week.

Tether itself has observed a positive 7-day change in the social volume of more than 30%, which, while much lesser than USDC’s, is still quite significant nonetheless.

Generally, investors use stables whenever they want to escape the volatility associated with the other coins in the sector. So, since the interest around these tokens has surged recently while the volatile cryptocurrencies have been seeing a red period, it would appear that holders may once again be seeking the safety of this stable form of digital assets.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $27,300, down 2% in the last week.

Bitcoin Price Chart

Posted on

Bitcoin’s Break Above $20,000 Sees Market Liquidations Cross $1 Billion

Tuesday has proven to be a good day for bitcoin and the crypto market in its entirety as gains have been the order of the day. Bitcoin has finally been able to clear the $20,000 territory even when indicators pointed towards the more sluggish movement for the digital asset. As expected, there have been ripple events from the gains in the market. Liquidations are now the order of the day and short traders are getting the ‘short’ end of the stick.

Crypto Liquidations Cross $1 Billion

The crypto market has now recorded its worse liquidation trend so far in 2022. Bitcoin’s recovery above $20,000 was swift and the liquidations were just as fast. The result of this is more than $1 billion being liquidated across the crypto market in the last 24 hours.

Given the recovery, short traders have suffered the worst of it. Data from Coinglass shows that over 87% of all liquidations recorded in the past day have been from short traders. This means that short traders have lost more than $700 million in a single day.

Amid this, FTX exchange recorded the largest liquidation event in history with more than $700 million liquidated on the crypto exchange. This puts the majority of the market liquidations on FTX (74.7%) with all other exchanges making up about 25% of the remaining figure.

Bitcoin and crypto liquidations

24-hour liquidations cross $1.1 billion | Source: Coinglass

Approximately 156,000 traders were caught in the crossfire of this bloody trading day. The largest single liquidation was recorded on the Okex – ETH-USDT-SWAP pair for a total of $3.05 million. Total market liquidation values now sit at $1.12 billion at the time of this writing.

Bitcoin Gearing Up For More

Bitcoin has landed in the mid-$20,000s after the current rally but the digital asset does not seem to be done yet. The recovery put it firmly above its 50-day moving average, which cements its short-term bull trend.

Additionally, the correlation with the stock market remains high and bitcoin is bound to follow the performance of its largest counterpart. If the current positive sentiment across the financial market continues, then it is possible that BTC would test the $21,000 resistance before the close of the trading day on Wednesday.

Bitcoin price chart from TradingView.com

BTC price at $20,600 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

High inflation rates across the world are also triggering investors’ move to bitcoin. Forecasts have put countries around the world at even higher inflation rates going into the end of the year, which could paint a bull picture for cryptocurrencies going forward.

BTC is currently trading at $20,600 at the time of this writing. It is up 6.98% in the last 24 hours and has a current market cap of 396 billion. It has also seen $61.7 billion in trading volume, a 136% increase in the last day.

Featured image from ITPro Today, chart from TradingView.com

Follow Best Owie on Twitter for market insights, updates, and the occasional funny tweet…

Posted on

Crypto Traders Lost $421 Million In Liquidations For The Past 24 Hours

The crypto market has been bouncing back and forth in the past few days. Over 124,003 traders saw more than $421 million liquidated in a 24-hour period as prices tumbled wildly throughout yesterday and today.

The crypto market is falling to new lows not seen since November. With a total loss of $421 million, Bitcoin (BTC) accounted for most of the losses, followed closely by Ethereum (ETH). 

Related Reading | TA: Ethereum Bears Aim Big After Recent Breakdown Below $2.5K

Crypto Traders Liquidations Figure

Most of these liquidations occurred on Binance, FTX, and Okex. As a result, Bitcoin traders lost 4,340 BTC worth $144 million, Ethereum traders lost 50,180 ETH worth $121.81 million, and LUNA traders lost 264,350 coins worth $15.99 million.

Other major cryptocurrencies showed relatively lower losses. Futures tracking Tron’s TRX saw $8 million in losses, followed by Solana’s SOL at $7.54 million. Dogecoin’s DOGE showed $7.24 million while Stepn’s GMT losses reached $6.93 million. Among other alternative currencies, Ripple (XRP) futures saw a loss of $6.1 million, followed by Appcoin (APE) at $5.95 million.

Crypto futures lost over $421 million in the past 24 hours. | Source: Coinglass

The 12 hours of liquidation figures show the losses of $286 million from all major cryptocurrencies.

According to Coinglass data, traders lost 77.5% ($327 million) of the total liquidation amount betting on longs. $129 million liquidations happened on Okex, while traders on FTX lost $107 million. Binance traders are on 3rd, losing $94 million in liquidations.

In case anyone isn’t aware of what futures “liquidations” are, it’s best to take a brief look at the workings of margin trading.

When an exchange closes a leveraged position, it’s called a liquidation. This happens when there is a partial or total loss of the trader’s initial margin. Liquidations happen mostly in futures trading. Because that only tracks asset prices, unlike spot trading, where traders own the actual assets.

 

Bitcoin has been on a downtrend since 5th May with a 15% decline in the past seven days | Source: BTC/USD chart from Tradingview.com
Crypto Market Correlation

If we look at cryptocurrency prices from November 2021, they have gone down a lot. The total value of all cryptocurrencies has dropped by almost 50%. In November 2021, the total crypto market capital reached $2.79 trillion while now it is at $1.49 trillion according to Tradingview.  Bitcoin market cap in November 2021 crossed $1.26 trillion, which is about 45% of the total market cap.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Carnage Continues As BTC Disintegrates To $34K

It is unclear what caused the sell-off, but it is happening during a downturn that is affecting all markets, including cryptocurrencies.

This suggests that the crypto market is becoming more like traditional markets. The S&P 500 and other big tech firms have been more strongly related to crypto in the past year. That is why the crypto market is more tightly connected to the global economy.

Featured image from Pixabay and the chart from tradingview.com