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Ethereum Going Green Is Red For ETH

Ethereum ($ETH.X) is not moving in the direction many hoped it would post Merge, but it’s only Friday. Weekends are notoriously volatile for the crypto market, so watching how things move into Saturday and Sunday will be important. 

And even though ETH had a big nose dive on Thursday, the remainder of the market performed much better. By better, I mean -2% to -3% lower on Thursday versus Ethereum’s -10%.  And unless something drastic happens before Monday, Ethereum could be positioning for another leg down. 

We’ll talk more about that in today’s Litepaper, along with some major/minor news with some of the crypto industries’ major exchanges. The most important is probably Coinbase ($COIN) finally stepping up and taking a very active political stance in defense of the industry. 

Here’s how the market looked at the end of the Friday trading session: 

Cardano (ADA)
$0.46
-1.07%
Binance Coin (BNB)
$272.90
0.70%
Bitcoin (BTC) $19,600 -0.51%
Dogecoin (DOGE)
$0.06
1.87%
Ethereum (ETH)
$1,435
-2.68%
Polkadot (DOT) $6.83 -1.44%
Solana (SOL)
$32.17
-2.66%
XRP (XRP)
$0.34
4.54%
Altcoin Market Cap
$542Billion
-0.79%
Total Market Cap
$919 Billion
-0.59%

Ethereum Merge Is A Nothing Burger? Featured Image

The Merge came. The Merge was complete. The Merge was a success. The hype was real.  Ethereum went green, and the planet was happy. 

But price action showed a fairly standard version of Buy The Rumor, Sell The News. 

Now, if you watch the market every day, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and have some recency bias. It’s hard to forget that Ethereum ($ETH.X) did pamp from the June 18 swing low of $880 to the most recent swing high on August 14 at $2,031 – roughly a +130% gain. 

Even considering yesterday’s sell-off, Ethereum is still up over 60% from the June lows. 

But that’s not what has some people worried – it’s the decentralization function that was supposed to happen. It’s still early, but so far, Ethereum looks more centralized now than it ever has been. At the time of writing, nearly 300 blocks are validated.

And two – yes, just two addresses were responsible for 45% of the blocks. If the wallets are correct, the staking service Lido and Coinbase ($COIN) are accountable for those blocks. Making the centralization even worse is that over 50% of the nodes are hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services). 

From a technical analysis perspective, things look spectacularly bleak for Ethereum. 

ETH/USD Daily Chart

The blue shaded zone represents a very thin zone in the Volume Profile between two high volume nodes at $1,434 and $1,242. A swift sell-off could occur if ETH closes at or below $1,434. This is because analysts interpret moves below/above a high volume node to act like a vacuum where price gets sucked through the thin volume zones and into the next high volume node. 

In other words, a close at or below $1,434 could generate a swift spike lower to $1,242. 

ETH/USD Daily Chart

Another look at the daily chart for Ethereum with the Ichimoku Kinko Hyo system shows ETH could be positioned for another swift leg south. Yesterday’s close below the Cloud was incredibly bearish. In fact, one of the strongest bear signals in the Ichimoku system, the Ideal Bearish Ichimoku Breakout, is just one condition away from being fulfilled: The Chikou Span in open space. 

For that to occur, Ethereum would need to close at or below $1,455. If bulls want to mitigate any further bearish momentum, they’ll need to close ETH at least back inside the Cloud near the $1,525 value area. 

And keep a close on the Chikou Span; it responds to the same support and resistance levels as the current candlestick. It would be a very normal situation for Ethereum to dip down to the $1,340 level, where it would be well below the Cloud, only to bounce seemingly out of nowhere because of the Chikou Span finding support against the bottom of the Cloud (Senkou Span B). 


Binance

Binance’s ($BNB.X) venture capital wing, Binance Labs, added more to its investment in the blockchain startup Aptos. Aptos’s blockchain is reportedly more efficient than Binance’s BNB Smart Chain. 

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Bullets

Bullets From The Day:

😀 If you needed another example of TradFi (traditional finance) investing in crypto, this story might be some good evidence of that: Charles Schwab ($SCHW), Citadel Securities, and Fidelity Digital Assets announced the start of a new cryptocurrency exchange called EDX Markets. EDX is intended for retail and institutional investors. Press release here

🤬 Celsius ($CEL.X) filed for approval to sell some of its stablecoin hoards to pay for ongoing ‘operational expenses.’ They have to pay those lawyers somehow and want to do it with non-Custody and Withhold customer assets. That is roughly 80ish% of their customers – the retail side. Read the filing here

💥 Just because Ethereum ($ETH.X) switched to Proof-of-Stake from Proo-of-Work doesn’t mean those PoW miners just threw in the towel. Some have started their own forks, and others have transitioned to mining Ethereum Classic ($ETC.X). ETC saw a nearly 371% spike in its hash rate. However, that didn’t help price, as ETC closed down almost 10% on Thursday. Forkast has the full story