Crypto Fights Back To $1 Trillion

One of the most anticipated and critical technical events for crypto occurred over the weekend: a return to a $1 Trillion market cap. 🤩

$1 Trillion is a critical level for one primary reason beyond its psychological importance: $1 Trillion is the price level that cracked when FTX collapsed. 

For many analysts and pundits, the current price action behavior for Bitcoin and the broader crypto market is at a make-or-break point. 

Hitting $1 Trillion is great – but many analysts believe that closing at or above $1 trillion on a weekly or monthly time frame is more important. 

Since Friday (January 20, 2023), the Total Crypto Market Cap has hit and exceeded $1 Trillion for each of the past four days – but has yet to close at or above $1 Trillion. 

However, regaining $1 Trillion maybe isn’t as important as this: the Total Crypto Market Cap is on its way to its highest monthly close in 6 months. To do so, the Total Crypto Market Cap needs to end January at or above $954 Billion. 🙏

Cardano’s ($ADA.X) network faced a brief hiccup on Sunday. Roughly 50% of Cardano’s nodes disconnected, restarted, and gradually came back online. 😬

Input Output Group (IOG) explained, “This appears to have been triggered by a transient anomaly causing one of the two reactions in the node; some disconnected from a peer, and others threw an exception and restarted. Such transient issues (even if they were to affect all nodes) were considered in the design of the Cardano node and consensus. The systems behaved exactly as expected.”

In other words, this was a problem/issue that developers saw and had plans already to address.

The recovery went so fast and so well that SundaeSwap’s CTO even took to Twitter to address the event:

The real takeaway for me is how impressively resilient the cardano network is. Something took down ~60% of nodes and the network recovered in a few minutes, and continued producing blocks throughout. https://t.co/PzsYJiSIOH

— Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham (@Quantumplation) January 22, 2023

If investors/traders/analysts were concerned, that sentiment has not been reflected in Cardano’s price action. If the network had to be shut down, then we might have seen a different story. 

Cardano is attempting for a fifth consecutive day higher and remains up over +58% for January 2023. 

The launch of Cardano’s algorithmic stablecoin, DJED, is still planned for a release this month – but no official date has been announced. 📣

In Saturday’s Litepaper, we looked at the three top-performing crypto indices and the worst-performing index over the past seven days. 

The NFT Index was last week’s best-performing crypto index for the second week in a row, with an +11.9% gain. If we looked at the NFT index today, it would still be in first place, and it’s up +14.51% over the past seven days – due mostly to Axie Infinity’s ($AXS.X) +40% gain on Sunday.

From a fundamental perspective, analysts attribute the spike to an increase in the governance token AXS: roughly 2% of the entire supply unlocked. 

Usually, increases in supply have brought in selling pressure – Axie Infinity is down -10.19% from the intraday high and currently down -0.33% for today.

However, some analysts believe that the selling may be limited because of who received today’s unlocking distribution. Why?

Because today’s unlock was only distributed to wallets earning staking rewards – in other words, people already hodling AXS.

Oh, and here’s a random fact about Axie Infinity:

An article today from Bitcoinist shared a tweet from Loopify that reminded everyone that AXS’s NFT collection is still the largest traded NFT collection:

Axie Infinity still largest traded NFT collection. People are underestimating how big gaming collections will be. pic.twitter.com/0O1z8BYzR8

— Loopify 🧙‍♂️ (@Loopifyyy) January 14, 2023

At the time of writing, AXS is up over +108% for January 2023 but still down nearly -93% from its all-time high of $171.85. 😱