Weekly Market Rollup - 05/12/2022

In this Week's Market Rollup

Solid gains for the ‘blue chips’ and a sea of green for all market sectors after a very nasty November. A lot happens in a crypto week…

Read on for the full story.

Market Highlights

• Bitcoin (BTC) surged past the US$17,000 mark after U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s speech on Wednesday.

• Fantom (FTM) rallied over 30% week-on-week following the release of project founder Andre Cronje’s blog deep-diving into Fantom’s reserves.

• Crypto node operator Ankr was hacked last Friday, allowing the attacker to remove US$5 million of BNB from the protocol. The exploit was believed to involve hacked private keys.

Price Movements

Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin (BTC) and the rest of the crypto market showed positive signs for the first time since the contagion effects caused by FTX’s spiral into bankruptcy in November. Civil unrest in China caused by anti-lockdown protestors saw BTC slide on Monday, briefly sending BTC’s price below US$16,000.

However, risk-on assets began to recover on Wednesday following the U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s speech claiming smaller interest rate hikes could be seen as early as December. As a result, BTC jumped 4.4% on Wednesday, surging past US$17,000, where it hovered for the remainder of the week. BTC closed the week at US$17,268 after adding 5.0% over the last seven days.

Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum (ETH) experienced an even larger sell-off on Monday that was potentially fuelled by a whale that transferred 73,224 ETH (worth approximately US$95 million at the time of writing) to an exchange. The added selling pressure brought the price of ETH down to US$1,151 before joining BTC in its recovery on Wednesday.

Powell’s speech pushed ETH past US$1,300 for the first time in three weeks, but it was unable to sustain the move. ETH closed the week at US$1,290, up 8.1% from the previous week, and reclaimed 3.0% relative market share from BTC.

Altcoins

Leading the GameFi sector was Illuvium (ILV), which gained 20.6% week-on-week. Illuvium is an open-world, interoperable blockchain game built on the Ethereum network. With the launch of its game expected this quarter, it appears some investors are positioning themselves ahead of the release. Also performing notably well from this sector was UFO Gaming (UFO), up 11.9%.

DeFi has continued to benefit from the shift in narrative towards decentralised platforms. GMX (GMX), the decentralised perpetual exchange, jumped 22.8% after accruing more daily fees than its prime competitor, Uniswap (UNI), on Monday. While the narrative shift currently favours GMX, Uniswap has increased its annualised revenue by 75% and active users by 8% since the collapse of FTX, and is up 16.1% over the last seven days.

The best performing asset this week, however, was Fantom (FTM), which gained an impressive 30.3%. The surge in price stemmed from a recent blog by project founder Andre Cronje, which provided a financial peek into Fantom’s reserves. Per Cronje’s blog, at the current US$7 million annual salary burn rate, Fantom possesses enough capital to last 30 years and is cash flow positive in excess of US$10 million per year.

Other News

Binance temporarily disabled withdrawals on Friday following an exploit on the crypto node project Ankr. Ankr is a distributed node operator for Proof-of-Stake networks, letting users stake their tokens easily. The attacker was able to exploit a particular BNB staking pool to allow infinite Ankr Reward Bearing Staked BNB (aBNBc) tokens to be minted. The Ankr team later confirmed that the attacker was able to get away with US$5 million worth of BNB. Ankr then proposed a new token, ankrBNB, be reissued to pre-hack aBNBc holders. Binance has since enabled withdrawals.

Recommended reading: Digital Asset Trading Explained