GB Market Commentary 03/09/2021
by Jonas Luethy
After briefly trading above $50000 yesterday morning, bitcoin dipped to $48300 overnight and is now flirting with the key psychological level of 50k. Traders and analysts have identified $51200 has the next resistance to break through and $48300 as the key support level. While the general sentiment is moderately bullish, a clear break above $51000 would be needed to see a continuation of this trend. Eth is now at $3900 as the market gently inches upwards. Solana has once again made a new all-time high, currently trading above $144. Since July 20th, Solana has increased by 600%, making it the seventh-largest crypto by market cap as of this morning. Solana overtook dogecoin which is now in 8th place. Interestingly, futures funding for Solana is very low, implying that most of the price action is driven by spot trading rather than leverage. The total crypto market cap is 2.23 trillion and bitcoin market dominance is 41.6%.
More bad news for Ripple as the SEC has announced that it will require the firm to hand over a million Slack messages sent between employees as well as communications sent from 22 different email custodians. Ripple has argued that it is unfair and unreasonable for the SEC to expect multiple terabytes of text messages given the potential implications this will have on the firm. As of now this development could cost ripple around a million dollars and may extend the lawsuit by several months. This follows Ripple filing a motion to expose XRP holdings of SEC employees just a few days ago.
The NFT market is still going strong, as Sotheby’s is putting two NFT collections to auction next week. 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club and 101 Bored Ape Kennel Club NFTs are estimated to fetch from $12-$18 million and $1.5-$2 million per collection. The most popular NFT marketplace, OpenSea, had a monthly trading volume of $1.5 billion last month.
Finally, the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity has announced that it yields more revenue fees than OpenSea, Uniswap and the Binance Smart Chain. Moreover, Axie Infinity has revealed that it has surpassed 1 million daily active users. This may not sound like a lot but the most popular “traditional” non-crypto games usually get around 500k-700k daily users. A problem for the game however, is it’s accessibility. In order to play the game, a player needs to own 3 Axies. Axies are in game creatures that function exactly like NFTs and are therefore finite and expensive. The average player looking to start playing Axie Infinity will have to pay around $300 per Axie and 3 are required to play, making it an extremely expensive video game. While Axie Infinity is certainly paving the way for a future where crypto and gaming go hand in hand, more accessibility will be a key challenge crypto-gaming companies will have to face.