GB Market Commentary 20/08/2021
by Jonas Luethy
After testing the $44’000 support level and bouncing off the 20-day moving average, bitcoin has surged upwards past $47’000 and is currently trading in the high $46’000 range at time of writing. Bitcoin is still above the 200-day moving average and on-chain data still strongly suggests a bullish trend. Ethereum is trading around $3200 after briefly being pulled under $3000 and most major altcoins are performing well. Cardano has gone up nearly 17% in the last 24 hours, making an all-time high of $2.55 and solidifying its position as third largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Other top performers include XRP, Polkadot, Polygon and many more as the total crypto market cap stays just above $2 trillion.
Binance has found itself in hot water after a group of traders decided to seek financial compensation for money lost during an outage in May earlier this year. On May 19th the binance futures platform suffered a global outage while the market simultaneously crashed as a result of increased Chinese regulation, causing millions of dollars’ worth of liquidations.
The initial group of six investors claim that binance owes them in excess of $20 million as the group seeks to include “several hundred more traders”. Swiss litigation finance firm Liti Capital has pledged over $5 million to the group and executive chair of the firm David Kay has announced that one way or another, this would be a landmark case. As well as the litigation from private investors, Binance is in more trouble as the Dutch central bank has issued a warning to the exchange saying that it was operating illegally in the Netherlands. CEO Changpeng Zhao explained that regulatory compliance is a top priority for the firm, as the company pivots from a technology innovator to a financial services firm.
A recent chainalysis report has shown that cryptocurrency adoption across the world has risen over 880% this year. The chainalysis team created a 2021 Global Crypto Adoption Index Top 20. Leading the charge are Vietnam, India and Pakistan, in first, second and third place respectively. Interestingly, the only first world country to make the top 20 is the USA in 8th place, and the only European nation is Ukraine in 4th place. To not skew the results, the study focused on cryptocurrency adoption by ordinary people rather than professional and institutional players. Emerging markets rank highly on the list as they have very high P2P volumes when adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita and adjusted for internet-using population.