Bitcoin may be entering the later stage of a bull market, crypto analysts say, as talk of a price plunge grows
Bitcoin has soared by more than 700% in a year. Dado Ruvic/Getty Images
Bitcoin conditions are “similar to the second half or later stages of a bull market,” Glassnode said.
Analysts pointed to signs of long-term holders spending coins and to a reduction in big wallets.
Talk of a bitcoin price plunge has grown; a crypto entrepreneur said there could be a 90% drop.
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Bitcoin may be entering the second half or later stages of a bull market, crypto analysts at Glassnode said on Monday, as nervousness grows in some quarters about a plunge in the price.
Glassnode’s weekly analysis found that there had been a pickup in “wealth transfers” from long-term bitcoin holders to newer speculators, which the company said was reminiscent of market peaks.
The report said bitcoin bull markets eventually reach a “euphoric top” that materializes as big holders increasingly spending their coins to realize profits.
Glassnode estimated that long-term bitcoin holders had reactivated about 9% of supply so far in 2021 by spending coins, though this was below the 17% reactivation before the market’s crash in 2017.
“These studies suggest conditions are similar to the second half or later stages of a bull market,” Glassnode said.
The bitcoin price was down 6% on Tuesday, to $54,294, well off a high of $62,000 earlier in March but still up by about 700% from a year ago.
Glassnode also said on Tuesday that the biggest players - wallets with 1,000 to 10,000 bitcoins - had cut their holdings by 307,000 bitcoins since December.
Read more: Hedge funds are ramping up bets against Chamath Palihapitiya’s SPACs and have already taken home $40 million this year. Here’s a detailed look at the wagers they’re making.
Timothy Peterson, an investment manager, tweeted that falls in big holdings “are often but not always associated with bear markets.”
On Monday, Bobby Lee, the founder of the crypto exchange BTCC, told CNBC that 2021 would be a bull market for bitcoin, of the sort that comes around every three or four years. He said the bitcoin price could go as high as $300,000 this year.
But Lee said that the “bubble” was likely to pop. “People should be aware that it could fall as much as 80% to 90% of its value from the all-time peak,” he said.
However, many bitcoin advocates have pointed to growing institutional interest as a reason bitcoin is unlikely to crash as it has in the past. Visa, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan are some of the latest big names to get involved.
Crypto social network BitClout arrives with a bevy of high-profile investors — and skeptics – TechCrunch
While much of the recent wave of relentless hype around NFTs — or non-fungible tokens — has been most visibly manifested in high-dollar art auctions or digital trading cards sales, there’s also been a relentless string of chatter among bullish investors who see a future that ties the tokens to the future of social media and creator monetization.
Much of the most spirited conversations have centered on a pre-launch project called BitClout, a social crypto-exchange where users can buy and sell tokens based on people’s reputations. The app, which launches out of private beta tomorrow morning, has already courted plenty of controversy inside the crypto community, but it’s also amassed quite a war chest as investors pump tens of millions into its proprietary currency.
Early backers of the platform’s BitClout currency include a who’s who of Silicon Valley investors including Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, the startup’s founder tells TechCrunch. Other investors include Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. A report in Decrypt notes that a single wallet connected to BitClout has received more than $165 million worth of Bitcoin deposits suggesting that huge sums have already poured into the network ahead of its public launch.
BitClout falls into an exploding category of crypto companies that are focusing on tokenized versions of social currency. Others working on building out these individual tokens include Roll and Rally, which aim to allow creators to directly monetize their internet presence and allow their fans to bet on them. Users who believe in a budding artist can invest in their social currency and could earn returns as the creator became more famous and their coins accrued more value.
“If you look at people’s existing relationships with social media companies, it’s this very adversarial thing where all the content they produce is not really theirs but it belongs to the corporation that doesn’t share the monetization with them,” BitClout’s founder, who refers to themselves pseudonymously as “diamondhands,” tells TechCrunch. (There’s been some speculation on their identity as a former founder in the cryptocurrency space, but in a call with TechCrunch, they would not confirm their identity.)
The BitClout platform revolves around the BitClout currency. At the moment users can deposit Bitcoin into the platform which is instantly converted to BitClout tokens and can then be spent on individual creators inside the network. When a creator gets more popular as more users buy their coin, it gets more expensive to buy denominations of their coin. Creators can also opt in to receive a certain percentage of transactions deposited into their own BitClout wallets so that they continue to benefit from their own success.
The company’s biggest point of controversy hinges on what has been opt-in and what has been opt-out for the early group of accounts on the platform. Most other social currency offerings are strictly opt-in. Users come to the platform in search of a way to create tokens that allow them to monetize a fanbase and build a social fabric across multiple platforms. The thought being that if the platforms own the audience then you are at their mercy.
BitClout has taken an aggressive growth strategy here, turning that model on its head. The startup has pre-populated the BitClout network with 15,000 accounts after scraping information from popular public Twitter profiles. This means that BitClout users can buy shares of Kim Kardashian’s social coin or Elon Musk’s without those individuals ever having signed up for a profile or agreeing to it. This hasn’t been well-received by all of those who unwittingly had accounts set up on their behalf including many crypto-savvy users who got scooped up in the initial wave of seeding.
The startup’s founder says that this effort was largely an effort to prevent handle squatting and user impersonation but he believes that as the platform opens, a sizable pre-purchase of creator coins reserved for the owners of these accounts will entice those users to verify their handles to claim the funds.
Perhaps BitClout’s most eyebrow raising quirk is that the platform is launching with a way to invest into the platform and convert bitcoin into BitClout, but at launch there’s no way to cash out funds. The project’s founder says that it’s only a matter of time before this is resolved, and points to Coinbase and the Winkelvoss twin’s status as coin holders as a sign of future exchange support to come, but the company has no specifics to share at launch.
While the founders and investors behind the project see a bright future for social currencies on the blockchain, many in the decentralized community have been less impressed with BitClout’s early efforts to achieve viral adoption among creators in a permission-less manner.
“BitClout will make a great case study on how badly crypto projects can mess up incentive engineering when they try to monetize social networks.” Jay Graber, a decentralized platform researcher involved in Twitter’s bluesky effort, said in a tweet. “Trust and reputation are key, and if you create a sketchy platform and mess with people’s reputations without their consent it is not going to go well.”
If BitClout comes out of the gate and manages to convert enough of its pre-seeded early adopter list that there is value in joining its closed ecosystem version of a social token then it may have strong early momentum in an explosive new space that many creators are finding valuable. The concepts explored by others in the social currency space are sound, but this particular execution of it is a high-risk one. The network launches tomorrow morning so we’ll see soon enough.
Theta riches: Young Aussie dad turns $17k crypto investment into $1.4m
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A 23-year-old Aussie gamer dumped by his girlfriend because of his “addiction” to a cryptocurrency has had the last laugh now that his $17,000 investment has made him a millionaire.
Twitter and Reddit user “Grave” says he bought 100,000 Theta tokens in April 2020, paying 17c apiece.
But six or seven weeks later, his girlfriend found out and dumped him for “wasting my money on stupid fake internet currencies,” he recounted over the weekend.
“Almost a year later, today we peaked at $11.80 AUD im sitting on $1.180 mill and I wish I bought MORE!” he wrote on Saturday.
Last year I was nearly broke and went spiralling downwards. This year thanks to $THETA #theta & #tfuel im sitting on $1.3 million #AUD There is always a way 💙 — Grave 🧟♂️ (@GravedinGaming) March 11, 2021
Grave is doing even better today, with the livestreaming token hitting a fresh all-time high of $US10.99 ($14.25) at 1.30pm AEDT.
At 2.09pm, Theta tokens were trading for $US10.76 ($13.95), up 11.5 per cent in 24 hours, giving the young father a nominal net worth of $1.4 million.
From their launch in February 2018 through last July, Theta tokens changed hands at less than US30c, and were available for US6.8c a year ago. That’s a 167-fold increase in the past 12 months.
Reached by Stockhead on Twitter, Grave declined to reveal his real name, saying he hadn’t told a lot of his family about his good fortune just yet.
“People who choose to follow me on theta.tv will will learn my identity in due time :)” he messaged.
He said he had cashed out 300k worth of tokens, “but I bought dips and bought more so im buying low and selling high,” and planned to buy more later.
“Im aiming for 150k tokens end of year” he wrote.
A screenshot Grave posted in May is strong corroboration for his story, showing he was bullish on the cryptocurrency long before it went parabolic.
As he alluded to, Grave has his own gaming channel on Theta.tv, the decentralised livestreaming video delivery network powered by the Theta token.
By attracting viewers, influencers earn rewards in the form of TFUEL tokens, the other token in the Theta ecosystem.
Theta’s rise and rise
In the past week and a half, Theta tokens have leapfrogged five other mostly older and better-known tokens — Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, USD Coin, Stellar and Dogecoin — to become the 11th most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, according to Coinmarketcap.
Theta tokens are collectively worth $US11.2 billion, putting it just behind Chainlink, according to the website.
Grave wrote on Reddit he decided to invest in the token only after a lot of due diligence.
“I researched the shit out of it and just really liked what their desires for Theta network was. They were unique from day 1 and have really just shown incredible colours to that.” He added that he hadn’t heard from woman who dumped him, and declined suggestions from other Redditors that he text her a screenshot of his balance. Bitcoin, Ethereum down 4%
Theta’s performance today came even as the overall crypto market declined for the second day in a row.
Bitcoin was trading at $US54,850 ($71,000), down 4.4 per cent in the last 24 hours, according to Nomics.
Ethereum was changing hands at $US1,707 ($2,200), down 4.2 per cent.
Of the top 100 tokens listed on Coingecko, 82 were in the red and just 18 were in the green.
Dent was the top performer, up 54.6 per cent in the past 24 hours to US1.27c. The Ethereum token is designed to be used to swap mobile phone bandwidth.
It’s up nearly eightfold in the past 30 days, but still not near its all-time high of US10c it hit during the January 2018 bubble.
Uniswap, VeChain, Kusama, Leo Token, Bitmax Token, Arweave and Helium have been the other top 100 crypto tokens to hit all-time highs in the past 24 hours, according to Coingecko.
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