2024-11-12 12:54

Bitcoin has surged by $20,000 in the past week as we examine the cohort breakdown of this rally. Investors who hold less than one BTC continue to accumulate, as they have been doing for the past two months. Humpback whales who hold over 10K BTC, continue to distribute coins, extending the two-month trend. Long-term holders, on average, seem unfazed about this rally and continue holding onto bitcoin, demanding higher prices. Bitcoin's (BTC) blockchain data reveals that small addresses continue to accumulate BTC, even as whales stick to their "sell on rise" strategy. BTC, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, nearly tested the $90,000 threshold early Tuesday and has since pulled back to trade near $87,400 at press time, still up 27% on a seven-day basis, according to CoinDesk data. The 40,000-foot view tells us that the recent buying pressure has largely originated from the Nasdaq-listed Coinbase (COIN) exchange, often considered a proxy for the stateside institutional activity. However, granular data reveals that small addresses – often referred to as "shrimps" – are actively boosting their coin stash as they chase the ongoing price rally. Shrimps continue to be the smart money Glassnode data shows a breakdown of all cohorts from less than one BTC, referred to as "shrimps," up to over 10,000 BTC, called "humpback whales." A value closer to one shows that cohorts are accumulating tokens, while a near zero value represents distribution. All cohorts other than humpback whales have accumulated bitcoin for the past two months. This has coincided with bitcoin's upward price trajectory, as it climbed from approximately $55,000 in September to just shy of $90,000 in November. The data challenges the narrative that whales are the smart money of the ecosystem. The feature image shows that whales have been selling into price strength, while retail has been buying the rally. CoinDesk research shows how retail has evolved into smart money over time. Three months of supply outpacing issuance When we aggregate the data from all cohorts, including miners, exchanges, and retail investors, over the past 30 days, it shows that all groups combined have accumulated a total of 26,000 BTC. But again, this demand has been consistent for the past three months since September, outstripping supply and issuance. Long-term vs short-term holders Glassnode defines long-term holders (LTHs) as investors who have held bitcoin for more than 155 days. We typically see them distribute bitcoin into price strength, which we have seen on previous occasions when bitcoin has hit all-time highs in 2017 and 2021, and accumulate at bottoms. This time, however, they seem to be holding on to their balances, a sign of bullish expectations. Perhaps, prices are going to have to go much higher for LTHs to part with their bitcoin. Currently, LTHs hold 78% of the bitcoin circulating supply approximately over 15 million coins. In the past month, they have reduced their supply by just around 3%, but compared to 2017 or 2021, when their supply dropped as much as 20%. The inverse can be seen with short-term holders (STHs) or those who hold coins for less than 155 days and tend to buy bitcoin on euphoric days like Monday, when bitcoin shot up 10%. Their supply is near all-time lows, albeit with a brief tick higher. During previous bull markets, STHs have held as much as 35% or 50% of the supply. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/12/bitcoin-shrimps-emerge-as-the-new-smart-money-as-whales-offload-their-stash-van-straten/

2024-11-12 11:40

The Beam Chain groups a number of big-ticket upgrades, including native zero-knowledge proof support and fast finality, into a single Ethereum upgrade. Just don't call it "Ethereum 3.0." BANGKOK — It's been over two years since Ethereum's community last rallied behind a big tech event. That event—the so-called Ethereum merge—marked the network's long-awaited shift to a new, more eco-friendly consensus mechanism called "proof-of-stake." The core guts of the Ethereum blockchain have changed little since then. The chain's developers have pushed through a series of upgrades to enable the growth of quick and cheap "layer-2" blockchains, but the Ethereum community has mostly been starved of a single organizing vision—at least one that commanded the level of enthusiasm generated by the Merge. That might soon change. At Ethereum's Devcon conference in Bangkok on Tuesday, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake revealed his proposal for a major redesign of Ethereum's consensus layer called "Beam Chain." Beam Chain is "a proposed redesign of the consensus layer that incorporates all of the latest and greatest ideas from the Ethereum roadmap," Drake said in a speech at Bangkok's Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre. Drake's Beam Chain vision organizes a series of "big ticket" upgrades to Ethereum's consensus layer into a single package. The changes include adjustments to Ethereum's block production apparatus, as well as how it handles staking and zero-knowledge cryptography. Drake's presentation was highly anticipated—coming after months of speculation online and in crypto forums that the influential Ethereum researcher, who was instrumental to the 2022 Merge upgrade, was working on something major. Drake delivered his remarks to a packed convention hall, with onlookers spilling out into the hallway outside of the event's main stage. The Beam Chain won't entail any immediate changes to Ethereum, or even anything radically different from what's already on the chain's roadmap. It does, however, propose a major change to how Ethereum's future upgrades are organized. Today, Ethereum upgrades its core code roughly once per year. Drake proposes continuing to make incremental upgrades to the chain each year to address "low-hanging fruit," but then knocking out big changes in one fell swoop a few years from now. The Beam Chain would focus on Ethereum's consensus layer, also called the Beacon Chain, which is the part of the network that handles how transactions get processed and recorded. "The beacon chain is kind of old," Drake said. "The spec was frozen five years ago, and in those five years so much has happened." According to Drake, the Ethereum developers today have a "much better understanding" of how to adapt to maximal extractable value—strategies used by sophisticated traders to wring extra profit from Ethereum, sometimes at the cost of regular users. The past half-decade has also yielded valuable breakthroughs in zero knowledge technology, said Drake, and the Ethereum blockchain has built up "technical debt" that challenges developers' ability to develop the chain quickly and securely. Among the focus areas for the Beam Chain will be "faster slots" and "faster finality," meaning ramping the frequency with which blocks are added to the chain, as well as increasing the number of transactions included per-block. This could eventually mean the introduction of single slot finality, where blocks with transaction data can be finalized immediately, meaning that information would become permanent right away and impossible to alter. Currently, it takes about 15 minutes on Ethereum for a block to finalize. By decreasing the finality time, the finalization process would become more efficient for applications or exchanges that have a high transaction throughput. Having that 15 minute delay creates opportunities for MEV to be extracted and raises the risk of reorgs. However, there are some concerns about centralization with faster finalization times, since there's more computing power needed, with expensive hardware. Developers will need to balance the tradeoff between shortening finalization times and computing power. The Beam Chain also includes a proposal to bake zero-knowledge cryptography deeper into the fiber of Ethereum's base network. Ethereum developers have embraced a roadmap involving layer-2 rollups, which are auxiliary blockchains atop Ethereum where transactions can be executed quickly and at a lower cost, and then settled down to the base chain. As part of that, rollups have embraced a new type of technology that uses zero-knowledge proofs to help with the scaling of the blockchain. Over the last two years, dozens of ZK rollups have popped up, like Polygon’s zkEVM and Matter Labs zkSync, initially driving a lot of the attention and building to these new blockchains. With Drake’s Beam Chain proposal, support for zero-knowledge proofs will be built into the main Ethereum layer-1 chain. It's therefore reasonable to wonder what implications this might hold for the fast-growing field of ZK-powered layer-2 networks. While the Beam chain would be an ambitious upgrade, Drake said in his talk on Tuesday that he was reluctant to call it "Ethereum 3.0" (people sometimes referred to Ethereum's 2022 Merge upgrade as "Ethereum 2.0.") "The Beam Chain is only about the consensus chain," said Drake, while other research is still being done into Ethereum's execution and data layers—the other core elements of the network that support things like apps and layer-2 data. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/11/12/ethereum-researcher-justin-drake-introduces-beam-chain-a-total-redesign-of-the-networks-consensus-layer/

2024-11-12 10:06

Bitcoin and ether ETF inflows soared on one of the biggest days in the BTC's history. Ether U.S. spot-listed ETFs recorded the largest net inflow since their introduction, adding almost $296 million. Bitcoin overtook silver as the planet's eighth-largest asset by market cap. Investors poured money into U.S. spot crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on Monday as bitcoin (BTC), the largest token by market capitalization, climbed to a record just shy of $90,000. Flows into ether (ETH) ETFs hit a record $295.5 million, with BlackRock's ETHA and Fidelity's FETH both gathering a net $100 million, data from Farside Investors shows. Bitcoin ETFs netted a whopping $1.1 billion, the second-highest amount on record according to SoSoValue data, as the token's market cap climbed to a record $1.78 trillion, overtaking silver as the eighth-largest asset by market cap on the planet. The lion's share, $765.5 million, was funneled into the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) with Fidelity's FBTC gaining $135.1 million. "Assets in the US spot bitcoin ETFs are now up to $84b, which is 2/3 of the way to what gold ETFs have, all the sudden there's a decent shot they surpass gold before their first birthday (we predicted it would take 3-4yrs)," Eric Balchunas, a senior analyst at Bloomberg, said in a post on X. The records didn't just stop at pure crypto investments. Shares of Microstrategy (MSTR), the publicly traded company with the largest stash of BTC, hit a record high. Crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN) topped $320 for the first time since November 2021. "The Bitcoin Industrial Complex (ETFs + MSTR, COIN) saw $38b in trading volume today, with lifetime records being set all over the place, including IBIT, which did $4.5b. This points to a robust week of inflows. It was just an insane day; it really deserves a name a la Volmageddon," Balchunas said in a separate post. As of press time, bitcoin is trading at $88,000 and ether around $3,400. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/12/ether-etf-inflows-hit-record-bitcoin-inflows-soar-as-btc-eyes-90k/

2024-11-12 06:22

Much of the current rally has been fueled by bullish sentiment around the meme’s endorsement by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk in the Trump administration. The memecoin led gains among crypto majors, outperforming the other top 100 tokens. The jump led to crypto traders losing over $68 million on DOGE-tracked futures. Dogecoin (DOGE) continued its strong rally for the fourth-straight day with a 48% price jump over the past 24 hours, reigniting murmurs of a $1 price target. DOGE jumped above the 41 cents mark early Tuesday for the first time since May 2021, when it set a record high of just over 70 cents. It has returned over 150% to investors in the past week and nearly tripled over the past 30 days, data shows. DOGE-tracked futures saw over $68 million in cumulative losses. Those liquidations were the largest for the dog-themed token so far this year, with open interest nearing a lifetime record from April. Much of the current rally has been fueled by bullish sentiment around the meme’s endorsement by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk in the Trump administration. Musk has discussed creating a “Department of Government Efficiency,” abbreviated as D.O.G.E, to make government spending more efficient. That has fueled expectation among traders that there could be more chatter of “DOGE” in mainstream media and retail trading circles, fueling attention and interest in dogecoin, as a CoinDesk analysis first noted in mid-October. Recent price action has led some crypto traders to mark $1 as a major price target for DOGE — one that has been long anticipated since 2021, when the token traded above 70 cents. The $1 mark has a psychological appeal, spurring “doge to $1” memes in the past several years. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/12/dogecoin-rockets-48-as-traders-target-1-price-next/

2024-11-12 06:11

Fairshake supported Gallego, who polling and prediction markets have consistently said would win. Democrat Ruben Gallego won the Arizona Senate seat defeating Republican Kari Lake. While Democrats lost control of the Senate in the 2024 election, Gallego's win stemmed some of the losses. Republicans will control 53 seats for at least the next two years, having flipped Pennsylvania, Ohio, Montana and West Virginia last week. The crypto-focused super political action committee, Fairshake, was heavily involved in the Ohio race in particular, supporting Republican Bernie Moreno to the tune of $40 million. Gallego, a congressman from the Grand Canyon State, voted in favor of the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act and a resolution overturning the Securities and Exchange Commission's Staff Accounting Bulletin 121. Fairshake gave him $10 million in support, as well as fellow Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who won Michigan's Senate race. Both prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, as well as polling, projected he would win the race. The House of Representatives still has 16 races left to call, as of 05:30 UTC Tuesday (12:30 ET). Republicans have already won 214, leaving them just four seats shy of the majority for another Congressional term. Democrats have won 205 seats so far, and Republicans are still favored to win control of the body. With the Senate and Donald Trump's win in the presidential race, Republicans are poised to have control of a unified government. Fairshake supported 56 candidates in the House and Senate races, largely in primaries in safe districts, meaning ones where the primarywinner would likely win their general election race as well. California's Senate race, where Fairshake dropped millions in opposition to Democrat Katie Porter, is one such example. Through last Friday, this theory was largely borne out, as the PAC's preferred candidates won the first 48 of those races to be called. As of press time, this record appears to be slipping a little bit, with Democrat Yadira Caraveo and Republican Mike Garcia both conceding their races – though AP has yet to call either. Democrat Mary Peltola and Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer are also trailing, though Republicans Michelle Steel, David Valadao and Juan Ciscomani are currently leading against their opponents. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/11/12/fairshake-notches-another-win-with-arizonas-ruben-gallego-16-house-seats-still-uncalled/

2024-11-12 06:07

Such cumulative losses are the highest since early April, when BTC briefly crossed its previous peak at over $73,000. Bitcoin surged above $89,000 before dropping to $87,000, resulting in over $600 million in futures liquidations across both long and short positions. This volatility was the highest since BTC briefly surpassed $73,000 earlier in the year. Altcoins like DOGE, SOL, and APT also saw substantial futures losses, with DOGE experiencing its largest liquidations this year. DOGE gained over 40%, beating the 24-hour gains for the top 100 tokens. Bitcoin (BTC) briefly surged above $89,000 in early Asian hours, before correcting to as low as $87,000, in a wild trading session that saw the asset extend 7-day gains to over 32%. The volatility caused nearly $700 million in liquidations on crypto-tracked futures, impacting both longs and shorts (or bets on higher and lower prices, respectively), with $380 million in bearish traders and $290 million in bullish bets evaporated. Such cumulative losses are the highest since early April, when BTC briefly crossed its previous peak at over $73,000. Dogecoin (DOGE) was another shining spot in the crypto market, gaining over 40% to near 41 cents as the market celebrated Dogecoin-supporter Elon Musk's proximity to President-elect Donald Trump. BTC-tracked futures recorded over $200 million in short liquidations, followed by $40 million on bearish ether trades. Futures of other majors and midcaps, from Solana’s SOL to Aptos (APT) saw over $25 million in losses each — with unusually large figures implying a swift return to riskier bets among crypto traders. These futures typically see liquidations under $5 million in general market conditions. Annualized funding rates have spiked to over 30% across some altcoin-tracked futures, Coinglass data shows. BTC zoomed more than 7% in the past 24 hours following an unusually bullish weekend, carrying over sentiment for higher prices after Republican Donald Trump's win at the U.S. presidential elections last week. A Republican sweep could see total crypto market cap grow to $10 trillion by the end of 2026 from the current $3 trillion mark, bank analysts say, with price targets of $100,000 by the end of this year. Traders warn of a price correction in the short term, however, with a risk of a leverage washout above the $90,000 level and predictions of a slower ascent from current levels to $100,000. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/12/bitcoin-spikes-above-89k-in-wild-trading-session-battering-both-bulls-and-bears/