“Weekly what changed in crypto” by Alte.Capital — 11–18 June 2018
Most important stuff we’ve seen previous week in crypto world with personal thoughts
Whole week major drivers
It was another week of downward prices pressure. It makes many investors uneasy, injecting a difficult to quantify uncertainty. Despite price action, there are few worth to note developments.
Firstly, volumes on exchanges are also going down. Some exchanges are noting 50–70 % weekly drops in volume. This can be linked to fact that there are more exchanges comparing to past and still new exchanges are opening. Probably also some exchanges are decreasing their fakes volumes.
Secondly, with small problems EOS finally managed to start their main-net operations. This ends a 2 week-long launch process. Despite technological problems during start, we can see that starting main-net is not so profitable event. It’s more like “sell news” event, with many unforeseen actions during start.
In upcoming days another TOP 10 project, TRON is also going to start main-net. Probably it will follow the same path as EOS, just after the start.
Looks like these projects need to deliver their promises to keep users and investors engagement. This is not easy in short term, because it takes time for development of applications and frameworks.
Price action
After our predictions from previous weeks, we have reached crucial support at 270 billion market cap. We should see some action from that level this week. It’s just hard to say what the trigger can be.
Major crypto events in week 11–18th June 2018
SEC states that Ethereum is not a security
The SEC’s point man on cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) says that bitcoin and ether are not securities but that many, but not all, ICO’s are securities and will come under the regulatory control of the SEC and relevant securities laws. This statement removes some risk from Ethereum, but adds risk for other projects teams. Hard to say right now which ICO’s projects exactly can be affected.
Coinrail exchange hack
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail has lost $40M worth of altcoins in an apparent hack. Hackers stole several ICO tokens. Mostly PundiX, Dent and Tron. It looks like the hacker tried to cash out some of the PundiX tokens and transferred them to IDEX exchange. IDEX put out a statement on June 11, confirming that they have some of the stolen tokens and that they are being stored safely in the smart contract for the duration of the investigation.
Suppliers of GPU’s are plagued by increasingly high inventories
There are reports that both, suppliers of ASIC-based and GPU-powered mining devices all saw supply fall short of demand since March 2018. As a result, Taiwan suppliers of graphics cards have seen their inventories pick up rapidly, and their sales prices have declined to the levels seen in early 2017. TSMC, for instance, has revised downward its estimate for 2018 revenues from fabricating mining ASICs. Declining mining investment reward has forced many small mining farms to shut down.
The Coinbase launches Index Fund
It’s available only for U.S. Accredited Investors Only for the time being. The fund gives investors exposure to all the asset classes listed on the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange, weighted in relation to their respective market capitalization
The bank Wells Fargo is banning buying cryptos by credit cards
This follows in the footsteps of Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan who all restricted cryptocurrency purchases on their credit cards earlier this year. A study last year found that 18% of Bitcoin investors funded their purchases with credit cards.
Next “What changed in crypto” letter is due on June 25th, 2018
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