🐳 Weekly Edition: $2B in Liquidations Rock the Orderbooks as Market Takes a Breather

After finally reaching the $4,800 mark on Wednesday, Ethereum drew down about 8% causing several hundred million in liquidations in the span of 12 hours. About $2B was wiped out from the market as a whole making it one of the largest liquidation events of the year; interestingly, data from Kiyotaka shows ETH liquidations exceed that of BTC by a surprising 50%, with $600M and $400M wiped out respectively despite Bitcoin being worth 5x more.

Those who were around in 2021 and 2022 will remember we used to see the same thing happen with ETH traders who couldn’t help themselves from moving the leverage slider to the right... in some ways, the carnage is kind of nostalgic. It’s also frankly probably healthy after the meteoric move we’ve had: prior to the drop off, the crypto market had gained over $500B in just 2 weeks. We now sit just under $4T as an industry, valuing crypto at more than twice the entire global pharmaceutical market (estimated to be about $1.6T). The growth this year has been incredible from both an adoption and price perspective, and it seems we’re not done yet.

Our Trading Wallet hit a mid-week peak of about $177k on Wednesday, however it seems we’ll end today just over the $160k mark. ETH still makes up about 40% of our portfolio, by far the largest allocation, as it has for many months now. The plan was always to anchor with BTC and accumulate Ethereum along with a basket of strong altcoins, then rotate out once ETH moves hopefully bringing alts with it. Unfortunately as we’ve seen so far, generally speaking altcoins have been a horrible hold over the last year. I still believe individual sectors or narratives will have their day, but it seems certain that a full blown alt season like we saw in 2021 probably won’t be coming.

We’re up over 60% in just over a year since launching this initiative, requiring very little maintenance or action to achieve that performance. As a reminder our onchain holdings can be viewed at any time at the address linked on the Trading Wallet page, and any funds held on Coinbase are updated live as/if they change. This is by no means financial advice, but rather an observation that market outperformance can be achieved without fiddling with trades every single day. In fact, with how psychological crypto markets are you’re likely better off taking your positions then logging out until your thesis comes to fruition.

Many traders learned this one for the first time yesterday.

This week Beluga is featuring the ether.fi Cash program, the latest product addition to a leading DeFi protocol which has already amassed over $5B in TVL. The best part of ether.fi's offering is the ability to use the card as either a high-reward debit account or a credit account that lets you borrow against your balance without having to sell — it's like having Aave in your pocket where each swipe of your card creates a new lending position against your collateral. To learn more about the card, check out our full review here!