🐳 Weekly Edition: Bitcoin falls to $103k, is the bottom in?

The week ends on a lackluster note as Bitcoin dove to $103k this morning, nearly reaching the lows of last Friday. While I expected this week we’d learn of a fund or market maker that blew up during the liquidations on October 10th, no credible information has emerged (to my knowledge) so far. Despite the drop in Bitcoin, BTC dominance has once again risen to almost 60%; in other words, everything else is falling faster than Bitcoin. The last time BTC was at these levels (not counting Friday’s craziness) was mid August, when it traded closer to $120k. Interestingly, it also happens to be the same dominance level which immediately preceded the monster altcoin run in March, 2021. Not saying that’s where we’re going, just making a hopeful observation.

Speaking of altcoins, today the Stripe-incubated Tempo blockchain announced a $500M raise at a $5B valuation, a surprisingly high valuation given how alt-Layer 1 tokens have performed this year. They also announced the hire of legendary Ethereum developer Dankrad Feist, who was responsible for several major upgrades to Ethereum including danksharding. This is undoubtedly a major talent loss for the Ethereum Foundation, however I believe his immense contributions to the community have earned him what I’m sure was a very generous compensation package from Tempo. Regardless, in my opinion having major players like Stripe entire the blockchain space in such a meaningful way is a net gain for the industry as a whole. In my opinion, we spend far too much time fighting about which chain is best for a market sector our size.

While our balance sits at about the same valuation as when I wrote last week’s update, today was a significantly less stressful day than the flash crash of Friday. Don’t get me wrong waking up to Bitcoin sitting at $103k was no fun, but it was better than watching several altcoins I follow literally go to 0 on Binance. As we discussed briefly in Wednesday’s edition, I’m actually cautiously bullish here despite the carnage we’re seeing — we’ve wiped significant leverage off the table, which has been an overhang for a very long time. On the negative side, that event made a significant hit to the liquidity on many of these coins, in a market that was already relatively illiquid. It will take time for things to settle out, and with the added pressure of the US Government shutdown and trade war with China, we could see some moves to the downside. As always be careful if you’re on leverage, I will choose to sit in spot and chill.

We’re just trying to stay healthy

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