Bitcoin's long road to nowhere

Seriously Bitcoin, do SOMETHING!

The lack of Bitcoin direction is frustrating for traders hoping for trends and momentum. A look at the chart shows what a dire situation for breakout traders it is.

And that’s on the daily chart. On the lower time frames it’s false breakout central. Maybe a direction can be established after today’s key US CPI data. Bitcoin now sits above the 20 day moving average which could be a source of hope for bulls, although some directional movement could give greater weight to the technical signal.

And it’s a similar story in Ethereum…

Except Eth hasn’t been able to reclaim that 20 day moving average and still sits precariously above the key July 2021 low.

Where we have seen some movement is in Solana:

Although not for the best reasons. Solana’s outages are becoming all too frequent. At the start of June, the network was down again, the fifth network failure in 2022 so far. SOL fell on the news and hasn’t recovered those losses. The culprit, according to Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko

“Durable nonce instruction caused part of the network to consider the block is invalid, no consensus could be formed.”

Non-consensus causing blocks not to form is a pretty big problem for a blockchain. The durable nonce instruction is generally used for longer transactions such as custodial services. The patch was applied and this has apparently been addressed.

However, doubt’s over Solana’s role as the much-touted “Ethereum killer” will surely persist unless these frequent outages are definitively resolved. There’s no point being able to handle 65,000 transactions per second, and far outpacing Ethereum’s 15 per second if your network keeps failing.

Nevertheless, Solana has stepped into the Terra-sized hole in South Korea. Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation have launched a $100 million investment and grant fund to support crypto projects in South Korea

Johnny Lee, the general manager of gaming at Solana Labs, gave an interview to TechCrunch outlining the thinking behind the move:

“A big portion of Korea’s gaming industry is moving into web3,”

“We want to be flexible; there’s a wide range of project sizes, team sizes, so some of [our investments] will be venture-sized checks.”

As gaming and NFT’s are a massive part of the industry in South Korea, Lee sees them as a natural fit for web3:

“Free-to-play adoption probably took eight years, so if we say it’ll take four years for web3 games to be the dominant revenue model, I’m pretty comfortable with that.”

Patchy regulation

For the space as a whole, regulation is starting to filter through. Paypal has been granted a full BitLicense by the New York Department of Financial Services, allowing Paypal customers to transfer cryptocurrencies more freely between themselves and external wallets/exchanges.

Jose Fernandez da Ponte, the senior vice president and general manager for PayPal’s blockchain, crypto and digital currencies business said:

“We think a substantial amount of commerce and payments will happen on digital currencies in the future, and we are playing the long game,”

However, full crypto regulation is likely to take a while longer. The SEC has only just announced an investigation into Binance’s Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

The offering took place in 2017…

Not investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Trading cryptocurrency may not be available depending on your country of residence.