📉 A Dismal week in Crypto and Web3

but some projects continue to inject hope in the space.

August 21, 2022

Contents (4 min read):

  • 📖 Summary - 

    • Bitcoin Drop

    • Ethereum’s Merge and Value

    • Meta’s Hideous Metaverse

    • Celsius News

    • Mercado’s Coin.

  • 👭🏽 The State of NFTs

  • 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 Startupy - Community-curated search engine

  • 💸 Venture Funding

  • 🏖️ IRAs, tax-sheltered accounts

  • 📰 Top Reads

  • 🙏🏻 Grateful for…

📖 Summary

Bitcoin dropped ~14% this week due to the impact of the Fed’s July meeting minutes and over weaker-than-expected U.S. retail sales.

The U.S. central bank published the minutes of its July meeting earlier this week, which showed that policymakers intend to stay the course when it comes to tightening monetary conditions to tackle inflation. At the same time, officials are also concerned about damaging the economy by being overly aggressive.

Going into the release, markets put the probability of a 75% hike in September at around 60%, according to macro markets researcher Jim Bianco.

Ethereum lost about ~16.1% during the past 7 days. Whales and the entire crypto space continue to be very bullish on the historic merge that is scheduled to be this coming September 15th. However, ETH peaked at ~$2k, but has cooled down to around $1600 over a hawkish fed.

Over 18 months after launching ETH 2.0 Phase 0 and The Beacon Chain, Ethereum is finally moving away from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) this coming September 15. However, whales have been accumulating ETH, showing bullish signals in the near future. This is evident in the huge transactions witnessed after the successful launch of Goerli Testnet, spiking the price to a 2-month-high above $1,880.Positive expectations.

Meta launched Horizon Worlds with a hideous screenshot. Meta’s metaverse Horizon Worlds launched in France and Spain with a very plain-looking screenshot that drew ridicule from the tech and crypto crowd on Twitter. They did not even bother to translate it to Spanish for the release.

The Celsius case may get an independent examiner. The CeFi lender only has liquidity until the end of October and may receive an independent examiner similar to the bankruptcy case of Lehman Brothers.

In Brazil, a new cryptocurrency called 'Mercado Coin' has been introduced by E-Commerce giant, Mercado Libre's, allowing customers make purchases and receive cash back using the coin. 

👭🏽 State of NFTs

In a sign the NFT market is enduring a brutal winter, OpenSea’s trading volume plunged to its lowest level in 13 months on Tuesday. 

OpenSea, the No. 1 NFT marketplace, handled $6.5M worth of trades, a fraction of the $204M executed at its peak in February, according to data from DappRadar. 

The number of transactions on the site has also plunged by two-thirds in the last six months. As for active players, that, too, is way down with 15,220 traders on the marketplace, a 70% dive from the heady days of February. 

💸 Venture Funding

Venture funding has continued to decline in every area on a month-by-month basis. As we can see below, the “NFT space” as the “Crypto Financial Services” industry has been hit the hardest as less money is flowing into those areas.

The Trading/Brokerage category has also seen its investment numbers decline, this data goes hand in hand with the massive layoffs that we have seen across the board in the crypto industry.

According to an analysis by Crunchbase, at the end of July, at least 32,000 workers in the tech industry in the US alone have been sacked by various companies as part of efforts to reduce workforce size. 

In July alone, CoinFlex, a crypto exchange, sacked 50 – 60% of its staff, Blockchain.com reduced its workforce by 25%, and the Foremost NFT platform, OpenSea laid off 20% of its staff.

Conclusion: Many great crypto and WEB3 projects will continue to attract investors, but at what rate? In addition, as long as the economy continues to shrink and people keep losing their jobs, less money will be invested in new technologies and in crypto projects.

Cryptocurrency is one of those things that everyone is talking about these days. There are all kinds of different exchanges to e crypto on, but many people don’t realize how much they’re losing in taxes and fees.

iTrustCapital allows its clients to invest in crypto through an individual retirement account or an IRA without having to worry about taxes or fees.

IRAs are tax-sheltered accounts, meaning all your crypto trading is tax-free and can grow tax-free over time.

📰 Top Reads

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