Weekly Market Recap - Dec 28
Overview
Bitcoin has continued its sizzling pace to end 2020, starting off the week around $22k and steadily rising since last Monday, currently priced at around $27k. The reason for this continuing bull-run points directly to the growing institutional adoption of BTC, driving the price higher and causing retail investors to get involved due to fear of missing out.
Market Recap
The bull run we are seeing is not just limited to BTC — it affects all other coins as well. Ethereum started the week off trading a little under $620, seeing a dip on Wednesday down to $570, and has since rebounded strongly, trading now above $740 and over $730 for the first time since May 2018. ETH’s rally is also partially attributed to CME announcing its Ethereum futures listing in January 2021.
XRP was hit hard with the SEC’s decision to charge XRP and its holding company with an unlicensed securities offering. On Wednesday, XRP’s price opened at around $0.50 and dropped all the way down to $0.23, showing how classifying a crypto as a security can cause substantial damage in a single day. It will be interesting to see if the SEC decides to classify other cryptocurrencies as securities going forward.
For institutional news, reports have come out that PayPal and BitGo will not be finalizing a deal after rumors came in October that PayPal was planning to acquire BitGo. Also, Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital launched a bitcoin fund, investing $25 million of capital and telling CNBC that Bitcoin is still in its “early innings”. Lastly, a hacked database of over a million Ledger customer emails has been made available to the public, including physical addresses as well as phone numbers.
Turning to the DeFi space, Cover Protocol suffered an infinite minting attack earlier today, where the hacker was able to print over 40 quintillion COVER tokens. This caused a massive drop off in COVER’s price, falling more than 97% while receiving backlash from the crypto community. In November, Cover was one of the DeFi protocols to merge with Yearn. Finance, a portal for various DeFi products. Although the hacker did return the funds, the attacker drained more than $5 million. Although this attack is unlikely to greatly affect all of DeFi / Ethereum, the hack does not do the space any favors, as the DeFi space has already been victim to many other hacks this year despite its amazing growth.
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