Introduction

Here at Nexus, we are thrilled to offer you an instant connection to a global digital marketplace with unparalleled depth, speed, and pricing. Additionally, our very own suite of industry experts puts together a weekly market recap to ensure you stay up to date on all that’s been happening in the market.

Technical Market Recap

LTC is up a little over 13%, BCH is up around 24%, and EOS is up close to 20% for the week. ETH continues to march towards its ETH 2.0 Phase 0 launch, as there is now over 400,000 ETH staked. For Phase 0 to go live by December 1, users need to deposit a little over 100,000 more ETH (524,288 required) by tomorrow — if not, the launch will be one week after there is sufficient ETH.

Market Overview

BTC has extended its gains last week, up 4% over the week. Although slowing down its blazing pace of growth over the past couple of months, BTC continues to climb towards the $20,000 mark, hoping to achieve a new all-time high.

It is very clear that we are experiencing another bull run as 2020 approaches its end, and feels very similar to the one in 2017. In 2017, a big catalyst for the price hike was from the media vs what we see in 2020 from the mass adoption by institutions. During the 2017 bull run, the media and attention it drew to the crypto space caused a wave of newcomers to buy Bitcoin as they rushed into the market. This time around we are seeing different behavior, as huge institutions have started to accept cryptocurrency with open arms. Goldman Sachs in August named a new head of digital assets and reported that they would be doubling the size of their crypto team. JPMorgan last year launched their own JPM coin, running on the Quorum blockchain that JPM developed through their blockchain unit, Onyx. This week, BlackRock’s fixed income CIO said in an interview that not only is cryptocurrency here to stay, but also an extremely durable mechanism that is more functional and will take the place of gold.

Institutional adoption paired with other recent events like PayPal’s pivot to allow the trading and holding of cryptocurrencies, shows a clear difference from the past. The quantitative easing tactics employed by the Fed/stimulus programs also bolster the case for Bitcoin as a scarce resource, and weaken the value of USD.

Although BTC continues to dominate headlines, other altcoins have started to rally tremendously. The biggest story is XRP, which has jumped significantly over the past week, up a whopping 73.8% at the time of writing. Reasons for XRP’s jump in price are unknown, but the meteoric rise in BTC and Biden’s appointment of Gary Gensler (pro-crypto and pro-XRP specifically) as head of the financial policy transition team are two possible theories.

Tune in next week for another edition of Nexus’ Market Recap. Start trading a robust pool of cryptocurrencies and fiat pairings with today.