Mooners and Shakers: Bitcoin hangs on but all eyes on looming CPI inflation data; Mt. Gox impact also lurks
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Bitcoin lost the nice, round, psychological level of US$20k earlier, but has managed to find some decent support above US$19.6k, at the time of writing.
Meanwhile, the CPI inflation data hits on Wednesday July 13 in the US, and all the technical analysis in the world right now probably can’t quite compete with those results.
Is it as simple as: lower than expected inflation, crypto/risk assets go up; higher inflation, crypto/risk assets go down? Possibly, although the old high-inflation “priced in” argument is floating about again, too.
Maybe the real kicker will come when the US Federal Reserve announces its response to the CPI inflation data on July 26–27 with another possible 0.75bp rate hike.
Right, got it — inflation… macro’s a bitch right now… is there anything else spooking the market, other than crypto also making its best effort to internally combust through the “contagion” effects of Terra LUNA, Celsius and 3AC et al?
Wish we hadn’t asked, because yeah, there is…
Mt. Gox BTC release could happen in August
This news is a few days’ old now, but we’d best address it. Roughly 137,000 BTC related to the Mt. Gox hack of 2014 is set to be finally paid out to affected creditors, beginning as early as August, according to reports. That’s nearly US$3 billion worth of Bitcoin back in accounts and theoretically able to be dumped into the market.
Mt. Gox was a major exchange in the early-ish days of Bitcoin/crypto but suffered a crippling hack of 850,000 BTC (worth about US$17.8 billion today today’s price). In 2014 the exchange reported it had found 200,000 BTC, but those coins had been locked in litigation until now.
About a week ago, Mt. Gox and “Rehabilitation Trustee” Nobauaki Kobayashi sent an email to creditors giving them the option to receive USD, BTC, or BCH.
As crypto analyst Miles Deutscher points out in a lengthy Twitter thread, “many people are panicking that the release of these funds will lead to a huge supply-dump, which could significantly impact the $BTC price.”
However, among others, Bloomberg, Cryptoslate and YouTuber Lark Davis have been considering some of the reasons why this Mt. Gox BTC release might not end up being a black-swan capitulation event for the market. Briefly, here are two of those thoughts…
• Apparently many creditors have actually already sold their claims to large crypto funds such as Fortress Investment Group LLC, seeking an early payout.
• A lot of these creditors are Bitcoin OGs and early believers and might not be forced sellers. They may be more likely to hodl on and wait for all-time highs once again or layer out gradually if they still believe in the asset and believe it will climb again.
Of course, if most Mt. Gox creditors were to begin offloading their BTC across the major exchanges then, as Cryptoslate points out, “the social sentiment of early Bitcoiners relinquishing their coins could create a bearish psychological sentiment”.
As if we didn’t have enough of that already.
Chin up, though, because we’re still seeing positive bits and pieces of crypto-adoption news, plus some serious funding capital beginning to flow into various crypto sectors again, such as this news from blockchain-gaming giant Animoca Brands…
Top 10 overview
With the overall crypto market cap at US$927 billion and down 2.4% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens — according to CoinGecko.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) is doing a pretty good job of holding support above 19.6k — touching that rough daily low a couple of times over the past 24 hours.
And, in fact, the US Dollar, which has been going from strength to strength lately, appears to have cooled off just very slightly today (-0.08% at time of publishing), giving at least some analysts some cause for relief-rally hopes if that were to continue.
Uppers and downers: 11–100
Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$7.4 billion to about US$371 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)
DAILY PUMPERS
• Quant (QNT), (market cap: US$1.12 billion) +7%
• Loopring (LRC), (mc: US$483 million) +3%
• Mina Protocol (MINA), (mc: US$390 million) +2%
• Synthetix Network (SNX), (mc: US$562 million) +1%
• Huobi (HT), (mc: US$674 million) +0.6%
DAILY SLUMPERS
• Tezos (XTZ), (market cap: US$1.36 billion) -10%
• Cosmos Hub (ATOM), (mc: US$2.39 billion) -9%
• Arweave (AR), (mc: US$555 million) -8%
- BitTorrent (BTT), (mc: US$771 million) -7%
- ZCash (ZEC), (mc: US$692 million) -6%
Read the full article: https://stockhead.com.au/cryptocurrency/mooners-and-shakers-bitcoin-hangs-on-but-all-eyes-on-looming-cpi-inflation-data-mt-gox-impact-also-lurks/
