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Happy New Year and welcome to our weekly crypto market report.
It was 14 years ago (January 3rd, 2009) the first cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) was mined. Today, it's become a trillion dollar industry with over 20,000 actively traded cryptos!
In this report:
- The Week in Review - Judge rules exchange owns customer's crypto
- Top 100 Gainers (Last 7-days) - Lido DAO +56% - leading the Charts
- Small Cap Gainers (Last 30-days) - VAI +440% - 2nd week in a row
- Monthly Altcoin Pick - December Altcoin Pick was released last week
What's Happened This Week?
The top stories this week:
- Genesis Lays off 30% of workforce, as a result of FTX collapse
- SBF Pleads not guilty to criminal charges. Trial date set for Oct 2, 2023
- Judge Rules Celsius Networks Owns Customers' Crypto Deposits
- Binance takes 66% of trading volume
Tweet of the Week:
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Judge rules that Celsius users gave up legal rights to their BTC by using the platform and all the $4.2 billion of crypto deposits are now property of Celsius.
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) January 5, 2023
Take your #bitcoin off exchanges!
Top Performing Altcoin
+440% (30-days) VAIOT (VAI) - Nano-Cap:
Again this week, VAIOT is the best-performing Altcoin. VAIOT combines Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain to develop a portfolio of business-oriented Intelligent Virtual Assistants serving both consumers and businesses. It offers AI-based legal services such as intelligently creating custom contracts and an intelligent, digital channel for B2C and C2C transactions between the users with incentive programs utilizing VAIOT’s Blockchain and VAI Tokens.
VAIOT has a market cap of just over $10M and is one of many examples of AI technology being harnessed by the blockchain, with AI likely becoming the next big trend for 2023.
For more information, check out Small Cap Gainers (30 days) at the bottom of this post.
Bitcoin & Ethereum Price Movement
The price for both Bitcoin and Ethereum has been relatively stable with a slight upward trend over the last seven days, with the price of Bitcoin ($16,919) and Ethereum ($1,266), a change of +1.9% and +5.6% respectively (7 days).
Looking at Alternative Assets?
Looking for some of the hottest investments (outside of crypto), like Wine, Websites, and even Lego, check out alternative assets. Alternative investments include active quick flips, passive buy & holds, and cashflow-producing assets.
Top 100 Gainers - Last 7 Days
Over the last 7 days, the biggest gainers (within the top 100):
Lido DAO (LDO) +56% - Rank #34
Lido is a liquid staking solution for Ethereum. Lido lets users stake their ETH - with no minimum deposits or maintaining of infrastructure - whilst participating in on-chain activities, from lending, to compound returns.
Whalestats recently reported LDO was one of the most used smart contract tokens among the top 5,000 ETH investors.
The reason behind the rapid increase in the momentum of Lido is attributed to the Ethereum Merge, which has triggered an increase in the popularity of liquid staking protocols such as Lido Finance.
Following the merge, the total ETH stake in Lido increased 10% from 4.43 million ETH on September 15, 2022, the date of the merge, to 4.9 million ETH today.
Solana (SOL) +33% - Rank #15
Solana, once a very popular NFT platform has taken significant losses over the last month, only partially recovering in the last few days. In the prior week, Solana (SOL) reached its lowest price since February 2021, falling to under $8.41 from its all-time high of $259 about a year earlier. The drop in price is attributed to the close relationship between Solana, FTX and Sam-Bankman Fried (SBF).
Although Solana has been able to recover in the last few days, there are news reports surfacing NFT projects are being paid to leave SOL (Polygon Paid y00ts NFT Collection $3 Million to Leave Solana).
BitDAO (BIT) +25% - Rank #41
BitDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), focused on DeFi, and managed by holders of BIT tokens.
The price of BitDAO’s bit token jump is attributed to a $100 million buyback plan. The buybacks are slated to begin on Jan 1., and the DAO will purchase bit at $2 million in USDT a day for 50 days.
Given the positive impact of the price of buyback price, it's likely we will again see BitDAO on this list in future weeks.
Ethereum Classic (ETC) +25.7% - Rank #24
Ethereum Classic (ETC) is a hard fork of Ethereum (ETH) that launched in July 2016.
Every once in a while, Ethereum Classic (ETC) registers a large price pump that is usually associated with whale activity. The latest such event occurred on 4 January, when ETC bulls pulled off a surprise attack and pushed the token up by over 20% in one day.
Ethereum Classic’s hash rate bounced back slightly, potentially indicating increased network activity, and in the last two days, during which, Ethereum Classic’s volume soared to a new monthly high.
Largest Small Cap Gainers in the last 30 days
The greatest gains within the cryptocurrency market are within the nano, micro & small market capitalized projects.
Despite the current bear market, these are the small market cap projects that have performed well over the last 30 days:
- VAI +440% - AI Assistant and on-chain Intelligent Contracts (Nano-Cap)
- 1EARTH +308% - Web3 DAO Funding Platform (Nano-Cap)
- TRACE +303% - Metaverse Fashion & Lifestyle (Nano-Cap)
- ICE +177% - Automated Multichain Yield Platform (Nano-Cap)
- WIGO +214% - DeFi Exchange, Yield Farming & NFTs (Nano-Cap)
VAI continues to be the largest gainer with +440% (30 days)!
The small-cap market is where you will find the trends of the future and for 2023, we the trending projects will be in AI, DeFi and the future of the internet - Web 3.0.
Almost without fail, the largest trending projects over the last 3-months have been within one of these three sectors, with some projects incorporating all three elements (AI, DeFi and Web3) into their builds. Although we are still in a bear market, blockchain development is still moving forward offering an opportunity to buy into some projects at highly discounted prices.
Every week we review and analyze low-market-cap cryptos looking for the next low-cap gem and every month we research the cryptocurrency marketplace for the next successful cryptocurrency project and announce it to our subscribers as our Monthly Altcoin Pick.
To get access to our past and upcoming Altcoin picks, be sure to signup as a paid subscriber.
Monthly Altcoin Pick:
We released our Altcoin pick for December last week. If you would like access to this and prior Altcoin Picks, please consider becoming a member.
Our Altcoin Picks for the prior months can be found here.
If you would like to support this publication and have access to member benefits, such as our monthly Altcoin Pick, signup here
Thanks and appreciation to all our members!
Happy New Year to everyone!
Until the next report,
Richard
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