Weekend movers – Flow (FLOW) and Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR)
Little has changed in the cryptocurrency market, with Bitcoin still holding above $30,000. The largest cryptocurrency’s gains in 2023 to date remain at 84.7% while trading at $30,650 at the time of writing.
Bitcoin has lost momentum after a series of requests for Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the last weeks of June. This could be due to the US financial regulator being unimpressed with Bitcoin ETF filings by financial giants such as Blackrock and Fidelity Investments, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
Over the weekend, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said current Bitcoin ETF filings were “insufficient”, prompting some issuers to reapply to Coinbase, named as their market oversight partner.
Bitcoin’s latest price action was despite a small period of volatility in the middle of the week, with Bitcoin moving from $30,157 to $29,894 on Friday before stabilizing over the weekend. Ether, on the other hand, has jumped to trade at $1,963 now.
As with crypto, little has changed on the macro front as the traditional market has limited trading hours on Mondays and will be closed on Tuesdays for the 4th of July holiday. Meanwhile, investors are expecting more rate hikes in the US this year following repeated warnings last week from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell that inflation is yet to be contained.
US interest rates are now between 5% and 5.25%, the highest since 2006, with a rate hike of 25 basis points expected by the market at the next Fed meeting on July 26.
So while North America is celebrating a long weekend, markets are calm and both bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) are maintaining price stability.
State of the crypto market
The total cryptocurrency market cap currently stands at $1.247 trillion, while legacy coins such as Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, and Litecoin continued to soar, building on the optimism of being included in the tokens traded on the Citadel Securities and Fidelity Investments-backed EDX Markets exchange that launched on June 20 despite the crackdown on crypto by US regulators.
Solana also contributed to earnings after a slump after being labeled a security by the SEC. SOL bounced back last week after a series of bearish indicators, with Solana-based NFT protocol Cardinal saying it would shut down, citing “macroeconomic challenges” and Revolut neobank along with crypto exchange that owns Solana as well as Cardano. and scrapping Polygon for US-based users.
These tokens were among cryptocurrencies that the SEC last month named as illegally issued financial securities in its lawsuit against the Coinbase and Binance.US exchanges. Ethereum creator, Vitalik Buterin, wrote on Twitter on Friday that the tokens do not deserve to be targeted.
“If ethereum ends up ‘winning’ by all the other blockchains getting kicked off exchanges, that’s not an honorable way to win, and in the long run it’s probably not even a win,” he said.
Amid this, crypto exchange Kraken was ordered by a US judge on Friday to provide information about its users to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in an investigation into underreported tax liabilities. Earlier this year, in February, the platform was fined $30 million for its staking services, which the federal agency said was an offering of unregistered securities.
Best Weekend Artist
While all this was happening in crypto, many digital assets enjoyed an uptrend over the weekend, with The Graph (GRT) and Compound (COMP) posting gains of as much as 23% and 18.6%, respectively. Other notable winners included Uniswap (15%), Injective (12.3%), Lido (9%), Cosmos (6.9%), Gate (4.4%), and Kucoin (3.3%).
In particular, decentralized finance (DeFi) has seen renewed interest since mid-June, with the industry’s market cap rising 20.5% to $50 billion. In the last 24 hours, the price of the interest trading protocol Pendle posted the most gains of 28%, while the gains of the lending protocol Compound made the best performance of the past week at almost 80%.
Current (CURRENT)
When it comes to weekend gains, FLOW came out on top with a 39% share price gain, which currently stands at $0.7586. The token was trading at $0.510 for the weekend as it started to appreciate in value and is up 13.8% over the past 24 hours. FLOW is also in the green against BTC on Monday at 13.3%. Technically, the price has resistance at $0.80 and $1.0, while support levels are present at $0.40 and $0.20.
Despite these gains, FLOW’s trading volume is now down 75.60% from a day ago to $7.8 million, indicating a recent drop in market activity. This comes after the price of the token has increased by 56.5% in the past 14 days. In 2023, however, FLOW has only seen an 11% increase and is down a whopping 98.3% from its all-time high (ATH) of $42.40 in August 2021.
Interestingly, less than a month ago, the price of the token hit an all-time low at $0.44. This is due to the SEC questioning FLOW and the regulatory status of a dozen other altcoins.
The agency’s lawsuit against Coinbase labeled FLOW as security, for which the SEC focused on the history of Dapper Labs, claiming that FLOW’s appreciation would not have happened without the company’s backing.
“Since FLOW is required to interact with the Flow blockchain, the demand for and value of the FLOW token would increase as a result of the efforts of Dapper Labs and the Flow development team to develop the Flow blockchain network” , the SEC said in its lawsuit. It further pointed out that Coinbase Ventures participated in an early fundraising round for Dapper Labs. According to Crunchbase data, the company has a total of $612.5 million in funding as of June 2023.
Dappers Labs has also been accused of being securities in another lawsuit, and in February a judge denied the company’s motion to dismiss the case filed by an NBA Top Shot user.
Dapper Labs is a Canadian company behind several recognizable NFT projects such as CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot. It launched the fast, low-cost blockchain Flow blockchain in 2020.
The blockchain’s native token, FLOW, is used to pay transaction fees and buy and sell digital collectibles, as well as staking, where holders lock their tokens in exchange for receiving rewards for validating transactions on the Flow network.
Click here to find out everything about investing in Flow (FLOW).
Worst Weekend Performer
Amid the broad green market, LEO is down 8.7% on Monday. With 24-hour losses of 4.8%, Kaspa is also feeling the heat, with Bitcoin SV and XDC Network also in the red at 2.6% and 1.5% respectively. Meanwhile, the past week was the worst for Radix (-18%), followed by Apecoin (-9.7%), Conflux (-9.3%), Kava (-7.1%), Near (-7%) , Sui (-6.6%) and stacks (-6.5%).
While the crypto market recovered over the weekend, some coins still managed to post a negative performance. During this period, KASPA fell as much as 9.8% to lead the losses, with crypto exchange Bitfinex’s LEO token close behind thanks to its losses of 9.3%. Other weekend losers include Pepe (-8.9%), Bitget (-2%) and Cardano (-1.3%).
Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR)
The $1.6 billion market cap cryptocurrency was quite volatile last week, with prices starting at $0.05 before dropping to $0.0475. Over the next few days, the price went up and down constantly, and into the weekend, the HBAR price rose to $0.0518. Over the weekend, the price dropped 4.6%, but has since managed to recover somewhat and is now trading at $0.0513.
With this, HBAR is up 2.8% in the last 24 hours and sees its trading volume increase by 24.20% to $18.42 million. While it is up 11.5% in the past 14 days and up 32.64% year-to-date (YTD), the token has lost more than 91% of its value since reaching its high of $0.57 in September 2021.
HBAR is Hedera Hashgraph’s native token, used to enable cheap and highly customizable transactions on the network. The token launched at a price of $0.36, but dropped to $0.03 when it started trading in late 2019.
Hedera boasts high throughput with fast finality and low, predictable costs. According to the website, Hedera’s native services scale up to 10,000 TPS while costing an average of $0.001 with finality in 3-5 seconds.
The network is governed by a board of leading companies and universities around the world. The council is responsible for maintaining the stability and security of the Hedera network and overseeing its future development.
Hedera Hashgraph has forged partnerships and working arrangements with numerous companies and institutions, including Boeing, LG, IBM, Standard Bankand, energy giant EDF and University College London (UCL). In February 2020, Google was also included in the board of directors, and three years later this year, Dell Technologies also announced that it had joined the board.
Earlier last month, Hedera’s councilor Abrdn, a major UK asset manager, launched its first blockchain-based investment by symbolizing part of its £15bn Lux Sterling money market fund. The token was issued on Hedera’s DLT and the company used the Archax Tokenisation Engine to mint the token.
“We see real opportunity in the wider adoption of digital securities as the next evolution of market infrastructure,” said Russell Barlow, Global Head of Alternatives at Abrdn.
Click here for everything about investing in Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR).