Overview
- Overall Market insight
- Technical Analysis: Bitcoin |ETH | LUNA
- TVL analysis
- Major News
- NEWBIES’ Lesson of the day: How to Utilize TVL metrics
Crypto Market Update
The market looks overextended, and the low volume in the recent rally is looking unlikely to retrain during Asian markets. The EOY has a chance to end on a low, which could prove a nice set-up for an early rally in 2022. Traders have been taking advantage of the low volume to drive altcoin prices upward in the past week. Suppose BTC begins to falter, expect altcoins to follow. It will be interesting to see if alts can hold a percentage of the late-year rally.
Technical Analysis Technical Analysis is NOT mainly used to predict the future price of assets. Instead, the value is from its utility to see past price patterns, volumes, and trends. These patterns can aid in finding entry/exit points, areas of interest, price supports/resistances, and aid in making informed decisions while trading — probabilities over absolutes. Bitcoin has seen a 15% 7-day rally from 45.5k to 52k and seems to be rejecting the 52k resistance. In my report from a Dec 16 covering EOY options price probabilities, Bitcoin had a high possibility (62%) of touching this critical support. The volumes have been decreasing during the rally, indicating poor trend strength. A likely move to the options max pain of 48k is probable before EOY. 44k remains the one standard deviation floor for the EOY price probability. Chart Below. 
Bitcoin Dominance (BTC.D) continues to hover near the yearly low of 39.6%. The recent rally saw altcoins gain a lot of ground on Bitcoin Dominance. As a result, it looks likely Bitcoin will hold this dominance level until 2022. Ethereum (ETH) shows signs of breaking below its bull trendline beginning on July 21. However, don’t expect a definitive answer until volume returns to the market, likely at the beginning of 2022. ETH currently sits at $3973.
Ethereum Dominance (ETH.D) has incurred a 10% hit to 20.11% in the past week due to alternative altcoins rallying strongly on ETH and BTC dominance. Terra (LUNA) shows weakness with a bearish engulfing candle formation on the daily charts. If the $90 resistance breaks, expect a drop to $75 which could prove a good re-entry into a recent red-hot LUNA. Lower volumes were indicative of a weakening uptrend. LUNA currently sits at $92.10. Chart Below.
SushiSwap (SUSHI), which I mentioned as a strong candidate for a rally, is up 78% in 8 days. SushiSwap is benefitting from the positive sentiment that comes with leadership change.
Notable Movers (7D)
- FTM 2.29 +60%
- NEAR 15.06 +67.5%
- AAVE 284.34 +55%
- KDA 15.34 +43%
- ATOM 31.15 +40.3%
- RUNE 8.16 +39.5%
- VLX .37 +77%
- ROSE .76 77.1%
SM/MID Cap Movers (7D)
- VADER .09 +154%
- QRDO 7.07 +74%
- DUSK .83 +90%
- ANT 9.65 +72%
- COTI .42 +36%
- OCEAN .44 +31%
Bitcoin Fear and Greed index: 41 fear
Google Trends: 29
Max Pain (Dec 30 Options): 48k
How to use The Fear and Greed Index for investing
TOP 15 CHAINS TVL
Fantom (FTM) and Polygon (MATIC) saw the most significant percentage inflows of TVL at +29.5% to $5.82 billion and +15.5% to $5.73 billion, and Ethereum (ETH) saw the highest capital inflow with an increase of +$11 billion in TVL in the last seven days. 
Major News
- A DAO wants to purchase Blockbuster and turn it into a decentralized film streaming service. The DAO plans to raise $5 million to purchase Blockbuster from DISH Network through the sale of BlockbusterDAO NFTs for 0.13 ETH ($530).
- Centralized crypto exchanges have seen $14 Trillion in trading volume this year and an increase of 689% compared to 2020 — a testament to the exponential growth of crypto.
- Kraken exchange will launch an NFT marketplace that will issue loans in 2022. This is the first centralized exchange I’ve heard doing this, expect others to follow.
- UST stablecoin has been pushed to $10 billion by DeFi traders. UST is now the largest decentralized stablecoin by market cap
Notable Events
- IOTA (IOTA) Will begin pre-staking rewards tomorrow
- OneLedger (OLT) will launch it polygon bridge tomorrow
- KeyFi (KEYFI) will have a token launch tomorrow on Polygon
NEWBIES’ Lesson of the day: How to Utilize TVL
Part 2 of a TVL lesson series. Link to part 1 (under NEWBIES)
Whether you want to invest in a smart contract platform or an individual platform like AAVE, it’s essential to understand a few basic metrics. TVL can be utilized to exam the popularity of a chain or platform by examining how much value is locked into its smart contracts. Looking at the chart below from DefiLlama, we see that Ethereum has a TVL of $161.39 billion, accounting for 62.78% of the market. Despite the popularity of other chains this year and high ETH gas, Ethereum remains the top dog for usage and TVL by a large margin, although it lost a lot of ground this year. The rest of the chains share just 37.22% of the market. For this reason, Ethereum continues to grow in price steadily and remains one of the least risky assets in crypto.
The chart below shows us the top ten chains as far as TVL. Some of the best performing chains this year, SOL, AVAX, FTM, LUNA, MATIC, are all on this list. So, it’s fair to say that the higher the TVL, the more valuable the project and the token.
I’ll leave you to explore DefiLlama with the information provided, and tomorrow we’ll touch a little further into TVL to help us find up and coming projects. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have spotted Solana at number 30 this year?
Tomorrow I’ll give you the tools to spot up and comers
I hope all you guys/gals had a great Christmas and got to spend some quality time with family and friends. Thanks for reading fam!
Gabi
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