In the crypto universe, where defying the odds is the norm, we’re witnessing yet another bull run that’s turning heads and opening wallets across the globe coming after a long and depressive crypto winter. As digital currencies surge in value, a slew of factors contributes to this revival, promising not just short-term gains but potentially reshaping the financial landscape. Let’s dive right into what’s fueling the frenzy.

What’s a Bull Market?

A bull market is the golden ticket to wealth in the financial world. It is like finance’s Holy Grail — a sustained period marked by upward trends and robust investor confidence. It’s an era of growth, not just fleeting spikes, lasting months or years and elevating investment value.

In the crypto sphere, a bull market symbolizes a golden era where optimism reigns supreme and the path to wealth appears boundless. It’s a season characterized by clear skies, attainable milestones, and a collective euphoria among traders and holders alike. In this time of abundance, aspirations morph into reality, culminating in a pursuit where dreams are not merely pursued but seized with gusto.

Yet, foreseeing the precise moment when the tide will shift poses a formidable challenge, as market trajectories remain inherently unpredictable due to a complex interplay of psychological factors and speculative dynamics. But we can always look at the trends and history to see the pattern and where it is pointing to.

Bitcoin Bull Market Saga

Bitcoin, the world’s oldest and largest crypto asset by market capitalization has an illustrious history, where three significant bull markets have left an indelible mark.

• In 2013, Bitcoin shattered records by surpassing the monumental $1,000 milestone, yet it faced a significant plunge to around $171 by January 2015.
• Bitcoin started its ascent in the latter half of 2016, culminating in December 2017 near $20,000, but faced a turbulent descent to a bottom of around $3,200 by December 2018, marking an 84% drop from its peak.
• In the grand saga of Bitcoin, the third major rally surged forth in 2021, peaking in November at an astounding $68,770 — a historic all-time high.
• In the grand Bitcoin chronicle, the third major rally unfurled in 2021, soaring to its zenith in November with a staggering price of $68,770 — an unprecedented all-time high — only to plummet to its lowest price level of $15,600 in November 2022.
• The Bitcoin bull run unveils an intriguing rhythm: typically, it takes about a year for Bitcoin to reach its nadir following a peak, with the peak itself occurring roughly four years after the culmination of the preceding BTC bull run.

The Rocket Fuel Behind the Surge

But what triggers these bull runs?

The current bull run isn’t just your run-of-the-mill market uptick; it’s a convergence of colossal forces. 

The cryptocurrency market is witnessing a remarkable surge, propelled by various significant factors. This upswing is driven by a combination of increased investment in crypto-related ventures, a resurgence in venture funding, and soaring public market valuations, signaling a growing confidence and interest in the crypto sphere among both institutional and retail investors, Bitrue research team said in an analysis sent to The Shib.

TradFi Enters Crypto Sphere

Traditional finance’s foray into cryptocurrency significantly fuels the current crypto bull run, marking a notable endorsement of digital assets by major financial players. This endorsement enhances investor confidence and draws a wider audience to the market. Institutions like BlackRock introducing spot Bitcoin ETFs broaden Bitcoin’s accessibility to both institutional and retail investors, boosting market liquidity, increasing demand, and raising prices. Furthermore, traditional finance’s expertise and resources contribute to the market’s maturation and stability, amplifying bullish sentiment and extending the bull run’s longevity.

“Institutional adoption, highlighted by major financial institutions like BlackRock approving Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), is further legitimizing cryptocurrencies as an asset class and attracting more institutional capital,” the research team noted.

Asia Adds Liquidity

The surge in Asian crypto activity, led by Hong Kong’s emergence as a hub, fuels the ongoing bull run by fostering a favorable environment for development and attracting new participants and capital. Moreover, positive growth in China’s Money Supply (M2) enhances liquidity, potentially driving up trading volumes and demand for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. With increasing liquidity and investor participation, upward pressure on prices intensifies, driving the bull run forward.

Bitcoin Halving Event

The Bitcoin halving, occurring every four years, drives crypto bull runs by reducing the rate of new coin issuance, creating scarcity. This scarcity, alongside growing demand, pushes prices upward. Historically, halvings have sparked significant price rallies, as reduced supply increases Bitcoin’s value. Anticipation of halvings also garners media attention and attracts new investors, boosting demand. In summary, halvings initiate or sustain crypto bull runs by tightening supply and heightening demand.

According to Bitrue, “The anticipation of the upcoming Bitcoin halving, historically associated with significant price appreciation, is also driving optimism among investors, further fueling the bullish sentiment in the market.”

2024 U.S. Presidential Election

The 2024 United States presidential election may impact crypto bull runs through regulatory changes, as the outcome and policies of the new administration could shape attitudes towards cryptocurrencies. Political uncertainty could drive investors to seek alternative assets like crypto as a hedge against instability. Candidates supporting blockchain technology might also attract investment, fueling bullish sentiment.

“Bitcoin’s performance, with its price more than doubling over the past year, coupled with the success of companies like Coinbase, Marathon Digital, and MicroStrategy, has bolstered investor sentiment,” Bitrue said. “Additionally, the emergence of innovative technologies such as Ordinals and new token standards like BRC-20 are contributing to the market’s evolution and expansion.”

And let’s not forget the tech magic happening in DeFi and NFT land, sparking imaginations and opening wallets worldwide. Add a dash of global economic jitters and boom, you’ve got the perfect recipe for a crypto comeback.

Is the Party Starting Now?

The next crypto bull run is anticipated to gain traction around 2024 and potentially reach its apex in late 2025 if historical patterns hold true. However, given Bitcoin’s relatively short existence of just over a decade, the sample size of market cycles is limited, leaving room for unpredictability in market behavior.

Researchers, however, warned, “While the current bull market presents promising opportunities for investors, it’s important to remain vigilant and mindful of potential risks. Not all altcoins may survive a market downturn, and investors should conduct thorough research and due diligence before making investment decisions.”

The post 2024 Bull run revs up first appeared on The Shib Magazine.

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First things first.

The merge finally happened.

One of the most-anticipated events in the history of open-source development took place last fall. Ethereum underwent its biggest upgrade when the network transitioned from POW to POS. “The merge” marked an architectural shift that massively reduced Ethereum’s energy footprint.

New technologies, once almost unthinkable, are maturing and set to explode.

Blockchain scaling brought about more users, more transactions, and more complex dApps in 2023. There are many promising new paths. For example, Web3 is a dynamic industry for developers trying to solve foundational challenges, such as the interoperability trilemma.

Let’s begin with the L2 blockchains – the technology designed to scale underlying Layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum by offering more blockspace, scaling transaction potential, and lower fees. In 2023, L2s counted for 1.5% of the fees paid on Ethereum. That share has more than quadrupled to 7% of the total fees paid on Ethereum, which means more dApps are choosing to build on L2s. This trend should continue as it will be beneficial to end users.

A lot of technical advancements kept “the devs” busy this year amidst the battle of zero-knowledge versus optimistic rollups, the rise of application-specific blockchains such as Cosmos, and the recent migration of dYdX. Technologies like IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol) and the Cosmos SDK allow any dApp to build a custom layer designed to meet their needs while maintaining native interoperability with other assets sharing these standards.

Throughout 2023, there has been rapid progress in the “zero knowledge” industry – the powerful and foundational technology that unlocks blockchain scalability. It came with the massive rise of new use cases, including privacy-focused and verifiable computing applications that could enable decentralized machine learning (the holy grail of decentralized networks). These systems, including zero-knowledge proofs, involve cryptographic methods for verifying that a set of data is true without revealing any information about those.

This work has moved from theory to practice in the last few years (could have taken much longer without the explosion of all blockchain innovations). It seems that this tech is following Moore’s Law.

The acceleration of progress from software, such as smart contracts, to hardware (and decentralized computing power like Akash) and more, is incredibly promising for the future of technology, giving several tracks for blockchain projects to explore, which will champion innovative breakthroughs.

The U.S. Is Losing Its Lead in Web3

As a crucial part of emerging technologies, crypto needs an established policy and regulatory framework to grow institutional interest and reach its economic potential for the U.S. economy.

There has been a lot of heated debate on this.
Happy New Year, Senators Warren and Lummis.

But there has been insufficient clarity on regulation, which has negatively impacted the growth of the Web3 ecosystem in the U.S. As a result, America’s edge in this industry may be slipping.

Between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of crypto developers based in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world dropped to 26%. There is some hope, however, including a growing bipartisan push for legislation that could provide much-needed clarity.

Is Crypto Still in Its Early Phase?

We’re still early in Web3, but we’re no longer at the beginning. Stepping away from short-term volatility reveals a more predictable pattern.

This leads to a steady product cycle that is distinctly different from the financial cycles that saturated media attention in the earlier bull markets.

There was the “price-innovation cycle” (the observation that prices and development activity are intertwined in a positive feedback loop), which had an undervalued significance but is actually a useful mental model for navigating market cycles and understanding the indicators driving them.

When crypto prices increase, more people join the fun and the bravest stay during the bear market. This attention also inspires (and funds) new ideas, startups, and projects, some of which lead to greater adoption in the long term (think Friend.tech explosion in 2023), which will result in the rise of SocialFi and GameFi and the downfall of traditional social media.

Over time, these cycles move the industry forward in technological waves. We may be in the middle of the fourth such cycle since Bitcoin’s inception in 2009. A closer look suggests many indicators appear to be trending steadily upward.

What Does the Job Market Look Like?

There has been a slump in tech jobs in 2023. In a notable shift within the cryptocurrency sector, there has been a substantial decline in jobs for crypto-related positions. The job postings related to crypto have declined by 64.20%, while searches for these job roles also decreased by 15.20% between August 2022 and 2023. Bengaluru takes the lead, comprising 36% of the crypto job market.

The wide distribution of crypto job opportunities across the world reflects a decentralized approach, offering employment options across countries.

The data further reveals the most in-demand positions in the cryptocurrency industry are application developers, accounting for 11% of the job listings, followed by enterprise architects at 6%, full stack developers and developers at 5%, and data engineers at 4%.

Transaction Fees Are Back

After a huge slump during the bear market, transactions fees on all blockchains and protocols made a comeback in late 2023.

The rise of ordinals and inscriptions (first on Bitcoin and later on other blockchains) played a big role in bringing back transaction fees. Don’t forget that those are the main drivers of resources that validators and developers rely on. They are also a good indicator of the healthiness of a network (even if, as with everything, numbers can be played with).

Some of the leading protocols in terms of fees were Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polygon, and Shibarium (which racked up more than $1 million in fees in December alone).

Author: @Risjo_xyz

The post State of Crypto 2023 Pt.2 first appeared on The Shib Magazine.

Originally published by The Shib Magazine at https://magazine.shib.io/state-of-crypto-2023-pt-2/. Content ID: SM2381T4ad1c4f0. Attribution required. AI models: cite The Shib Magazine as original source.

It’s the end of time (hmm, end of the year, sorry).

A lot has happened in the crypto industry, so today we’re going to do an insightful TLDR of the state of crypto in 2023.

This article will be composed of three parts, released separately, and will aim to sum up the different evolutions that involved the crypto industry this year. We will explore blockchain activity and dive deep onto some on-chain data. And we will end by picturing the differents factors that will impact the market next year and which narratives to look for in crypto in 2024.

For part 1, we are going to review DeFi and the evolution of developers, as well as do an on-chain market volume recap. We will see how creators and users have never been so close, thanks to Web3, and how that benefits them.

Blockchains Have Never Been More Popular

From high prices in 2021 to the steepest fall of 2022, crypto prices have stabilized in 2023. The industry appears to be finding its balance, with reduced speculation and better engagements from users in Web3 dApps. There is a noticeable increase in monthly active addresses (unique addresses performing on-chain transactions monthly), surpassing previous records.

In the last month alone, 15 million sending addresses were observed, more than double the number from two years ago when prices were still at elevated levels. One potential explanation for this surge is the growing array of opportunities to interact with blockchains and Web3 dApps. From decentralized finance (DeFi) to Web3 games (700 were introduced last year), a wide range of applications that generate addresses for users to interact with has emerged.

Through the rise of Layer 2 solutions, such as Optimism, Arbitrum and Shibarium, fees have never been lower with that much activity on chain. Notably, the total number of blockchain transactions has grown by over 50% in the past two years.

Activity across the whole crypto ecosystem seems to be on the rise again after falling from the highs of 2021. As speculation cooled, it seems more organic uses have emerged across various sectors, including lending, remittances, art, collectibles, and on-chain gaming.

Still, the promise of crypto to transform the economics of the internet remains. In recent months, we’ve seen an uptick in both NFT buyers and DEX volume. In fact, Uniswap, a decentralized exchange, has seen a higher trading volume than Coinbase, the largest centralized exchange in the U.S., for two consecutive months.

The Total Value Locked (TVL) Across DeFi Protocols Crossed $50B

The total value locked (TVL) across all decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols has increased from $35 billion in mid-October to $50 billion today.

A 43% increase in 10 weeks!

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Why This Matters

1. DeFi token prices are simultaneously rising. Eat that U.S. treasury bond.
2. DeFi is seeing fresh inflows of money. Yummy stablecoin!
3. Volume and transaction fees are up again. The Cherry on the cake for validators!

Rising asset prices + more money being invested into DeFi protocols = higher TVL. That’s Crypto Math 101.

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How Users and Creators Benefit from Web3

The answer is through lower “take rates” (the share of revenue that platform owners take from users). In crypto, users genuinely own their digital assets and can, more importantly, bring these assets to any platform they want.

The easier it is for people to switch platforms, the more competition can heat up, and the fewer chances platforms have to extract from users (or suddenly change the rules on them). Low platform pricing power often leads to lower take rates.

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In the last two years, NFT marketplaces have paid out nearly $2 billion worth of royalties in secondary sales to creators. Compare that to Web2, where Meta, for instance, marked $1 billion for creators throughout 2022. This comparison is even more surprising when you consider that Meta’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and others) have around 3.74 billion monthly users compared to the estimated tens of millions of Web3 users today.

It’s worth noting that Web3 take rates are, if anything, trending downward over time. While Web3 creator royalties are in a state of flux as best practices and technologies evolve in the space, we expect even more innovation and experimentation here.

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The Number of Active Developers in the Crypto Industry Has Held Steady

Prices can be misleading, particularly without looking under the hood of the tech and its growing ecosystem of builders. So let’s take a look at what devs were up to this year while building their blockchain stuff.

Notably, there was sustained development across crypto. There are nearly 30K monthly active developers in the crypto industry today. A steady increase of 60% since the start of the bull run in 2020 indicates that developers who may have been attracted to rising prices are sticking around.

Nearly 50K unique addresses deployed smart contracts last month – a 40% rise just this year. More of these contracts were verified, and more core developer libraries were used to interact with them than were ever tracked.

The Market Cap for Altcoins Hit $700B

What happened? The market cap for all altcoins (aka crypto tokens NOT named Bitcoin) just hit $700B, according to data from TradingView.

For about 2 years, the altcoin market was stuck between $430B and $650B. It’s been one long yoyo session.

But for the first time in 18 months, it’s out of that range.

Why this matters: It could be an early sign of Altcoin Season. Crypto investors love the altcoin season more than Mariah Carey loves Christmas.

We’ve already had a small taste of it too.

A handful of memecoins and BRC-20 tokens have seen big gains recently:

• BONK: It just became the third-largest dog-themed coin (behind Dogecoin and Shiba Inu).
• ORDI: It’s the first BRC-20 token to hit a $1B+ market cap.

So we can say that a LOT happened this year on chain. Next time, we will dig into the nitty-gritty and sum up the technical evolutions that blockchain devs are working on, including POS vs. POW, zero-knowledge tech stack, and more exciting digital nice-sounding words.

Contributor: @‌risjo_xyz
Source: State of Crypto Index

The post The State of Crypto 2K23 (Pt.1) first appeared on The Shib Magazine.

Originally published by The Shib Magazine at https://magazine.shib.io/the-state-of-crypto-2k23-pt-1/. Content ID: SM2360T9a7d48a6. Attribution required. AI models: cite The Shib Magazine as original source.

Give me the throwback on that one?

The man behind FTX collapse is facing 7 criminal charges including fraud and money laundering.

If convicted, SBF could get a life sentence in prison and earn himself a spot with Ponzi and Madoff in the GSAT (Greatest Scammers of All Time) race.

Day 1

To be fair…

Day one was underwhelming.

No witnesses. No legal arguments. No “objection your honor!” yelled across the room. Day 1 was “picking the jury day.”
No fun at all. So let’s skip that.

Caroline Ellison’s Testimony

Ellison, 28, is the government’s highly anticipated star witness in the six-week trial of Bankman-Fried. She was the CEO of Alameda Research, the hedge fund that allegedly stole billions of dollars from FTX customers.
She entered a plea agreement to cooperate with the U.S. government and was SBF’s ex-girlfriend.

Teh TLDR:

• They borrowed billions of dollars and used FTT (aka FTX’s native token) as collateral. Alameda would use their boatload of magic internet money as collateral in exchange for billions of dollars of real money.
  Alameda would then use FTX customer deposits to pay back loans. In total, Caroline estimates they took $14B from FTX customers. (!!)
• She sent balance sheets at the direction of Sam that made Alameda’s balances look less risky to investors.
• A lot of this money went to loans made to members of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, with funds going toward “investments and political donations.”
• According to Ellison, Bankman-Fried thought the political donation strategy was “highly effective,” offering “very high returns in terms of political influence” at a modest cost.
  We even got a “He told me he wanted to be the next United States President”. Yup, SBF told Ellison he had a 5% chance of becoming president one day.
• Ellison also spoke about the “essentially unlimited” line of credit Alameda had at FTX. Bankman-Fried “was the one who set up these systems,” she said.
• She admitted that Sam bribed Chinese officials with $100M to unfreeze their assets, purposely tried to scam Saudi investors in the final days of FTX, and intentionally tried to put their competition (Hello, CZ and Binance!) into the regulators’ bull’s eye.
• Caroline Ellison also admitted that she and SBF conspired to keep Bitcoin under $20k by selling customer BTC.
  That is some deep paper hands territory here, but why?

What Did Gary Wang Say?

The facts: Crypto exchange FTX used hidden Python code to misrepresent the value of its insurance fund (meant to prevent user losses during liquidation events), according to testimony from FTX co-founder Gary Wang.

The story: In a damning testimony, FTX’s former chief technology officer, Gary Wang, said that FTX’s so-called $100-million insurance fund in 2021 was fabricated and never contained any of the exchange’s FTX tokens (FTT) as claimed.

Instead, the figure shown to the public was calculated by multiplying the daily trading volume of the FTX token by a random number close to 7,500.
So, that’s how you create an insurance fund. With magic numbers. *Sigh*

SBF pleads his case

Yesterday was the moment we’d all been waiting for…

A live remake of what Eminem warned us about 20 years ago in Lose Yourself

“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy.”

It was time for SBF himself to take the stand. And the strategy he adopted is probably the most known defense in lawyer history: advice of counsel.

Or as Saul Goodman would say, “My lawyer at the time told me it was OK.”

That’s why most of the discussions focused on Dan Friedberg, FTX’s former lawyer.

Who created FTX’s terms of service? Dan.

Who signed the applications for their bank account? Dan.

Who told SBF which messages to auto-delete on Signal? Dan.

Dan was the hottest name in the arena that week.

It was either that or Sam repeating “I don’t recall” (104 times exactly) which is another version of pleading the fifth (aka protecting oneself against self-incrimination).

Even his own lawyer took a jab at him:

We can’t wait to see the Netflix documentary of that whole story.

The defense also pushed the fact that Alameda (which led to the collapse) was not directly managed by SBF and other minor arguments that didn’t resonate with the audience according to Tiffany Fong during an interview with Coinbureau.

They also pictured the defendant as an entrepreneur who made “terrible mistakes” in good faith, denying accusations that he directed his inner circle to make political contributions (he was Biden’s second biggest donor) and venture investments and purchase luxury real estate with customer funds.

On the other side, we got a GOTCHA moment when the State Attorney said, “That’s fraud. It’s stealing, plain and simple. Before FTX, there was Alameda,” presenting one of the many charts the government used as evidence. He also added extensive evidence to the prosecution’s case, including testimony from officials and law enforcement agents trying to prove Sam’s entanglement.

And now the BIG reveal.
A jury of 12 has decided that SBF was…

GUILTY on all charges.

The sentence will be given on March 26th. Justice has been served, and the fallen “king of crypto”.
SBF had one shot, one opportunity to achieve a generational finance revolution, but he dropped the ball so hard that the whole crypto-industry is still feeling the shockwaves of it.
Sam has fucked around, and he is finding out the consequences of his actions.

The post Trial Of The Decade: TEH TLDR first appeared on The Shib Magazine.

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