Bitcoin at a Decision Point, Leveraging Solana-Based Wallets and the Nomad Fiasco: This Week’s Crypto Roundup

The last seven days failed to bring positive developments, at least in terms of prices, as the total cryptocurrency market capitalization fell by around $35 billion. This comes on the back of BTC and ETH failing to overcome critical resistance levels and currently circulating below them.

This time last week, Bitcoin’s price was pegged at around $24,000, and we saw the cryptocurrency make an attempt to rally towards $25,000 on Saturday. Unfortunately for the bulls, sellers stepped up and sent the market into a correction that resulted in BTC losing roughly 2.5% of its value over the past seven days.

Many of the other coins followed suit, with some obvious exceptions. FLOW, for once, seems to be the week’s best performer, with a staggering increase of around 55%, all of which has come in the last 24 hours. This is no surprise. Meta (formerly known as Facebook) announced yesterday that the company will integrate the Flow blockchain to further expand the NFT universe for its users. This is interesting because, according to Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, the company’s attempt to create the metaverse (like Meta’s obvious efforts in this direction) is going nowhere.

The most impactful event this week was undoubtedly the widespread attack of wallets on the Solana network. Over 8,000 hot wallets were compromised and users saw their funds drained directly. The team confirmed that this is not a problem with the Solana network, but the cryptocurrency’s price still suffered.

Speaking of hacks, Nomad Bridge was also exploited. Interestingly, the hacker posted the script in a public Discord group and anyone could copy and paste it to drain money out of the bridge. The team is now offering a bounty to return the $190 million that was drained.

Elsewhere, institutions may once again dip their toes into the industry, as suggested by analysts from Nansen in an exclusive interview with CryptoPotato from EthCC 5 in Paris. This was further proven by the fact that Fairfax County Retirement Systems, which operates Virginia’s Pension Fund consisting of over $6.8 billion, invested an additional $70 million in two different cryptocurrency yield breeding funds.

The broader market sentiment has also improved a lot over the past couple of weeks. The Cryptocurrency Fear and Greed Index is currently at 31. While this is still considered to be in the “fear zone”, at least we are out of the “extreme fear” zone.

Speaking of improving market sentiment, some major investors also seem to think Bitcoin is out of the woods. For example, Anthony Scaramucci – founder of SkyBridge Capital – believes that the cryptocurrency will not sink below the lowest level of the year again.

All in all it was an interesting week and it is very exciting to see what will happen going forward as prices seem to be reaching a focal point.

Market data

Market Cap: $1.134 Billion | 24H Vol: $83B | BTC dominance: 39.1%

BTC: $23,204 (-2.5%) | ETH: $1,668 (-3.2%) | ADA: $0.51 (+0.3%)

This week’s crypto headlines you can’t miss

Thousands of wallets compromised in ongoing Solana-based hack. In what appears to be the latest widespread attack in the cryptocurrency industry, thousands of wallets in the Solana ecosystem were compromised. According to the developers, it was not a problem with Solana, but rather an exploit aimed at stealing users’ private keys.

Virginia Pension Fund invests $70 million in crypto lending. Fairfax County Retirement Systems is diving deeper into the field of cryptocurrencies. The institution that manages over $6.8 billion in assets has invested around $70 million in two different crypto-yield breeding funds.

Bitcoin’s next bull run coming in 2024, predicts Morgan Creek’s Mark Yusko. According to Mark Yusko, CEO of Morgan Creek Capital Management, BTC will enter its next bull run sometime in 2024. The main reason for this, somewhat unsurprisingly, will be the halving.

Corporate attempts to create the metaverse go nowhere: Vitalik Buterin. One of Ethereum’s co-founders, Vitalik Buterin, believes that the current attempts by large companies to create a metaverse are not really going anywhere. Despite this, he believes that this is a concept that is “going to happen”.

BlackRock taps Coinbase for institutional crypto trading and custody services. The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, has used Coinbase to provide cryptocurrency trading and custody services for its institutional clients. The collaboration was revealed earlier this week – August 4.

Bitcoin has already bottomed in this cycle, says Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital, does not expect BTC to go below $17,500 again. He maintains that its fair value should be around $40,000, which represents an increase of close to 100% from today’s level.

Diagrams

This week we have chart analysis of Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano, Solana and Ethereum Classic – click here for full price analysis.