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In brief
It was a quiet weekend for Bitcoin. The currency has moved sideways over the last 48 hours, bobbing around the $19,200 mark. Which will be good news for investors after the nail-biting 10 days of market highs and instant crashes.
Ethereum’s price too has been pretty stable over the last two days, but the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap by setting records of its own.
Ethereum’s realized price - a measure of how many coins are actively being used as opposed to those stored or lost - hit highs not seen since the halcyon days of 2018. It reached $287.09 yesterday, according to data metrics site Glassnode. The coin’s regular price has also been trending northwards over the last seven days, and is now within touching distance of $600.
The project’s performance has led to a boom in the number of addresses holding more than 1 ETH. According to data released by Glassnode, there are now more than 1 million addresses holding 1 ETH, a number that has grown by 12% in the last six months. And a large portion of that has found its way into smart contracts on the long-awaited Eth 2.0 rollout.
While traditionally Ethereum’s price was strongly correlated with Bitcoin’s, the recent boom in DeFi and the advent of Eth 2.0 has given the project’s rise a distinct flavour. Speaking of DeFi, the number of individual addresses involved in decentralized finance has just surpassed 1 million.
The number, compiled by Dune Analytics is a ten-fold increase since the start of 2020, which is mirrored by the amount of money locked up in DeFi protocols. On January 1, there was $700,000 stored in contracts using platforms like Uniswap, now there’s more than $15 billion.
And if that wasn’t enough to get the Ethereum champagne corks popping, transaction volume surpassed $40 billion in November, according to a report by DappRadar. While that’s a far cry from September which saw volumes closer to $100 billion, it’s a sign the network is in rude health.
Vaccines and IPOs will dominate markets this week
While Futures markets are all a distinct shade of red this morning - the S&P, Dow and Nasdaq are all down - market watchers are concentrating on what’s going to happen when Pfizer goes to Washington to talk about vaccines this week.
The FDA is due to meet on December 10 to decide whether Pfizer and partner BioNTech’s vaccine can be given a green light to deploy its vaccine across the COVID stricken states. The yay or nay couldn’t have come sooner as the country’s death toll rapidly approaches 300,000 and the recorded case rate sails past 15 million.
While that’s happening two tech giants are due to file for IPOs this week. Airbnb, which postponed its IPO earlier this year as COVID crippled the company, is due to begin trading on the Nasdaq on December 10. Food delivery company DoorDash meanwhile, is heading for the New York Stock Exchange.
It’s a good time for both companies to jump into the stock market as investors are feverishly gobbling up shares in companies they believe will bounce back in 2021 (Airbnb) or build on their stellar performance thanks to Covid (DoorDash).
Fun fact: while both expect to raise billions of dollars with the listings, neither of them are currently profitable.
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