Singapore (Lauryn Ishak/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Technician’s take: BTC is in a wide trading range with strong overhead resistance. Technical indicators are mostly neutral.
Bitcoin began falling late Friday and continued to drop through the early part of the weekend before coming to a temporary rest at about $39,000. At the time of publication, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was trading below $38,500. Ether and major altcoins were in the red on Sunday.
Bitcoin’s decline began as bad news throughout last week quashed even the faintest hopes of a resolution to the Russian onslaught and erased gains from earlier in the week when investors saw Ukraine and Russia’s separate use of crypto as proof of its potential.
“The drop on Friday was a reversion to prices that shot up when people believed there might be more of an escape to crypto in the wake of fiat banks and payment gateways in Russia and Ukraine restricting access,” Joe DiPasquale, CEO of fund manager BitBull Capital, wrote in a text to CoinDesk. “The price would be buoyed if there were a de-escalation with the Russia/Ukraine conflict.”
That seemed unlikely on Sunday as Russia continued its brutal attacks against Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin rejecting all overtures for a ceasefire, even to a targeted truce that would allow citizens of Mariupol, a besieged port of roughly 500,000 people, to flee. Russia has been targeting Mariupol and other Black Sea ports to isolate Ukraine’s southern coast with its access to shipping and industry.
Russian forces pounded other major Ukraine cities with artillery and rocket fire, according to multiple reports. In one instance, mortar fired killed a mother and two children as they evacuated the town of Irpin near the capital of Kyiv. European and North American media outlets reporting on the invasion even found themselves under attack on at least one occasion.
Meanwhile, the three largest credit card companies, American Express, Visa and Mastercard announced over the weekend that they would be suspending operations in Russia. The decision added to a flurry of sanctions by countries aligned against Russia in hopes of crippling its economy. Already there are signs that the sanctions are biting hard as the ruble’s value against the dollar has plummeted to less than a penny.
At the time of publication, Bitcoin was down about 2.5% over the past 24 hours and over 7% from early Friday when the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was still trading at roughly 41,600. Ether was changing hands at about $2,550 on Sunday, off over 4% from a day ago.
DiPasquale believes that bitcoin could hit “its next resistance just below $36,000 before bouncing back up to $40,000,” and noted that “many, long-term investors” may see this as “a buying opportunity.” But he added that that “new investors are skittish given global uncertainty, as well as uncertainty” about the Biden Administration’s executive order on crypto in the near future.
Many in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector associate the acronym with the first letter: E, for environmental (the rest is Social and Governance). And with this comes conceptions of militant greenism, with all its criticisms of blockchain technology for “melting the earth.”
Elon Musk’s concerns over bitcoin’s ESG credentials helped cause a crypto crash last May, and crypto developers and entrepreneurs term receives a certain degree of hostility in the industry.
But wait a minute, argues Lightbulb Capital’s Daniel Liebau. Lightbulb Capital is working with Singapore-based Modular to bring some reform to DeFi using a term familiar to TradFi investors.
Liebau wants the world to know that the S and the G are separate sometimes overlooked criteria in ESG – and we need to focus on all three aspects equally.
For Modular, the S in ESG may stand for social but it also wants to use the S to emphasize sustainability. It’s not just about the carbon footprint (important because Modular prefers less energy-intensive proof-of-stake projects) but rather about the project’s long-term potential.
“It’s interesting to see how people or projects drop in and out of the top 10 on CoinMarketCap over time,” Liebau told CoinDesk. “We want to eventually be those platforms that stay for a very long time because other people can build on them and create peer-to-peer commerce type of applications.”
Liebau argues that platforms focusing on things like financial inclusion rather than, say, lottery apps are the sustainable ones.
The other way Modular uses S is for social. When analyzing an investment opportunity the firm looks for the projects following on social media platforms. Why? Liebau points out there’s plenty of research that correlates between […]
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