For the first time in months, the markets are positive and sentiment is good. Bitcoin is up more than 30% from last week, and Ethereum is doing even better. In other news, DeFi adoption is going parabolic, senator Elizabeth Warren has reaffirmed that she definitely doesn’t like crypto and one of the world’s largest companies is hiring a blockchain expert.
Bitcoin vs Ethereum Price
Remember how it seemed like the end of the world when Bitcoin hit $40k a few months ago? Well things change and this time hitting it feels pretty good. Even though we’re not quite to the point of lambos and early retirement, $40,000 is still a heck of a lot better than an ugly drop to twenty.
While market demand is a big reason for Bitcoin’s fast move up, another key factor is the ever-popular short squeeze, as featured in the famous GME saga.
For anyone who doesn’t know how a short squeeze works, when traders short an asset, they’re betting that the price will go down. If the price goes up, the trader loses money. If the price goes up a lot, the trader loses a lot of money and is forced to exit their short position.
Here’s the kicker though, to close a short position the trader has to rebuy the asset, in this case BTC. So as short sellers buy BTC to close out their positions, the price of Bitcoin goes up. That forces even more traders to close their short positions, which drives prices even higher.
A short-squeeze is a self-perpetuating feedback loop, and it’s one of the key reasons that Bitcoin went from $30 to $40k in just five days.
Moving on to the number two position, ETH is up more than 40% from last week’s lows and, unlike BTC which is mostly moving sideways, the Ethereum price chart is damn near a straight line up.
As we’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, EIP 1559 is less than a week away and this is probably one of the key reasons that ETH is outperforming BTC at the moment. It’s still too early to say for sure whether this micro bear market is over, however, it sure feels good to finally see some green candles on the crypto charts again.
Ethereum volume
Speaking of ETH dominance, here’s something that’s never happened before. According to Coinbase the six month trading volume growth for Ethereum was bigger than Bitcoin’s. 
That’s a 1,461% increase for ETH versus a 489% increase for BTC.
If you think about why Ethereum’s trading volume is growing so quickly, it does sort of make sense. Bitcoin is digital gold, it’s the type of thing that you buy and hold for the long term, whereas there are a lot more reasons to spend Ethereum. Namely, DeFi.
The decentralized finance movement on Ethereum is flourishing and to get in on the action you have to use ETH to pay for transaction fees. The same goes for NFTs, which are often bought and sold with Ethereum.
Ethereum is the world’s supercomputer, and all of this trading volume growth shows that a lot of people are starting to treat it as such.
Uniswap news
You can’t talk about DeFi on Ethereum without mentioning Uniswap. With approximately 2.5 million users, Uniswap is Ethereum’s most popular protocol. Even though 2.5 million people might not sound like a lot, here’s what’s so crazy about that number…
According to Dune Analytics, there are 3 million unique addresses that have interacted with one of Ethereum’s top 24 applications. That means that 83% of all DeFi users have used Uniswap at some point. A lot of those are new users, too. It took a bit less than a year for DeFi to grow from 100,000 to 1 million users. 
Going from 1 million to 2 took six months and then, finally, the move from 2 million to 3 million DeFi users only took 78 days. That’s parabolic growth and exciting as it is now, just imagine where we’re going to be in two years!
US Senator Warren’s attack on Crypto
Bullishness aside, not everyone is excited about the blockchain revolution. In fact, Senator Elizabeth Warren seems to find cryptocurrency about as appealing as a tuna fish milkshake.
Among other things, Warren believes that investing in crypto is no better than going to the casino, and that crypto enables illicit activity and is a haven for tax dodgers.
To be fair, there is a bit of merit to a few of Warren’s claims. There have been some really high profile scams like Bitconnect, and a lot of ICO tokens did turn out to be failures. That being said, it seems like Warren focuses on the bad while glossing over the good. Case in point, in her latest speech Warren claimed, quote,
Instead of leaving our financial system at the whims of giant banks, crypto puts the system at the whims of some shadowy, faceless group of super-coders and miners, which doesn’t sound better to me.
It’s fascinating that Warren would use the words “shadowy” and “faceless” to describe crypto, when those two words seem like a much better description of the current financial system.
For better or worse, crypto is the most transparent monetary system in history. Every transaction that ever happens is stored forever on the blockchain. Can Warren name a single bank that’s even 1/10th as transparent?
Maybe instead of calling out crypto so much she could focus more of her energy on fixing an increasingly broken financial system. I mean, banks still use fax machines and sending money from Stockholm to New York takes 5 days and costs 15%. Fix that first, then let’s talk.
At any rate, Ryan Sean Adams, the co-host of the Bankless podcast, probably has the best take. According to Ryan, quote,
Elizabeth Warren just made shadowy super coders sound way cooler than any of us ever did
Amazon crypto news
There are 2 companies that start turning heads when their names cross with crypto Apple and Amazon, Why? Because they are so huge and can literally change the trajectory of crypto adoption on a dime, I mean a Satoshi.
Amazon has confirmed that they’re hiring a digital currency and blockchain expert. The job posting suggests that Amazon is interested in digital currencies and integrating blockchain technology into their platform. Although the Amazon news is bullish for crypto, we do need to clear up a bit of misinformation.
A few days ago there was a story circulating around that an “anonymous insider” had revealed that Amazon was planning on accepting Bitcoin payments by the end of the year. Amazon has officially denied that story, and the company has stated that they have no plans to start accepting Bitcoin. So that’s a bit disappointing, but it’s still pretty cool to see that Amazon is interested in blockchain and crypto. We look forward to seeing what the e-commerce giant comes out with in the next year.
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