It’s that time of year again, the glorious moment when Bitcoin breaks its previous all time high and crypto investors start looking at Lamborghini color swatches. Heated arguments break out all over the internet as hodlers argue whether Italian supercars look better in black or orange.
It’s not all about Bitcoin though! This week we’ve got some bullish news for altcoins too. The Bitcoin dominance chart suggests an upcoming alt season, XRP is trading in record volumes and more than $1 billion has been locked up in the Ethereum staking contract.
These days it’s not so easy to be an altcoin investor. 
Bitcoin is off to the races, smashing through $20k like nothing and yet the altcoins just keep lagging behind. Ethereum is still 50% below its all time high while other popular coins like XRP and Monero are even further behind. It’s a tough game but we’re starting to see a few signs that it won’t stay this way forever.
For one thing, the BTCD charts are telling us that there might be an alt season on the horizon. BTCD chart stands for Bitcoin Dominance, which measures what percentage of the crypto market Bitcoin accounts for. In other words, the market cap for Bitcoin, versus the market cap for all other coins combined.
There is a big resistance zone at 67% on the BTCD chart and Bitcoin seems to be unable to break through that, suggesting that Bitcoin dominance isn’t going to be rising. If BTCD keeps rejecting these higher levels the most likely scenario is that it’s going to roll over, which would be bullish for altcoins.
Also, it’s encouraging to remember that at the start of 2017 the alt coins didn’t start their own epic bull run until after Bitcoin had broken its previous all time high. 
So if the same thing happens again, then Bitcoin breaking through $20k could be super bullish for altcoins in the coming weeks and months.
When the ETH 2.0 staking contract was released there was actually a lot of uncertainty about how long it would take to get all of the ETH needed for the contract to go live. The contract needed stakers to deposit about $500 million worth of ETH and at first the deposits came in really slow. Then, the flood happened and in just a matter of days the Ethereum 2.0 staking contract got all of the ETH it needed to go live. Looking back now it seems sort of silly that we ever worried about getting enough ETH, since there’s now $1 billion worth of Ethereum locked up in the staking contract!
One of the macro forces that’s driving so much money into Ethereum staking is a lack of yield all over the world. For example there are currently $17 trillion worth of negative yielding bonds in the world. In simple terms what this means is that, there are $17 trillion worth of financial instruments that are GUARANTEED to pay you back less money than what you put in. It’s a pretty crazy situation, and it’s got investors looking for alternative assets they can buy. Staking Ethereum currently offers a ROI of more than 10% which is definitely one of the reasons so many people want to stake.
Objectively speaking, the XRP price has not done well in the bear market. XRP was way down against the dollar, but it was also down when measured against Bitcoin. XRP hodlers definitely weren’t having much fun through this bear market, but there is finally some sunshine on the horizon! In the last couple of months XRP has been absolutely crushing it. Just a day or two ago XRP was up by 26% in 24 hours, but even that is peanuts compared to some price action from a few weeks ago, when XRP was up almost 50% in a day!
Zoom out a bit to the 90 day chart and XRP is up a beautiful 125%. All of these gains are happening on top of huge trading volume. In the last 24 hours almost $20 billion worth of XRP has changed hands, which is basically double the trading volume that we’ve seen up to this point so far.
All of this volume tells us that a lot of new buyers are getting super interested in XRP, which is definitely a good sign for long time investors. Even though XRP is still a ways off from its previous high, if this trading volume keeps up it won’t be long before XRP gets back to its peak.
Forkast.news, working with the AAX exchange, have released a new report which estimates that as of the end of 2020 there are more than $20 billion dollars worth of tokenized assets. More than anything else it’s stablecoins that are dominating this market, with just Tether alone having nearly a $20 billion dollar market cap. USDC is in a much smaller second place, with a market cap of about $3.5 billion. It’s not just stablecoins that are getting all of the attention though. You can use the blockchain to tokenize just about anything, including commodities, securities, bonds, real estate and of course other currencies besides the dollar. Tokenized assets are just so superior to everything else that it’s pretty obvious that they’re going to keep eating the world. That’s good news for everyone, and especially good for crypto holders as they’ll have even more assets to invest in. Institutional investment is one of the key drivers of this move in Bitcoin and it doesn’t seem like the buying is slowing down.
Just in the last week or two we’ve heard that MicroStrategy will be buying another $650 million worth of BTC, the asset management company Ruffers announced a nice little $744 million dollar purchase, MassMutual bought a cool $100 million worth of BTC and One River Asset Management just launched a crypto fund that will accumulate $1 billion worth of crypto by 2021. Institutions are buying up Bitcoin so fast that it’s hard to even keep track of it all. And don’t forget, all we’re hearing about are the companies and investment funds that are choosing to make an announcement! Who knows how many private companies and funds are buying BTC without telling anyone.
Not to get too bullish but the best way to end this week’s news is to point out that Scott Minerd, Chief Investment Officer of the Guggenheim investment fund, has called for a $400,000 Bitcoin value. If this is where institutional buyers think that Bitcoin is headed, well, who are we to say they’re wrong. As a matter of fact, here are some predictions for the next year from some of our YouTube viewers.
Where do you think Bitcoin's headed? Let us know in the comments below.
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