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This Week's Top Stories
“Mt. Gox moves over $700 million worth of bitcoin to unknown wallet: Arkham” – Tuesday, 20.8
- Mt. Gox appears to have transferred 12’000 BTC to an unknown wallet on Tuesday night. Such movements of bitcoin in the recent past have preceded repayments from Mt. Gox to its creditors via distributors such as Bitstamp and Kraken crypto exchange.
- If the transfer this week was used for another batch of repayments, this would mean that there are 44’000 BTC left and might indicate that the Mt. Gox creditor repayments are nearing completion.
“SEC talks with ETF issuers over concerns of Solana being a security preceded Cboe removing 19b-4s” – Monday, 19.8
- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had talks with prospective Solana ETF issuers about its concerns over Solana's potential status as a security. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas tweeted that the Solana ETF application has stalled at the second step of the filing process.
- The decision on the Solana spot ETFs in the U.S. was expected to take be made in spring next year, however with the recent developments, the decision is likely mainly dependent on the U.S. presidential election in November, with experts giving it small chances with the current administration in office.
“Fed minutes point to ‘likely’ rate cut coming in September” – Wednesday, 21.8
- Federal Reserve officials at their July meeting moved closer to an interest rate reduction but stopped short while indicating that a September cut had grown increasingly probable, minutes released Wednesday showed. According to the FOMC minutes, there was an inclination among an unspecified number of officials to start easing at the July meeting rather than waiting until September.
- As of today, the market is fully pricing in interest rate cuts at the September meeting, with a 73.5% chance of a 25-bps cut and a 26.5% probability of a 50-bps cut. It remains to be seen how the data continues to evolve, because the members stated once more that they will be watching the inflation and other data closely until the meeting in September.
“Investors pile back into equities amid ‘full recovery’ in market confidence” – Monday, 19.8
- Equities around the world have rebounded strongly from their early August lows, the Financial Times wrote that investors who slashed their equity exposure during a bout of market volatility in early August sharply increased their holdings as global stocks rebounded.
- U.S. indices, especially the S&P 500 are trading just shy of their all-time highs. The S&P rebounded almost 10% from its low in early August, the Nasdaq is up 13% from its early-month low as well.
Chart of the Week
This week we are taking a look at the various dominance charts. Since the bear market low in November 2022, when FTX crashed and the whole crypto space held its breath for a couple of days, the Bitcoin dominance has increased from 38.7% to 56% today. Meanwhile, the Ethereum dominance has slightly decreased from 16.8% to 15.2%, the stablecoin dominance has seen a large decrease from 17.3 to 7.4% and the overall altcoin dominance has decreased as well, from 27.2% to 21.3%. This dynamic has not developed unnoticed, as we see in the market, Bitcoin is the strong force, and some altcoins are taking turn with outperforming Bitcoin for a while, but overall Bitcoin has been in the lead over the last 18 months. This is likely due to the anticipation and then launch of the new spot-ETFs and all the new money flowing into Bitcoin through these new products. Retail investors are likely not yet back on the altcoin playing field, as the chart below indicates as well.
