ETH rallied 10% as crypto market bounces. SOL outperforms, but can it survive? GALA meets in agreement with The Rock. APT is heading to the top 50.
ETH
Ethereum rallied 10% as the cryptocurrency market mounted a rally earlier in the year.
The second largest cryptocurrency in the world was able to overcome the 3.5% rally in Bitcoin. Much optimism surrounds the bounce in some of the currencies that were beaten in the bear market. However, some of the gains are likely due to tax loss collection, a scheme in which investors can sell their cryptocurrencies at a loss in December to take a tax deduction. Once this is done, they can shop again in January.
Meanwhile, a big bet has been made for Ethereum to go down to the $400 level. An order was placed for 26,000 ETH put options expiring on June 30, 2023. Analyst and trader @TeddyCleps was also bearish, saying that Ethereum has been running into resistance for eight months.
Another upgrade for ETH is expected with developers on the first All Core Developer Execution Team (ACDE) agreeing to โtentativelyโ set a March 2023 date for the Shanghai hard fork. ACDE's next call will go live on January 19 and the hard fork is the first radical change to the network after the Merge transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
The number of Ethereum validators will now exceed 500,000 by 2023. According to on-chain metrics, the issuance rate of new Ethereum coins has dropped considerably. The network has been operating on the PoS consensus algorithm for over three months, and the community is now excited about the Shanghai hard fork and the unlocking of the ETH token.
Ethereum price is now testing another resistance level with the $1350 zone and the target above would be $1650.
SUN
Solana was one of the hardest-hit coins in the bear market with $250 falling to around $8. However, the coin has led the latest charge with a gain of over 50% this week.
Solana's gains have been attributed to a new meme coin launched on Solana's network. BONK is another dog-themed coin that was airdropped to Solana users and rallied around 2500%. That brought a lot of attention to Solana, and some value investors jumped on board.
But investors have not learned their lesson with the meme coins and the price of BONK slid. That prompted the developers behind the coin to burn their allocation of 5 billion BONK tokens early Friday, as they tried to stem the token's bearish momentum.
The big threat to Solana is its stake in the now-bankrupt FTX exchange. Alameda Research, the trading arm of FTX, bought 58 million SOL tokens, which is equivalent to 10% of the supply. Administrators may now have to sell those tokens to pay creditors and that would lead to another price drop.
Development and Total Value Locked activity is also winding down at SOL and there are concerns about the future of the project. According to DeFiLlama, Solana's TVL saw a dramatic 98% drop from its record high of $10.17 billion, falling to $206 million earlier this week. That marks a 27% drop in TVL over the last month.
In November, Tether took $1 billion of its USDT stablecoin from Solana, while several major exchanges, including Binance, Crypto.com, and OKX, paused Solana-based deposits and withdrawals for USDT and USDC. Major NFT projects including Magic Eden, DeGods, and y00ts have announced plans to migrate to other chains.
SOL price has risen from the lows of $8 to a price of $16, but the headwinds are big for a further advance.
GALA
Gala Games' price shot up this week by 170% after a collaboration with actors The Rock and Mark Wahlberg.
Gala Games is a gaming blockchain that was founded by the co-founder of Zynga. Zynga was acquired in a $12 billion deal in 2022 by Take-Two Interactive and the plan for Gala is to attract a large ecosystem of gamers.
Gala Games has a growing collection of games like Townstar and Spider Tanks. Other games currently in development are Mirandus, Legacy, Echoes of Empire, and Legends Reborn. Some of their games have become relatively popular among players who want to earn money.
GALA was shot after the developers. Announced a new partnership with The Rock and Mark Wahlberg. The goal of the collaboration is to work on a new project called Gala Film, where the developers want moviegoers or Netflix viewers to have access to unique digital assets.
GALA price rose from around $0.016 this week to a price of $0.048 and could continue to see positive price action.
SUITABLE
Aptos' price has been rising in recent weeks and saw another 40% increase this week.
The PancakeSwap decentralized exchange is now the top DEX on the Aptos blockchain and the CAKE community has voted to keep working with the network. At the time of writing, the proposal has more than 99% of the votes in favor of the proposal.
The proposal noted that PancakeSwap has 14 farms deployed in Aptos, with APRs consistent with or higher than other DEX offerings in Aptos. DEX also wants to attract more projects based on Aptos that can help both CAKE and APT.
Aptos was founded by a team working with Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook).
Although Aptos was only released at the end of 2022, developments began in 2018. The team spent more than three years working on the codebase and building an enterprise-grade blockchain. The team has also raised $350 million in funding from a series of funding rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz and FTX Ventures.
The APT price has risen from lows of $3.00 to $5.00 and this could be a low in Aptos as it heads for a spot in the top 50 on the coin list.
Disclaimer: The information in this document is provided without regard to your personal circumstances, therefore it should not be construed as financial advice, investment recommendation, or an offer or solicitation to trade in cryptocurrency.
