MaiCoin Digital Asset Weekly, June 14 2019

MaiCoin Digital Asset Weekly, June 14 2018

Commentary

Digital Assets ended the week +4.5%, recovering about 1/2 of last week’s declines. Trading continued to slide, dropping another ~ 18% this week to a daily average of $60B. Breadth swung back into the positive this week with 71% of the top 200 coins and tokens ending the week higher.

News flow was stronger this week both in terms of overall sentiment and volume of needle moving stories. Top stories this week included: 1. Binance expanding into the US, 2. FB GlobalCoin building it’s consortium of corporate founders, 3. Bitfinex building out its decentralized product offering, 4. Telegram going back to the market for more money(!), 5. Bitfinex launching its first IEO offering, and 6. Bakkt preparing to launch physically settled BTC futures for insitutionals.

Next week could be a more decisive week for the short-term price trend. Price at the moment seems tough to call. With a very obvious head and shoulders patterns slowly taking shape throughout the week, declining volume and volatility beginning to mean revert, we had been wary of the potential for a price pullback. Outperformance this week by LTC is a reason to not be overly bearish, though, as BTC tends to follow LTC price moves. In short, if we drop below the head and shoulders neckline of $7,500 then it’s likely we’ll see a correction to the $6,000 level. If we can avoid that break next week, then the liklihood of upward momentum picking up again probably increases.

Thoughts

  • Reminder — your savings are not safe
    – An interesting story out of Italy this week:
    Italy proposes tax on savings hidden in safety deposit boxes
    – Those who voluntarily declare their deposit-box holdings would be taxed at a ‘low rate’ of about 15%…that’s after, presumably, already having paid income tax
    – Interesting to note the language, the verb of choice is ‘hidden’ not ‘saved’
    – This seems to tie in with the ongoing global war on cash, which would make it impossible for users to store value outside of the banking system and pave the way for the implementation of negative interest rates (where savers pay to keep their assets with banks, because they have no choice, in an effort to make savers spend their way out of recessions)
  • Facebook’s GlobalCoin a threat to BTC…or to banks?
    – Here’s what we know so far about GlobalCoin:
    1. It has pulled in a number of traditional finance and silicone valley types
    2. Will cost US$10M to run a node
    3. Thought to be targeting retail transactions and cross border payments
    4. Will be tied to a basket of currencies
    – The big question is will it be a true cryptocurrency, or just an internal settlement mechanism a la Tencent’s WeChat Pay? Within the Digital Asset Space it looks to be a more direct competitor of XRP, but its centralized nature seems to put it more at odds with existing incumbents than BTC.
    – A number of the company’s mentioned as early participants in the consortium (Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Facebook) have a very weak history on censorship resistance. In this light, GlobalCoin seems to be more of an upgrade on the legacy system (in terms of cost and convience as WeChat Pay is) than a challenge to BTC’s value proposition.

News

MaiCoin Media

Charts

Chart 1. Weekly price vs volume

Chart 2. Weekly price change

Chart 3. Major thematics

Chart 4. Monthly average daily volume as % of historic high

Chart 5. MTD average daily volume

Chart 6. Price, 50D Z Score

Chart 7. BTC vs other Digital Assets, 1 month % change