First Mover Americas: Bitcoin to Post Sixth Straight September Loss, but LINK and UNI Manage Gains

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Bitcoin (BTC) was trading flat on the day after a choppy week of price movement. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value has traded in a range of $18,500-$20,380 over the week. After a painful week for both equities and government bonds, both markets posted modest gains.

Historically, September has been a bad month for bitcoin, with the crypto showing negative returns in each of the last five years. The string continued in 2022, with bitcoin lower by 2.95% for the month at press time. October, however, has a better historical record, with bitcoin posting gains in seven of the last nine years.

Ethereum (ETH) was also trading flat on Friday at around $1,337 and has lost 13% over the month.

Managing gains in September were the token of decentralized oracle network Chainlink (LINK), which advanced 17%, and Uniswap’s UNI which was up 6%.

“For Chainlink, the narrative that’s driving price performance is the partnership with SWIFT on a cross-chain interoperability protocol,” said Nauman Sheikh, Head of Treasury Management and Derivatives at Wave Financial, in an interview with CoinDesk.

“For UNI, it’s the continued growth in market share and volume along with being regarded as a long-term deep value play,” said Sheikh.

Caution is warranted, though, suggested Sheikh. “Given the macro environment, we can expect these outperforming tokens to quickly succumb to profit-taking, especially if bitcoin and ethereum begin to sell off more aggressively,” he said.

CoinDesk’s Omkar Godbole reported XRP and MKR, (the governance token of the peer-to-peer lending platform Maker), are rallying in an otherwise quiet crypto sector as markets await the release of the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of U.S. inflation: the Core Personal Consumption Expenditure Index (PCE).

In other news, Spain’s largest telecom company Telef?nica invested in local crypto exchange Bit2Me and will begin accepting crypto for payments.

Meanwhile, a study by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision finds the world’s largest banks are exposed to about 9.4 billion euros ($9 billion) of crypto assets.

Sector classifications are provided via the Digital Asset Classification Standard (DACS), developed by CoinDesk Indices to provide a reliable, comprehensive and standardized classification system for digital assets. The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) is a broad-based index designed to measure the market capitalization weighted performance of the digital asset market subject to minimum trading and exchange eligibility requirements.

Bitcoin’s Bullish Seasonality Muddled by Continued Slide in ‘USD Liquidity Index’

By Omkar Godbole

October has been a good month for bitcoin (BTC) and traders may be looking forward to capitalizing on the bullish seasonality, having seen the cryptocurrency hold steady through recent traditional market turmoil.

Bitcoin has put in a positive performance in October in eight out of the past 12 years, with an average return of around 30% according to historical data sourced from charting platform TradingView. In other words, October has generated positive returns 66% of the time.

However, one indicator tracking the U.S. dollar liquidity calls for caution on the part of the bulls.

The so-called USD Liquidity Condition Index has slipped to a 19-month low of $5.7 trillion, according to chart provided by TradingView.

“The Fed net [dollar] liquidity is falling off a cliff, a clear headwind for crypto asset prices,” Lewis Harland, a researcher at Decentral Park Capital, said in a daily market update.

The index assesses the degree of dollar liquidity based on the interaction of three factors – the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, the Treasury General Account (TGA) and the reverse repo balance held at the New York Fed.

The liquidity declines when the Fed’s balance sheet contracts, the TGA and repo balances rise. On the contrary, an expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet and a decline in the TGA and repo balances indicates an uptick in the dollar liquidity.

Read the full story here.

COIN Raises a Bear Flag

By Omkar Godbole