First Mover Asia: Influencer Logan Paul’s ‘Bumblebee’ NFT Is Worth More Than $10; Bitcoin Dips Late but Remains Over $19K

Good morning. Here’s what’s happening:

Prices: Bitcoin’s late dip doesn’t shake it from its $19K perch.

Insights: What is Logan Paul’s “Bumblebee” NFT worth? Probably more than some observers thought.

Catch the latest episodes of CoinDesk TV for insightful interviews with crypto industry leaders and analysis. And sign up for First Mover,our daily newsletter putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context.

Bitcoin’s Late Dip Doesn’t Shake It From Its $19K Perch

by James Rubin

Bitcoin continued its recent sedentary lifestyle on Monday, and the trend seems likely to continue, at least until the next inflation report later this week.

The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization spent much of the day trading sideways before a late dip took it down roughly 2% over the past 24 hours and recently trading at $19,050. BTC has held steady between $19,000 and $19,500 for much of the past four days as investors wait for convincing evidence that inflation is slowing meaningfully – or not.

This Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) is widely expected to show a slight decrease from last month’s 8.3 reading, hardly enough to sway current U.S. central bank, monetary hawkishness and allay fears of a harsh recession. Both events would hurt riskier assets, including crypto.

“I suspect that inflation will remain quite high,” Octavio Marenzi, CEO and founder of management consultancy Opimas, told CoinDesk TV’s First Mover program.

He added: “That is going to tie the Fed’s hands. They are going to have to carry on increasing interest rates, which is going to weigh down crypto markets. So on Thursday, we’re not going to see much good news for crypto markets.”

Ether was recently trading just under $1,300, a more than 3% drop from Sunday, same time. Other major altcoins were solidly in the red after a late afternoon dip with CHZ and ETC recently off more than 13% and 10%, respectively, and SUSHI and the popular meme coins DOGE and SHIB both down over 8%. The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), a broad-based market index that measures the performance of a basket of cryptocurrencies, was recently down about 0.1%.

Stocks

Equity markets continued their now, four-day streak of woe with the tech-focused Nasdaq declining 1% and the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropping a few fractions of a percentage point. The Nasdaq, which plunged into bear market territory months ago, meaning it fell at least 20% from its previous high, reached a 15-month low, according to Dow Jones Market data.

Treasury yields, which have followed an inverse course to cryptos, rose. Brent crude oil, a measure of energy markets, was recently trading at about $96 per barrel, roughly flat, despite the latest rumblings from Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine – a Russian missile barrage on Kyiv and other major cities. The conflict continues to figure heavily in global, macroeconomic uncertainty. Concerns about Chinese consumer spending and U.S. cuts in semiconductor exports to the country offered additional, unsettling news Monday.

Meanwhile, crypto news was mixed. As CoinDesk reported, a record number of Brazilian companies purchased crypto in August. But in an interview with CNBC Monday, legendary hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones retreated from his previous bitcoin bullishness. Jones said that he had “a minor allocation to bitcoin” little more than two years after saying he had committed 1% to 2% of his multi-billion portfolio to the digital asset.

Jones compared troubling inflation to “toothpaste.”

“Once you get it out of the tube, it’s hard to get it back in.” The Fed, he said, “is furiously trying to wash that taste out of [its] mouth … If we go into recession, that has really negative consequences for a variety of assets.”

What Is Logan Paul’s ‘Bumblebee NFT’ Really Worth?

By Sam Reynolds

NFTs aren’t exactly the blue-chip investment their supporters hoped them to be.

But did YouTube star Logan Paul really watch his $623,000 investment in a bumblebee-styled non-fungible token called K4M-1 #03 evaporate to $10 as claimed?

Paul certainly lost a lot of money, but not nearly as much as it seemed.

Related: First Mover Asia: DappRadar’s Complicated Valuation Model and the Difficulties of Assessing NFTs

According to DappRadar, Paul’s NFT is worth around $7,272, or 5.51 ether (ETH). The valuation underscores the subjective nature of NFT pricing, even in the current down market.

DappRadar’s NFT estimates can be controversial. NFT Twitter got angry about its valuation of Three Arrows Capital’s Starry Night wallet. But there’s not really a universal way to value NFTs, and in the end DappRadar’s valuation turned out to be higher than Nansen’s.

“Our algorithm calculates what is the price of an NFT, which is consistent with the historical sales data. It is not precisely predicting, but finding a price that makes sense for the current market conditions. This methodology allows the investor to evaluate how good the trade price is, while also assessing the importance of the sale within the collection’s market,” a DappRadar spokesperson told CoinDesk earlier via email.

Overall, DappRadar puts Paul’s NFT collection at just under $1 million.

Related: First Mover Asia: There’s No Universally Accepted Way to Value Three Arrows’ NFTs

In December 2021, Paul tweeted that he had spent $2.645 million assembling his NFT collection. Now, it’s worth about 37% of what he paid for it. While most of the NFTs in the collection have had double-digit losses, there are also some double-digit gains.

Nansen puts the wallet’s value at 394 ETH, or approximately $515,000.

Either way, Paul seems to be a shrewder NFT investor than Three Arrows Capital, which saw its Starry Night portfolio fall to 0.04% of what was paid for it.

2022 DC FinTech Week (Washington, D.C.)

9 p.m. HKT/SGT (1 p.m. UTC) 2022 IMF/WBG Annual Meetings: World Economic Outlook

10:15 p.m. (2:15 p.m. UTC) IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report

7 p.m. HKT/SGT (11 a.m. UTC) Law Commission for England and Wales Digital Assets Consultation Roundtable: Collateral

In case you missed it, here is the most recent episode of “First Mover” on CoinDesk TV:

Bitcoin Under Pressure as Markets Await New Inflation Report; Binance Exec on $100M Hack

Crypto markets started the week down as market observers await new economic reports this week: September’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), corporate earnings and the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook. Opimas CEO and founder Octavio Marenzi joined the markets discussion. Binance Chief Communications Officer Patrick Hillmann joined “First Mover” with the latest following last week’s $100M exploit. First Mover previews CoinDesk’s I.D.E.A.S. 2022 conference on the future of crypto and Web3 investments.

Record Number of Brazilian Companies Bought Crypto in August: According to the South American country’s tax authority, 12,053 companies reported purchasing crypto during the month.

Lawmakers Overwhelmingly Back EU’s MiCA Crypto Law in Committee Vote: The landslide support paves the way for the landmark crypto licensing regulation to take effect in 2024.

Ethereum Scaling Tool Polygon Launches its zkEVM Public Testnet: The company continues to be targeting the mainnet going live sometime in early 2023.

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Surges to All-Time High, Putting Additional Squeeze on Miners: The difficulty gauge rose 13.55% from the last adjustment roughly two weeks ago, the largest-such move since May 2021.

Back to Square One? Circle’s USDC Market Cap Drops Below $50B for First Time Since Terra’s Collapse: USDC’s utility has taken a hit in the wake of Binance’s decision to consolidate order books and Circle’s decision to freeze addresses associated with Tornado Cash.