7 telling numbers from crypto’s big rally

#Web3Weekly: Oct. 22–28, 2023

Photo by Nicholas Cappello via Unsplash

The token market racked up a second straight week of big gains, raising traders’ confidence that crypto winter is definitively over.

A few key numbers that illustrate the rally’s winners and losers so far:

• $220 billion: The two-week increase in the global token market’s valuation. In percentage terms, valuation has risen 21% to $1.27 trillion total. However, the market is still 58% off its all-time high set in November 2021, according to CoinMarketCap data.
• 53%: Bitcoin’s current share of the global crypto market. That so-called “bitcoin dominance” is now at a 30-month high, as the token has benefited from heavy speculation that U.S. approval of an exchange-traded bitcoin fund is imminent. There is also one less-pleasant factor at work that I think we should cover…
• 3,445: Number of tokens that have either been de-listed by exchanges this year or appear imminently at risk for such. That’s a new record going back to 2016, according to Bloomberg News. Many of the de-listed coins were no doubt subject to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s ongoing crackdown on the industry this year. It’s also possible exchanges preemptively removed a few to avoid potential problems down the line. The net effect is that the market’s long tail of smaller token projects is thinning out. Effectively, that also helps to boost the market share of bitcoin, ether, and other mega-caps.
• 6%: Two-week decline in the Nasdaq Composite Index, which tracks many U.S.-listed tech stocks. In other words, crypto and mainstream tech investing have diverged sharply the last two weeks, which is unusual. If tech stocks stay in the doldrums awhile longer, and if a U.S. bitcoin ETF is approved as expected, we could be looking at a permanent change in tech’s “hierarchy of power,” to borrow a favorite phrase from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
• $280 billion: Market value shed last week by Big Tech’s “Magnificent Seven” companies (Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Tesla, Netflix, Microsoft, and Nvidia) following a round of mostly disappointing earnings reports.
• 7%: Quarterly decline in market valuation of tokens that use a proof-of-stake algorithm (PoS) to verify on-chain transactions. That’s bad news for anyone concerned about crypto’s power usage as PoS requires a fraction of the energy consumption of proof-of-work (PoW) networks like Bitcoin. The big difference is that PoS relies on more collaboration among network nodes, whereas PoW makes them more competitive.
• #93: Current ranking of Luna Terra Classic (LUNC) in CoinMarketCap’s listing of tokens by global valuation. LUNC recently completed a surprising return to the top 100 after falling almost to zero in May 2022 when its sister token, the UST stablecoin, lost its peg to the U.S. Dollar. The debacle wiped out $45 billion in market value and led to fraud charges against Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon. However, an open source community has since been maintaining the LUNC token, implementing tighter controls on supply of the token, and making other changes that have quietly helped it stage a comeback, according to The Merkle.

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