Zayden is currently at start-up incubator, WhatNot Studios in Bangkok, Thailand. Originally from Singapore, his inquisitive nature brought him overseas to gain experience and learn new things.
It is that same nature that got him into DeFi and Web3, often spending hours a day reading up on it. Self-proclaimed Web3 enthusiast, and investor in cryptocurrency.
Guest Author: Zayden Qu
This week, we saw Bitcoin retrace significantly by around 10% from all time highs to a price of around $61,000. Since then, it has recovered significantly to its current price of $67,000. Is this just normal volatility or does it signify a major slowdown in Cryptocurrency?
Volatility is perfectly normal
It is worth pointing out that the price of Bitcoin was practically only going up from $45,000 until it’s all time high of $73,000. Nothing ever goes up forever, thus this is very likely a healthy retracement in the market.
My Take: This retracement was not random, it occurred around the period where volatility was to be expected. Some reasons will be explained below.
Interest rates
The US Federal Reserve just had a scheduled meeting this week on interest rates. Typically, we see volatility in the market leading up to it as there is uncertainty and people try to speculate and frontrun the market. Thus, it is not surprising that we saw a huge sell off for Bitcoin prior to the announcement of interest rate changes.
At the end of the day, the US Federal Reserve decided to keep interest rates unchanged. Bitcoin’s price almost immediately went up 8% after the announcement.
My Take: Following the announcement, we should notice slightly less volatility as there is more certainty in the market.
ETF Flows
(Credits to HODL15Capital on X: https://twitter.com/HODL15Capital)
At the time of writing, the ETFs had just recorded its third day in a role with negative flows. The first 2 days of negative flows coincided with a drop in Bitcoin price. The drop in price made sense, as the recent huge increase in Bitcoin’s price was largely sustained by the huge ETF inflows.
Surprisingly the third day of negative flows was followed by an increase in Bitcoin price. This was likely because the news of interest rates being unchanged led to many investors buying back into Bitcoin.
My Take: My expectations for the ETFs remain the same. It is a pipeline that is set to bring in more and more money into Bitcoin and Crypto. The flows have slowed down in the past 3 days due to uncertainty in the market and investors were being more cautious. I am expecting for the ETF flows to slowly increase over the next weeks.
Ethereum under investigation
News was spread that the Ethereum Foundation is under investigation by an unnamed state authority, with the focus and scope of the inquiry remaining undisclosed. Not a huge deal is known about the specifics, however, is it very common for Crypto foundations to receive request for information by federal and state regulators.
My Take: This news feels like an attempt to manipulate the market. It came at a weirdly convenient time for BlackRock who just launched their new tokenized asset fund – USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund on Ethereum. I doubt there is much to worry about regarding this news.
Token Spotlight
Netmind.ai ($NMT) – NetMind AI is an AI solutions company that comprises 4 domains: NetMind Power, NetMind Chat, NetMind Avagi & Netmind Life.
The focus for today will be on NetMind Power, which is also their domain that focuses on Web3. With the advent of AI technology, GPUs and computing power has become a sort of commodity as AI technology demands exceptional computing power. Such computing power is usually expensive and centralized among large Tech companies.
NetMind Power essentially aims to democratize access to computing power for businesses, researchers and software developers by making it affordable and easy to train their AI model. To do so, they provide the platform for large-scale distributed computing using a global network of computing power by utilizing idle GPUs.
Team
Just a quick screening of the founding team of NetMind, you can tell they have a lot of experience in the field of AI. Most of them are researchers with deep technical expertise. Their CTO, Henry Huang, is an ex-Microstrategy, ex-Microsoft and ex-Coinbase developer. They have also published over a dozen research papers on AI and machine learning.
$NMT
Their native token $NMT is primarily used for rewards, governance, transactions, and staking. Customers of NetMind will pay for the services via the $NMT token and individuals who volunteer their GPU will be rewarded with $NMT tokens.
Current price: ~$7.50
Price target: ~$70 to $80
Disclaimer: Not financial advice and I am personally invested in $NMT
