This week in coins. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
The crypto market was having an uneventful week amid this late summer turmoil, until Friday, when the world’s leading cryptocurrency fell 4% in the space of 24 hours.
The fall in prices was triggered by statements by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell, in Jackson Hole, according to which the Fed will continue to raise interest rates as long as necessary to fight inflation. The comments also sent stocks tumbling, not just crypto.
To kick off the weekend, all of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap are showing a net loss over the past seven days, except for Cardano (ADA), which is forecasting a hard fork next month. Bitcoin (BTC) is down 5% in the past week, Ethereum (ETH) is down 6%, Solana (SOL) is down 10%, Dogecoin (DOGE) is down 8%.
Ethereum supporters still have high hopes that the upcoming merger event will boost ETH. But this week, the number of weekly ETH deposits sent to participate in Beacon Chain hit an all-time low, according to data from Dune Analytics.
The Beacon chain is an Ethereum ledger that coordinates the Ethereum network of applicators. It has been running in parallel with Ethereum’s mainnet since its launch in 2020. When Ethereum completes its next major network overhaul next month, called the “merger,” the mainnet will merge with the chain Beacon to do a full participation test. (PoS) Ethereum network.
Once Ethereum moves to a proof-of-stake consensus protocol, the network promises to be faster, cheaper, more scalable and 99% greener.
The biggest crypto news of the week
The general inertia in the markets this week has been reflected in the news cycle; it was a pretty slow news week in terms of crypto adoption or regulation.
The Australian Treasury said in a statement on Monday that it has a comprehensive plan to establish a crypto regulatory framework based on market research that it claims will be better than “anywhere else in the world”.
Australia will begin “token mapping” work this year, which it says will “help identify how crypto assets and related services should be regulated.” Once the preliminaries are done, the Treasury says it will have “time for changes to legislation and regulations”. The Australian Treasury also said it will release a public consultation paper on token mapping “soon”.
On Tuesday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong confessed as much CNBC that the company is still feeling the effects of Crypto Winter. Coinbase laid off 18% of its staff earlier this year and will cut costs in order to plan for a bear market that will last 12 to 18 months or more.
“We’re investing a lot in subscription and service revenue today,” Armstrong said, because “I’d like to get to a place where more than 50 percent of our revenue is subscription and service.”
According to Armstrong, 18% of Coinbase’s current revenue comes from subscription and services. Coinbase currently offers Coinbase Cloud, a suite of blockchain product development services, and Coinbase One, a service that offers superior customer support and other benefits.
Meanwhile, US investors waiting for an SEC-approved Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) will have to wait a little longer after the SEC again delayed its decision on VanEck’s Bitcoin ETF application in another period of 45 days. That means the agency has until Oct. 11 to “approve or disapprove, or initiate a proceeding to determine whether to disapprove, the proposed rule change.”
We finally got an update on Ethereum’s merge date, and it’s potentially even sooner than previously expected. According to a Wednesday blog post from the Ethereum Foundation, the network overhaul will now be fully completed between September 10th and September 20th. Ethereum core developers on Twitter have been even more specific: on or around September 15th.
After eight years of waiting, this is truly just around the corner.