Crypto Market Update for 3 July 2020: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Chainlink

This article provides an overview of how Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Cardano (ADA), and Chainlink (LINK) have been doing over the past 24-hour period, covers recent news that might have affected their prices (or might do so in the future), and looks at interesting observations about these digital assets from prominent members of the crypto community.

To give you a rough idea of how well the crypto markets are doing today, 13 out of the top 20 cryptoassets (by market cap) are currently in the red (i.e. down against USD).

All market data used in this article was taken from CryptoCompare around 09:20 UTC on 3 July 2020.

Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is currently trading at $9,112, down 1.13% (against USD) in the past 24-hour period:

This means that Bitcoin has been trading below the psychologically important $10,000 level since June 2.

U.S. stock prices, which have steadily been going up since March 23 despite the worsening COVID-19 crisis in the U.S., were finally given a good reason to go up yesterday: much better than expected non-farm payrolls.

According to a report by CNBC published yesterday, according to the U.S. Labor Department, “nonfarm payrolls soared by 4.8 million in June and the unemployment rate fell to 11.1% as the U.S. continued its reopening from the coronavirus pandemic.” 

This helped all three major U.S. stock indices — the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq — to close higher yesterday with gains of 0.36%, 0.45%, and 0.52% respectively.

Bitcoin, however, did not get a boost from this news, even though for quite a few periods since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic it has shown some positive correlation to the S&P 500.

Although Bitcoin had started Thursday (00:00 BST on July 2) at $9,238, it ended up trading around $9,097. Despite the lackluster recent price action, it is worth keeping in mind that Bitcoin is still up 26.85% so far in 2020.

This was crypto analyst Josh Rager’s explanation for yesterday’s Bitcoin price drop:

Personally I think this short term drop in Bitcoin price has more to do with liquidation of over- leveraged longs than it does the stock market

— Josh Rager 📈 (@Josh_Rager) July 2, 2020

Another plausible reason is concern in the crypto community over a potential upcoming crackdown on OTC trading of crypto in China:

Reportedly, Zhao Dong, the head of over-the-counter (OTC) and #crypto lending platform RenrenBit has been taken into a police station in the city of Hangzhou, located in the Zhejiang province. #Chinahttps://t.co/ZF9PihSE9Q

— 8BTCnews (@btcinchina) July 3, 2020

There was some good news however on Wednesday (July 1) from on-chain market intelligence startup Glassnode regarding one of the Bitcoin network’s fundamentals, number of new addresses, which reached a new 2-year high on this day:

📈 #Bitcoin $BTC Number of New Addresses (1d MA) just reached a 2-year high of 22,390.500

Previous 2-year high of 22,387.083 was observed on 26 June 2019

View metric:https://t.co/r5CnIIGLxw pic.twitter.com/Nj623ACkSQ

— glassnode alerts (@glassnodealerts) July 1, 2020

Another bit of good news that came out yesterday was the announcement by crypto payments processor BitPay, reported by Coindesk, that later this year “support for SegWit will be a default for all Bitcoin wallets.”

Famous goldbug Peter Schiff who does not allow any opportunity to criticize Bitcoin to go to waste took to Twitter once again yesterday to point out that Bitcoin has performed poorly compared to gold between June 2019 and now, conveniently ignoring the fact that over longer time frames, since its existence, Bitcoin has done much better than gold against USD: 

Since hitting its high in June of last year the price of #Bitcoin has fallen by 33%. During that same time period the price of #gold has risen by 27%. So, priced in gold Bitcoin has fallen by 53%. The long-term trend has clearly changed in gold’s favor. HODLers remain delusional.

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) July 2, 2020

Ethereum (ETH)

Ether is currently trading at $227.52, down 0.73% (against USD) in the past 24-hour period:

Although the Ether price is lower today than the 2020 high of $285.79 that it reached on Feb 14, since the start of the year, ETH is up 76.49% against USD.

Although there is disappointment among some ETH HODLers that Ethereum, which powers almost all of the hottest projects in decentralized finance (DeFi), was not able to benefit from the huge amount of excitement around DeFi projects such as Aave (LEND), Compound (COMP), and Synthetix (SNX), true believers in Ethereum insist that as the Ethereum ecosystem continues to grow, sooner or later, investors’ appetite for ETH will significantly increase, which should lead to much higher prices.

Earlier today, Paul Salisbuy, Co-Founder of New Zealand based startup Blockchain Labs, used the infographic shown below to talk about the ‘DeFi Vortex” that he believes (along with the team at digital asset investment firm Techemy Capital) is “accelerating the velocity of Ethereum”:

This is how we @TechemyCapital view the cryptoeconomic drivers and feeds into #DeFi as an Open Finance ecosystem.

1/ A thread on the #DeFiVortex that is accelerating the velocity of #Ethereum 👇 pic.twitter.com/9T6AfdgYXY

— Paul Salisbury (@paulsalis) July 3, 2020

Cardano (ADA)

ADA is currently trading at $0.09496, down 0.42% (against USD) in the past 24-hour period:

Since “Black Thursday” (March 12), when the ADA price reached a 2020 low of $0.02319, it has gone up almost 310%, and the reason for this highly impressive performance has to be how well the work on Cardano’s Shelley update has gone during the past few months. 

On Tuesday (June 30), IOHK announced that the Shelley codebase had been released on Cardano’s mainnet (but note that the actual hard fork is not expected until around July 29):

OK so… today’s mission (s) accomplished. Shelley-complete node 1.14.2 now successfully deployed to the Cardano mainnet. Next stop… the #Cardano2020 #ShelleyEdition virtual summit. (P.S. Thanks to all our amazing #Cardano community pioneers who have brought us here @Cardano

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) June 30, 2020

 A day later, the Cardano Foundation launched a new website:

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new #Cardano website! This is one of the deliverables of Project Renovare, the brand reappraisal exercise led by the Cardano Foundation, ahead of the smart contracts rollout later this year. https://t.co/8q4uYZAnoB#CardanoCommunity pic.twitter.com/kBWpbSc7iQ

— Cardano Foundation (@CardanoStiftung) July 1, 2020

And yesterday, on the first day of the two-day “Cardano Virtual Summit 2020: Shelley Edition”, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson announced the launch of a $20million technology ecosystem fund:

@IOHK_Charles announced the launch of a $20million technology ecosystem fund – in partnership with Wave Financial Group – the first venture fund to support the adoption of @InputOutputHK blockchain platforms, including Cardano. #cardano2020

— IOHK Media (@IOHKMedia) July 2, 2020

According to a press release shared with CryptoGlobe, here were a couple of the other announcements made by IOHK at this virtual summit:

• the launch of decentralized identity system “Atala PRISM”
• Project Catalyst (aka “Voltaire”), which is a new governance model that will give ADA holders “the power to vote on Cardano’s future development”

Chainlink (LINK)

LINK is currently trading at $4.877, up 2.18% (against USD) in the past 24-hour period:

This means that LINK is currently trading at (or very close to) its all-time high. For the year-to-date (YTD) period, LINK’s return on investment (ROI) against USD is +177.10%.

As usual, the reason for LINK’s continued excellent performance in the market is the ever-growing list of partnerships (and other bullish news) announced by the Chainlink team.

Here are three of the latest of these partnerships:

NFT-focused @PolyientGames is integrating #ChainlinkVRF to assure transparency for the minting and random distribution of PGFK rewards—a membership #NFT that provides lifetime rewards & perks to holders within the Polyient Games Ecosystem. https://t.co/6LuiTyvuYV

— Chainlink – Official Channel (@chainlink) June 29, 2020

.@Bullionix_io, a dApp for minting 3D gold-staked NFTs, has successfully integrated Chainlink’s XAU/USD Price Reference Feed into their system. This provides Bullionix with a highly reliable & manipulation resistant gold price for tracking the gold market. https://t.co/jXwBD0Z58x

— Chainlink – Official Channel (@chainlink) July 1, 2020

One of the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges @HuobiGlobal is making its exchange data available to smart contracts through the #Chainlink Network. Additionally, @HuobiWallet is currently running a live Chainlink Node.

— Chainlink – Official Channel (@chainlink) July 3, 2020

Featured Image by “WorldSpectrum” via Pixabay.com