The cryptocurrency market has posted a bullish performance, marking a good beginning this week. The market started to rally above the trillion-dollar mark towards the end of last month as the appeal for riskier assets increased amid the current bearish macroeconomic environment.
On Monday 02:46 am EAT (East African Time), the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies was $1.08 trillion, down 2.63% in the last 24 hours. The overall volume of the crypto market during the last 24 hours reached $64.26 billion, a 41.82% fall, according to data platform Coingeko.
With the new month remaining bullish for the landscape, here is a look at five cryptocurrencies investors should watch out for this week.
Bitcoin has maintained its good performance and was trading higher at $21,251.06 after losing 0.31% of its value over the past 24 hours. The flagship cryptocurrency hit a seven-week high on Saturday after a better-than-expected U.S. jobs report in October showed that the labour market remains surprisingly strong, even as the Feds pushes to cool down the economy.
The Altcoin market also continues to see similar bullishness. Ethereum’s price was down 3.26% compared to the prior week at $1,576, but the crypto’s performance has remained among the best this week. The token took advantage of the crypto market’s late push in October, surging all the way to $1,655 and trying to move closer to its $1,700 target. In a span of two weeks, ETH managed to rise by 30%, but the impacts of the Federal Reserve’s 75 basis point interest rate hike caught up with it and made it drop all the way down to $1,500 once again.
Meanwhile, Dogecoin was trading at $0.1243, down 3.17% in the last 24 hours but has gained 96.41% in the last 30 days. Elon Musk’s recently completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter last week triggered the crypto’s bullishness.
Shiba Inu (SHIB) has also been doing well, with a 25% increase in the past two weeks, though showing consolidation in the past 24 hours, indicating a 2% decline. A lot of the growth that the two meme coins posted is because of the attention it got from Elon Musk buying Twitter. The wild thought that Dogecoin and Shiba Inu could be used on Twitter created massive buying pressure.
Arweave (AR) is also among the most profitable since last week and continues to do well currently. Its current uptake is associated with Meta as the tech firm is undertaking a massive Instagram revolution, requiring third-party crypto projects’ involvement in infrastructure solutions.
The digital currency ecosystem is currently experiencing a massive valuation plunge as the cryptocurrency industry is still trying to find a balance after the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the inflation data in September.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) came in at 8.2% for the past month showing the ongoing interest rate hikes, the last of which was 75 basis points, are not yielding good fruits at this time. The resultant reaction plunged the traditional market into chaos, and the resultant ripple effect was experienced in the broader digital currency ecosystem.
The combined crypto market cap was down 0.31% at the time of writing and pegged at $921 billion. With the seemingly bearish trend, here is a brief rundown of altcoins entering the new week with impressive weekly performance.
Quant (QNT)
For the second time in a row, Quant is trending as one of the top performers in the ecosystem with a 22.46% to $192.68 per data from CoinMarketCap. The coin has been on a massive uptrend for the better part of this month, and investors may need to watch well before leaping into acquiring this token moving forward. This is because a mild correction may be underway in the short term.
Huobi Token (HT)
Huobi Token is the native coin of the Huobi Global exchange. The coin has printed as much as 72.16% to $7.07. The Huobi token is flying on a massively bullish trend with the news of the exchange being acquired by About Capital Management, with reports of links to Tron’s founder, Justin Sun.
With the change of ownership, investors believe the exchange may be well-capitalized and positioned to finance its current global growth.
Arweave (AR)
Arweave is a decentralized storage network that seeks to offer a platform for the indefinite data storage. Since its inception, the protocol’s adoption has grown remarkably; thus far, this adoption has been reflected in its token price growth.
Data archiving protocol KYVE has announced a Series B funding raise of $2.875M instigated by institutional capital firms Permanent Ventures and Hypersphere Ventures in which a vast collection of crypto projects and individual angel investors including, but not limited to, Coinbase Ventures, Volt Capital, Justin Kan and Robin Chan, participated.
KYVE has expressed the ambition of becoming the leading project in the Web 3.0 sphere with an inherent focus on data collection and digital calculation.
The newly-established project, currently operating in testnet phase, utilizes blockchain indefinite storage service Arweave to provide a vast number of Web 3.0 use cases, including cross-chain interoperability via bridges, data storage and oracles.
This news follows the project’s debut funding round six months earlier in which a plethora of reputable industry names participated via their foundations: Solana, Avalanche and NEAR, among others.
In early October, KYVE collaborated with Polkadot-based Moonbeam Network to enable the latter’s developers to benefit from KYVE’s data services. The partnership also opened up the possibility of greater scalability measures and high liquidity capacity via Ethereum Virtual Machine contracts.
Related: Arweave secures $5 million in funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz
Fabian Riewe, co-founder of KYVE, spoke highly of the progress the firm has made, as well as their future ambitions:
“The last six months have been an incredible journey for KYVE. We have improved the product, added new integrations, scaled our team with great talents and grown the community tremendously. Our mission is more ambitious than ever: We want to become the default tool for data collection and computation for all Web3 projects.”
According to a report by Coinshares, as of March 20, the weekly inflows into institutional crypto products has declined by about 59% when compared to the previous week. This suggests that institutional investors are taking a cautious approach after the recent bull run.
However, that does not mean the institutional investors are dumping their holdings just yet. The report highlights that the total crypto investment products assets under management hit a new high at $57 billion.
Crypto market data daily view. Source:Coin360
While the crypto bull market is still intact, a report by Glassnode suggests it could be entering into its later stages. The on-chain analytics provider believes that Bitcoin’s (BTC) “wealth transfer” from long-term investors to new entrants is in process.
Glassnode is not the only one to sound a warning on the maturing bull market. Chinese mining pool BTC .TOP CEO Jiang Zhuoer is projecting the bull market to end by September of this year.
However, till then, several tokens could provide attractive returns to investors. Let’s study the fundamentals and the charts of three such tokens.
DENT/USD
Dent wireless (DENT) calls itself the first digital and mobile operator. It aims to help users take control of their mobile data and allow them to share the unused data with other users instead of allowing it to lapse. According to a company YouTube video, the firm claims to have more than 26 million users in over 80 countries providing data for eSIM capable devices.
On Jan. 14, the firm had teased a launch of a reseller portal with Developer API sometime in Q1 2021. In another post on their website the company highlighted the expected milestones for this year, which included a new mobile app, a reward system and optimized network connectivity for the Tokyo Summer Olympics. However, regular updates regarding these seem to be missing on their official Twitter account.
Another rumor making the rounds in the Reddit community is the possible partnership between DENT and Elon Musk’s Starlink, but again there is no official confirmation of any deal.
During bull markets, several tokens that have been left for the dead tend to come out of their graves as market speculators pump them. However, when the bull market hits a hurdle, investors who only buy the rumor or invest in hope of making huge profits are left with worthless coins in their hands.
Therefore, investors should do thorough research, buy into projects that are transparent and stay clear of the ones that only give hope year after year without sharing any details with their community.
DENT has been in a strong bull run in the past few days. It has risen from an intraday low at $0.0048 on March 19 to an intraday high at $0.0149 on March 24, a gain of 206% in five days. The rally has pushed the relative strength index (RSI) above 94, suggesting the token is hugely overbought in the short term.
DENT/USDT daily chart. Source:TradingView
The long wick on today’s candlestick suggests traders are booking profits at higher levels. This suggests the DENT/USD pair could be ripe for a correction or consolidation. The first support on the downside is the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement level at $0.0104.
If the bulls can defend this level, it will suggest that traders are not rushing to the exit and that will increase the possibility of a resumption of the up-move. If the bulls can push the price above $0.0149, the rally could extend to $0.0223.
Conversely, if the bears sink the price below $0.0104, the selling could intensify and the pair may drop to the 50% retracement level at $0.0089 and then to the 61.8% retracement level at $0.0075. Generally, these deep falls delay the start of the next leg of the uptrend.
AR/USD
Data storage is a lucrative business, hence most of the top companies such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Microsoft are involved in it. However, with centralized companies, the users have to blindly accept their policies, hope the company will not go out of business and that they also use proper security measures to safeguard the data.
This is where Arweave (AR) enters as it stores data in a decentralized manner and asserts that it will be stored forever. This gains importance during the current nonfungible token mania where buyers are paying top dollars to buy NFTs of their choice. If the NFT is lost due to any reason, it will incur a huge loss to the buyer. Therefore, Arweave’s claim of permanent storage may look attractive for the NFT owners.
Arweave’s permaweb has more than one million pieces of data stored in it permanently and about 200 apps have been built on it. To boost growth further, on March 5 the protocol announced that it had secured additional funding of $8.4 million from Andreessen Horowitz, USV and Coinbase ventures.
The Arweave Network upgraded to a new type of consensus mechanism on Feb. 24 called Succinct Proofs of Random Access, which the company claims is more decentralized and less energy-consuming than classic PoW networks.
AR has risen from an intraday low at $8.60 on March 1 to an intraday high at $25.06, a 191% rally in 22 days. However, the bulls are struggling to sustain the price above $22 as seen from the long wicks on the candlesticks in the past few days.
AR/USDT daily chart. Source:TradingView
On the downside, the bulls are attempting to keep the price above $19.50. But if this support cracks, the AR/USD pair could drop to the 20-day exponential moving average ($16.62). This is an important support to watch out for because the price has not stayed below the 20-day EMA for more than two consecutive days since Jan. 1.
If the pair again rebounds off the 20-day EMA, it will suggest that the sentiment remains bullish and traders are accumulating on dips. If the bulls can push the price above $25.06, the pair could rally to $30.
Contrary to this assumption, if the bears sink and sustain the price below the 20-day EMA, then the pair could extend its fall to the 50-day simple moving average ($11.21). Such a move could signal a possible change in trend.
MLN/USD
DeFi has been at the forefront of crypto adoption in the past few months and several protocols have sprung up that claim to offer investors the best features. For a trader with limited experience, it is difficult to track the number of protocols and use them based on their advantages.
Enzyme (MLN) offers users access to several assets for managing their portfolios. Fund managers can build Enzyme vaults to attract investors and charge fees for managing those assets. The protocol also allows users to build trading bots.
The Enzyme team announced plans to add new features in its next release named Sulu. The new upgrade is expected to facilitate borrowing, transferability and several other features.
As part of the upgrade, Enzyme announced on March 18 that it will support deposits on AAVE, enabling access to attractive yields for the users. Enzyme has also initiated a gas subsidy program for the entire month of March to reduce the burden caused due to Ethereum network’s high fees.
MLN surged from an intraday low at $47.30 on March 15 to an intraday high at $111.11 on March 23, a 134% rally in about 12 days. The sharp up-move on March 22 broke above the stiff overhead resistance at $83.
MLN/USD daily chart. Source:TradingView
However, the bulls are struggling to sustain the higher levels, as seen from the long wick on today’s candlestick. This shows that traders are booking profits on rallies. The MLN/USD pair will now retest the breakout level at $83.
If the bulls can flip this level to support, it will act as a new floor. The buyers will then try to push the price above $111.11. If they succeed, the pair could rally to $128.67.
Alternatively, if the bears sink and sustain the price below $83, it will suggest that the markets have rejected the higher levels. That could trap several aggressive bulls who may rush to the exit and extend the decline to $65.44.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.