Crypto gets battered

For the second day in a row, Bitcoin went lower, with the $20,000 mark sitting out there like a Minotaur with a meat cleaver.

Dropping below $19,000, seemingly bent on the high $17,000s, BTC charted a labyrinthine overnight course for the low eighteens where it sits, pensively regaining its composure.

“The overly confident market has been dampened,” Arcane Research said Tuesday.

As of Wednesday morning 8 a.m. (EST), BTC was about $18,300, down 2.5% compared to yesterday.

As of 9 a.m., though, BTC was back on the rise.

Still up massively on a rocking 30-day period rolling into today, XRP has surrendered 10% over the past week, down to $0.55, as kid-at-Christmas excitement over the Flare Network airdrop abates, a once magical snow turned to slush.

Not that Ripple community heads aren't filled with sugar plum visions of Flare's potential use as XRP's smart contract platform. Still, the old adage, the one regarding "buy the news, sell the event," apparently has held.

Anticipation is building. A slew of exchanges, including Coinbase, said they'll support the airdrop i.e. dole out Spark tokens 1:1 to customers based on their XRP holdings. "Snapshot" day is Dec. 12.

The Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund has arrived and will trade in OTC marketplaces. BITW will seek to replicate the return of a market-cap-weighted index of the ten largest cryptos.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before such a vehicle got launched, as there’s a natural inclination among human beings to want to measure things in neat collections of ten; although someone might launch an index of the largest eleven cryptos, with the add-on winning entry via a relegation tournament among those digital assets with a market cap of at least $3 billion.

S&P Dow Jones Indices recently said it is preparing to launch a suite of crypto indexes, and this has our wheels turning about a 499-coin basket.

Grayscale’s Digital Large Cap Fund holds a basket of five crypto assets, albeit without tracking an index.

A rotating, artisan-crafted basket of a baker’s dozen of organic biggies (sans stablecoins) could be an idea worth charging a 1.0% fee, which would be cheaper than Grayscale’s (3% management fee) and BITW's (2.5%).

The brain crackles with index permutations and fee structures but also ways in which to think about the Big Ten where BTC is not even the top performer. Actually, it's only the sixth best. As Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan said, “Crypto is about more than bitcoin.”