ETH charges toward record

Ethereum this morning merrily set off on a jaunt to within a hair's breadth of its all-time high of just above $1,400. As of 8:30 a.m. (EST), ETH was $1,390, having risen 12% compared to the same time yesterday. That all-time high occurred back in late 2017/early 2018, depending on your statistical informational preferences, although, perhaps even later today, an exclamatory breach of $1,500 would put any past data-point disconnects to rest.

Since the start of last year, ETH has surged by 350%. It is up 100% over the past one month. Why?

Maybe it was the 2.0 upgrade in the last quarter of 2020, or the flow of funds into the crypto space at large, or some kind of blanket affection owing to ETH being viewed as Bitcoin's littler brother.

XRP, meanwhile, snuck back to the $0.30 level.

And Zilliqa is up 20% over the past one week, and on the verge of being eight cents. If ZIL can get over that hurdle, it could be poised to belt itself into one of those bullet-shaped cars chasing land-speed feats at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

ZIL reached its high ($0.23) in May 2018.

UniSwap fell 2% over the past 24 hours as of 8 a.m. Tuesday morning (EST) after spending the first few weeks of 2021 on a skyride.

UNI token prices have jumped 82% in January, hitting a new all-time high of $10.15 yesterday before slightly stumbling.

At last check, UNI was $9.15.

And to think that when DeFi protocol SushiSwap forked from UniSwap this past August it looked like the former's brazen clone and leech strategy would leave the latter in a zombie state – but that hasn't happened.

Although it's true that SushiSwap made off with a chunk of UniSwap's liquity, SUSHI now appears to be standing on its own (BeInCrypto). In terms of total value locked and market cap, SUSHI is still looking up at molten-hot UNI. SUSHI also has been wasabi-like, increasing 80% so far in January and at $7.25 as of Tuesday a.m. (EST) it was close to being a splashed-droplet of soy sauce away from its all-time high.

Bill Gates' venture capital fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, has raised $1 billion for a second round of investments after backing 45 startups with its first $1 billion, suggesting that a clean-tech boom is official, with Democrats set to take power (Bloomberg).

BEV’s first foray focused on renewable electricity, bio-fuels and electric vehicles. Round two, coming with a two-decade time horizon, will pursue a wider set of technologies, including agriculture, buildings, transportation and manufacturing. Start-up companies seeking infusions need to show a scale-up path that would cut at least 500 million metric tons of annual CO₂ emissions or about 1% of global emissions.

South Korea's Dunamu, which operates Upbit, has created a “fear and greed” index for crypto, using market volatility data alongside data pertaining to trading prices and transaction volumes. The tool will attempt to flag when markets appear to be behaving overly emotionally, reflecting five levels of sentiment, from extreme greed to extreme fear (CoinDesk).

One of the best-known metrics to gauge fear is the VIX which is sometimes called the "fear index" as it tracks the market prices of out-of-the-money (OTM) puts and calls written on the S&P 500; and while the VIX could easily get slapped now and again with a "greed index" label, as reflected by the activity in OTM calls, it never does.

If a trader checks the excessive emotion barometer, or “EEB” (our just-bestowed nickname), and sees it flashing "extreme fear", that could be taken to mean "put on your big boy pants and buy," because it's a reading suggesting the market is being over-cautious.

Measurements of "extreme greed" are taken as indications that the market is way too optimistic.