Dizzying rotation into altcoins

Gazing lustily toward the heavens, a crew of popular altcoins hit the launchpad, boldly going where none of them have gone before, at least not in the past few days.

It’s a head-spinning mid-week rotation out of suddenly stalled Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Binance Coin (BNB), the third-largest coin behind BTC and ETH, is leading the way with a 15% price spike to $462 in the past 24 hours.

Going down the line of largest coins, excluding stablecoins, there's Cardano (No. 5). Although ADA has lost 5% over seven days, it is suddenly at least flat (+1%) over 24 hours as of Wednesday at 8 a.m. (EST). At No. 6, XRP is also +1%.

Seventh-largest coin Solana is up 4%; the eighth-largest Polkadot is up 7%.

Looking outside the Big Ten, hefty gainers abound, including Avalanche (No. 15) which has gained 7% in 24 hours. AVAX is still down 14% on the week.

BNB’s rally would seem strangely incongruous considering it is being directly impacted by the ongoing China crypto crackdown but then again Binance just announced a $1 billion fund dedicated to developing the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem (CryptoPotato).

Predictions of a short-term pullback in Bitcoin's price proved prescient enough. As "nearly $58K" quickly devolved into "merely $55K," traders today are left to ponder whether regulatory news out of China could soon get upstaged by some big reveal from U.S. regulators pondering approval for a BTC-based exchange-traded fund. That, in the short-term, could create a euphoric, "floodgates-are-open" moment. However, it seems the emotional highs surrounding BTC's latest rally are rather muted relative to the giant digital asset’s attention-grabbing climb earlier in the year, as measured by BTC Google searches, nearing a one-year low (Cointelegraph).

The redistribution of BTC hashrate out of China and across the world can be considered to be a positive development for the decentralization ethos at the network’s core as well as its security. And, depending on which jurisdictions capture more mining market share, the shift could be positive for the environment.

Since China sent its rigs packing, the U.S., with a 35.4% share, now ranks as the world's largest market for BTC mining, according to new data from Cambridge University (Decrypt).

Germany – seeking in the next three decades to transform its electricity supply to 100% renewable energy – is muscling in on the crypto industry, too. It now has nearly a 5% share of the global hashrate.

In fourth place, sitting right behind the mining superpowers of the U.S., Russia, and Kazakhstan, is Canada with a 10% share.

America's neighbor to the north is embracing renewable energy, particularly hydroelectricity.

In Texas, it’s worth noting, there’s not only a coordinated push to become a crypto hub – but also to be the world’s wind turbine capital. A so-called "red" state synonymous with oil and gas, Texas in recent years has become a clean energy leader, GreenTechMedia said.

By this past weekend, more than 160,000 mistakenly distributed COMP tokens worth $50 million had been returned to the Compound treasury, Robert Leshner, the money-market protocol's founder, said.

Another $40 million worth of Compound governance tokens, vulnerable to erroneous expropriation, went unclaimed by liquidity providers (Blockworks).

A tweak, made last month to Compound's COMP rewards-enabling smart contract, contained a bug that caused way too much in COMP rewards to get paid out to a subset of users, within which there was a smaller subset, apparently content to keep $10 million worth of rewards dropped off on their doorstep by mistake.