Fantom on a spree
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 17th September 2024.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
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What’s up
Fantom Stirs Amidst Upgrade Excitement
The Dow index hit an all-time high on Monday and futures tied to it today are on the rise as investors await the Fed's interest rate decision tomorrow. European stocks were gaining early today. Crypto is flat. Not all coins are sluggish, though.
Fantom (FTM) shot up 10% in 24 hours as of Tuesday at 7:45 a.m. (EST).
The 55th-largest digital asset has soared more than 40% since mid-August. FTM, now hovering at roughly $0.55, last saw sixty cents back in June.
Mister Crypto, a pundit-trader posting on X, connects recent FTM performance with behind-the-scenes excitement among developers who are working on a test run of Sonic, a new, faster version of the Fantom blockchain, and which is set to launch later this year.
Developers have said that they were able to show, via simulated traffic on a closed testnet, a transaction finality of 720 milliseconds, and maximum theoretical throughput of 2,000 transactions per second (TPS). Put another way: Sonic's really fast; the current Fantom chain transaction rate is 30 TPS (Cointelegraph).
What's down
Ethereum Relatively Sullen
It's a fast-fading memory at the moment but realize this: Bitcoin fell below $58K late last night. Now, when we checked the biggest crypto today at 8:30 a.m. (EST) it was $59K. BTC is painted green over the past week, up 3.3%.
The second-biggest crypto, Ethereum, is a horse of a different color. ETH has fallen 1.8% in the past seven days. And ETH's price against BTC just hit a three-and-a-half-year low. Grayscale's Ether ETF (ETHE) has seen $2.7 billion go out the door since it launched this past July. Thanks to ETHE's profound bloodletting, the total line-up of seven-week-old ETH ETFs has experienced nearly $600M worth of net negative outflows.
Among Big Ten coins, the worst performer over the past week is Dogecoin (DOGE) which fell 2.8% to $0.1006. The original meme (for going on a month) has been clutching a dime like a stranded motorist at a pay phone circa the mid-1970s.
Checking the ranks of the entire Top 100, Helium (HNT) has the biggest weekly decrease, falling 14.6% to $6.95, per CoinGecko.
What's next
A Fed Decision Most Perplexing
All of a sudden, a majority of investors anticipate a 0.50% rate cut when the Fed meets tomorrow afternoon. According to Fed Funds futures data, traders see a 65% probability of that happening. Short-term borrowing rates falling 50 basis points would be considered a kind of monetary policy double cheeseburger, as typically the Fed cuts rates in 25-bp increments. Only a day ago, investors were split 50/50 on whether there'd be a jumbo cut.
While a cut of at least 25 bps seems assured, there's one contrarian trader who used the Polymarket platform to wager $200,000 that rates wind up staying unchanged. Benzinga flagged the trade, made by a macro-event punter using the alias BasedBoi, and who stands to win $6.5 million.
Shubh Varma, CEO of Hyblock Capital, told Cryptonews the swing in traders’ bets implies “maximum uncertainty” in Fed policy.
A 0.50% cut might trigger short-term bearish sentiment, Varma said.
"As it could signal the Fed acting aggressively to stave off a recession,” he explains.
Stocks could crater, as could Bitcoin which often moves in lockstep with assets deemed relatively risky.
On the other hand, a cut of 25 bps could be seen as more neutral in terms of recession worries, and thus, Varma adds, "could be interpreted as bullish for risk assets like crypto.”
