Nervous flub
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. 4th November 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
Crypto On Knife's Edge
Shifting perceptions — and betting proclivities — connected with the outcome of tomorrow's U.S. presidential election has traders in a tourniquet-tight holding pattern. In the past day, total crypto assets fell about 1% to $2.4 trillion. That was as of 7:48 a.m. (EST).
Having lost its grip on $70,000, Bitcoin spent the weekend struggling to stay above $68K, seemingly moving lower in lockstep with the declining odds for a certain crypto-friendly former president.
Meanwhile, Dogecoin (DOGE) jumped 6% in 24 hours, making it the top performer among Big Ten coins. DOGE is about sixteen cents. It's last dalliance with $0.20 came back in March of this year, around the time BTC reached its record high. The DOGE community seems to be clinging to a vision of the future in which Elon Musk obtains even more influence over the planet, possibly impacting the original memecoin in some way.
Big altcoins are doing okay. While red on the week, XRP just greened up on the day. The seventh-largest coin sits at $0.5121, up 2.4% in 24 hours, per CoinGecko.
The same goes for Solana (SOL). No. 5 SOL is down 7% since last Monday. But SOL is up 1% in the past 24 hours.
What's down
Polygon Wallows Despite Breakthrough
Decentralized predictions market Polymarket has been a smash hit in terms of a Polygon-run dApp achieving breakout success.
However, financial rewards have been sparse. As of late last month, Polymarket had only generated $27K in transaction fees for the entire year. Well, that's actually a testament to the Polygon PoS blockchain's affordability, insists Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron. Transactions, on average, are less than a penny.
As for Polygon's native POL (formerly MATIC), it's been losing ground steadily, down 23% in the past month and down more than 60% since the start of the year. Only about 5% of Polygon's activity comes from Polymarket. And the bulk of Polymaket's action comes from a relatively small cadre of outsized bettors.
Polygon's team is now seeking to seize political season momentum to stoke more take-up throughout the chain's wider ecosystem (CoinDesk).
What's next
Preparing For Fireworks
The race for the White House is coming right down to the wire. Margins remain razor-thin. Crypto traders are prepping for sizable swings, regardless of the outcome.
Less than a week ago, betting markets predicted a comfortable win for the Republican, former President Donald Trump. Momentum for Trump appeared to help spur a crypto rally. On Polymarket, the crypto-friendly candidate's chances of winning at one point surged to as high as 67%, while Bitcoin shot to within a few hundred dollars of its ATH of about $73,740.
In more recent days, Trump's odds have been slipping. As of this past weekend, Trump's chances fell to 53%, while the chances for Democrat, Vice President Kamala Harris, rose to 47% (and BTC fell below $68K).
Tomorrow, Tuesday, Nov. 5, is Election Day. It definitely feels like crypto (symbolically) is on the ballot. A Trump win could spark a rally. But don't rule out a sell-the-news retreat. It's not inconceivable that Trump's tariffs plan would chill world markets, sending the stock market lower, bringing risk assets down.
A scenario in which Harris wins, and the market falters in knee-jerk fashion, is eminently plausible. But animal spirits could, within minutes or hours, commandeer the result in some positive fashion with respect to the regulatory outlook, sparking perhaps a modest rally in digital assets.
By 10 p.m. (EST) tomorrow night, roughly 85% of the nationwide votes will be in but most likely the race will be too close to call. That's because three battleground states (Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania) likely will be too close to call, as the mail-in ballots in those states will not have been completely counted. In 2020, President Joe Biden's victory was not declared by the Associated Press until the Saturday after Election Day.
Tomorrow also marks (across Great Britain) Guy Fawkes Day, or Guy Fawkes Night, a bonfire-accompanied commemoration of a notorious act of rebellion against the establishment, one that spawned an iconic, sinister-looking mask made famous in "V for Vendetta."
