Crypto hits midyear on a high note

Summertime and the living is easy. Well, not that easy. The trout aren't running and the sun has become a blowtorch. So too have a slew of coins. One highly conspicuous mover/steamer: Ethereum.

Since tumbling through the first part of this past weekend, ETH has gained 25% in roughly 72 hours. A booster shot of 9% over the past day has now thrust the second-largest crypto snugly back above $2,000.

Tuesday's heatwave comes amidst regulatory clampdowns in China and the UK. But these were no match for Bitcoin as it broke past the dreaded $35,000 barrier with which it has done battle of late. At last check, at 7:40 a.m. (EST), BTC was trading at $35,600 up 4.2% since yesterday morning.

DeFi protocol Compound (COMP) is turning heads, meanwhile, surging 23% in that time.

Compound Labs, the creator of the Compound money market, has launched Compound Treasury, which, CoinDesk reckons, could prove to be a significant development in the super sexy “institutional DeFi" space.

Compound competitor Aave (AAVE) has gained 20% in the last 24 hours.

And Bitcoin SV (BSV) gained 22% after a UK court handed its creator a victory in a legal fight over the rights to the original Bitcoin white paper.

Built on Ethereum, used to collateralize payments on retail-focused Flexa Network, Amp (AMP) was looking like it might be one of those "under a dime to over a quarter" stories; and that still might turn out to be the case – provided AMP stays a nickel.

The 36th-largest crypto, as measured by total market capitalization, fell 3.6% over the past 24 hours, a period that saw nearly every Top 50 altcoin go higher. Payments app Flexa converted its Flexacoin to AMP last year. Earlier this month, AMP spiked 25% in 24 hours following its Coinbase listing. AMP has soared 2,000% this year.

Later this week, possibly on Saturday, Bitcoin’s “mining difficulty” will drop by more than 20%. That’s the biggest downward adjustment, ever.

Bitcoin's mining difficulty determines how challenging it is to mine new blocks, a process which involves solving a cryptographic puzzle, requiring a huge amount of computational power, or hashes per second, resulting in a network that had 142 exahashes (see earlier reference to "huge amount") per second as of only a few weeks ago; however, currently, with Chinese miners shuttering/exiting amidst a government crackdown, the network's hash power has fallen below 100 EH/s.

BTC’s mean hashrate fell to 94 EH/s on Sunday – the lowest since May 2020, according to Glassnode.

The less hash power deployed on the network, the longer it takes to produce blocks; the mining difficulty mechanism keeps the throughput to about ten minutes on average, with a maintenance tweak every 2016 blocks. Were hash rates soaring, and block production speeding up, the difficulty would be increased.

Quite a labyrinth. Anyhow, those miners remaining online will be more profitable and thus unlikely to pressure BTC price by selling coins in the coming weeks, Glassnode said.

Bitcoin SV (BSV) shot up 22% over the past 24 hours after its creator Craig Wright won a UK court battle over whether bitcoin.org should be allowed to host the original Bitcoin white paper. Claiming copyright infringement – and, controversially, that he is actually the paper's pseudonymous author, Satoshi Nakamoto – Wright won his bid to get the paper taken down because the website’s pseudonymous owner, “Cøbra,” chose not to mount a defense (Cointelegraph).

"Wright’s wider battle to prove that he is the progenitor of Bitcoin is still going through the courts," Decrypt said. "But it has been widely rejected by the community."

Wright refers to the largest crypto as “Bitcoin Core” and quixotically wants his fork BSV (named for Satoshi's vision) to rightfully assume the moniker Bitcoin, insisting it is truer to the original intentions as spelled out in the paper.

Cøbra told Decrypt no court order had been issued – yet: “Continuing to host it after that will be breaking the law.”