Dogecoin Defies Crypto Market Crash: Analyst Says It Looks ‘Incredible’

PEPE price is currently down 11.34% from its all-time high that it reached just yesterday, as its uptrend begins to lose steam. Its ADX has decreased from nearly 30 to 21.26, signaling a weakening in the strength of its current uptrend.

While the trend remains above the 20 threshold, indicating that some bullish momentum persists, the drop in ADX suggests that PEPE may not continue to rise with the same intensity in the near future.

PEPE Uptrend Is Losing Its Steam

PEPE ADX is currently at 21.26, down from nearly 30 just a day ago, suggesting a decrease in the strength of the current uptrend. ADX, or the Average Directional Index, measures the strength of a trend. Values above 25 typically indicate a strong trend, while values below 20 suggest a weak or weakening trend.

In this case, the drop in ADX from 30 to 21.26 signals that the upward momentum for PEPE is losing strength, which could lead to a potential slowdown or reversal of the current trend.

Since PEPE is currently in an uptrend, the drop in ADX could indicate that the bullish momentum is fading and the trend might lose steam soon.

As long as the ADX remains above 20, the trend is still considered to have some strength. However, the decreasing ADX suggests that the price may not continue to rise as strongly in the immediate future.

PEPE RSI Is Now In The Neutral Zone

PEPE RSI is currently at 50.5, after briefly reaching above 70 on December 7, indicating a shift in market sentiment.

The drop back to 50.5 suggests that the initial overbought conditions have eased, and the momentum is stabilizing. At this moment, it indicates neither an overbought nor an oversold situation.

The Relative Strength Index (RSI) is a momentum oscillator that measures the speed and change of price movements, ranging from 0 to 100. An RSI above 70 typically signals that an asset is overbought, while an RSI below 30 indicates that it is oversold.

With PEPE’s RSI at 50.5, it suggests a neutral market sentiment, with no strong bullish or bearish momentum. In the coming days, this could mean that PEPE price might consolidate or trade within a range.

PEPE Price Prediction: Can PEPE Test $0.000028 Soon?

Although PEPE price is still in an uptrend, the strength of the trend appears to be waning, as the price has now fallen below the shortest EMA line, signaling a potential shift in momentum. If the trend reverses and turns into a downtrend, PEPE could soon test the support at $0.000022.

If that level is broken, the price might continue downward, testing further support levels at $0.000017 and possibly as low as $0.000011. That would represent a potential 54% price correction.

The fading uptrend combined with PEPE price position below the short-term EMA suggests increasing downward pressure in the near term.

However, if the uptrend manages to regain strength, PEPE could look to test the next resistance level at $0.0000259. If this resistance is broken, the price might continue its upward movement and test higher levels at $0.000028.

Solana (SOL) is holding firm at a critical $209 support level, as the recent bearish surge has failed to break below this level. After recent price fluctuations, SOL’s ability to hold steady at this key zone has sparked speculation that a rebound might be on the horizon. With market dynamics shifting and technical indicators offering mixed signals, the question remains: will the bulls take charge and propel SOL upward, or will further decline occur?

Bearish Pressure Eases: Can The Solana Bulls Step In?

Solana has experienced a notable reaction at the $209 support level, a zone that has proven critical in maintaining its bullish structure. After testing this key level, the price has shown early signs of a potential rebound, suggesting that bearish pressure is easing and buyers may be regaining control.

Furthermore, the reaction at $209 has captured the attention of market participants, with many anticipating a rally toward the next resistance level at $240. In order to sustain this upward movement, SOL must break through nearby hurdles, such as the $240 and $260 resistance zones. A successful push past these levels could pave the way for a broader uptrend.

Conversely, if the rebound falters, a retest of the $209 support could occur, increasing the risk of a deeper correction. Thus far, the initial reaction and signs of recovery offer hope that Solana may be positioning itself for another leg up in the coming sessions.

Technical Indicators Signal A Potential Turnaround

The 4-hour Relative Strength Index (RSI) has dipped into the oversold zone, a level often associated with heightened selling pressure and the potential exhaustion of the bearish trend. Currently, the RSI is attempting to rise out of this zone, suggesting a possible shift in momentum as buying interest begins to reemerge.

A move out of the oversold territory is typically viewed as a bullish signal, indicating that sellers may be losing dominance and paving the way for buyers to regain control. If the RSI successfully climbs above the oversold threshold, it may trigger a larger recovery phase, particularly accompanied by increasing volume and positive price action.

Finally, Solana’s price continues to trade above the 1-day 100-day Simple Moving Average (SMA), a critical indicator that underscores its broader bullish trajectory despite recent market fluctuations.

Maintaining a position above this moving average suggests that optimistic sentiment remains intact, even amid short-term corrections. This level serves as a key threshold where buyers are likely to step in, reinforcing the price and preventing more declines. Historically, staying above the 100-day SMA has often preceded significant upward moves, making it a closely watched indicator by market participants.

Happy Tuesday! In today's newsletter, we take a look at what Satoshi Nakamoto said to do if quantum computing ever cracks Bitcoin, the altcoin market witnesses its largest long liquidations since 2021, researcher Max Resnick moves from Ethereum to Solana and more.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump would reportedly "love" for bitcoin to hit $150,000 early in his presidency.

Let's get started.

What Satoshi said to do if quantum computing cracks Bitcoin

Amid reignited discussions on the threat to Bitcoin following Google's Willow quantum computing chip release, the community shared Satoshi's prior guidance in case the blockchain's encryption is ultimately broken.

• While Willow is a significant advancement in quantum technology, its 105 qubits are far fewer than required to break Bitcoin's encryption algorithms: the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) with secp256k1 and the secure hash algorithm SHA-256.
• ECDSA secures private keys and authenticates transactions in Bitcoin. SHA-256 ensures data integrity and is critical to the cryptocurrency's proof-of-work mechanism.
• Bitcoin entrepreneur Ben Sigman pointed out that ECDSA, which is vulnerable to Shor's algorithm, would require several million physical qubits to break.
• SHA-256 is even more demanding, needing hundreds of millions of qubits via Grover's algorithm to pose a significant threat. "Bitcoin's cryptography remains SAFU... for now," Sigman said.
• Another community member brought up a BitcoinTalk post from Satoshi in June 2010.
• "If SHA-256 became completely broken, I think we could come to some agreement about what the honest blockchain was before the trouble started, lock that in and continue from there with a new hash function," Satoshi wrote at the time.
• "If the hash breakdown came gradually, we could transition to a new hash in an orderly way," Satoshi added. "The software would be programmed to start using a new hash after a certain block number. Everyone would have to upgrade by that time. The software could save the new hash of all the old blocks to make sure a different block with the same old hash can't be used."
• Meanwhile, analysts at Bernstein said any practical threat to Bitcoin still seems "decades away. " They urged clients to buy the current price dip amid strong ETF demand and acquisitions from corporate treasury participants like MicroStrategy, MARA and Riot.
• Ultimately, quantum computing poses a potential threat to all systems that rely on cryptographic standards, including cryptocurrencies, bank accounts and secure file storage.

Largest altcoin liquidations since 2021

The cryptocurrency market witnessed a major deleveraging event over the past 24 hours, with $1.6 billion in liquidations led by altcoins like ETH, SOL and ADA, which saw price drops of 5%, 6% and 11%, respectively.

• Altcoin leverage unraveled sharply after a buildup that saw open interest relative to market cap and funding rates surge, resulting in the largest daily long liquidation event since May 2021, according to analysts at K33.
• Subsequently, some funding rates fell to multi-week lows, reflecting a significant removal of leverage that analysts believe could lead to healthier and more sustainable price action.
• "If funding rates begin to decline further, it would signal that excessive long leverage is starting to unwind, potentially leading to a more balanced market as price forms a base," Bitfinex analysts told The Block.

Researcher swaps Ethereum for Solana

Max Resnick, a former Ethereum researcher, has left MetaMask developer Consensys to join the Solana-focused development firm Anza.

• Previously critical of Ethereum's technical roadmap, urging the blockchain to "dream bigger," Resnick spent two years at Consensys as Head of Research at a subsidiary called Special Mechanisms Group.
• "In my first 100 days, I plan on writing a spec for as much of the Solana protocol as I can get to, prioritizing fee markets and consensus implementations where I believe I can have the highest impact," Resnick said.
• Solana has emerged as a serious challenger to Ethereum, surpassing it in monthly chain and protocol fees as well as onchain DEX volume in November.

Bitcoin app Relai raises $12 million

Bitcoin self-custodial investment app Relai has raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Ego Death Capital, bringing its total funding to $20 million and boosting its post-money valuation to $72 million.

• The funding round was structured as "plain vanilla equity," consistent with Relai's previous fundraises, and closed earlier this month, CEO Julian Liniger told The Block.
• The app has facilitated $650 million in bitcoin investments since its launch in 2020, with $450 million occurring this year alone, according to Liniger. It aims to reach $1 billion in 2025.
• Currently employing 40 people, Relai plans to double its headcount next year, hiring across product, development, marketing, growth, legal and compliance functions, Liniger said.

Magic Eden airdrops ME token to NFT users across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Polygon

Multi-chain NFT marketplace Magic Eden has launched its ecosystem token, allowing users to claim and stake ME to participate in cross-chain challenges and future airdrop opportunities.

• Users must claim their ME by Feb. 1, with any unclaimed tokens redistributed to stakers, the project stated.
• "The thesis behind ME is that onchain apps are going to win in the long run. It's the purest, most seamless way to use the blockchain," Tiff Huang, director of the ME Foundation, told The Block.
• Ethereum rollup Fuel also unveiled its native token on Tuesday.

In the next 24 hours

• The latest U.S. CPI inflation data are released at 8:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday. Est. MoM 0.3%; Core 0.3%. Est. YoY 2.7%; Core 3.3%.
• Taipei Blockchain Week continues in Taiwan.

Never miss a beat with The Block's daily digest of the most influential events happening across the digital asset ecosystem.

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

© 2024 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) Raydium has surpassed Uniswap in monthly volumes for the second month in a row, according to a Dec. 10 Messari report.

In November, Solana native Raydium beat Uniswap — generally the most popular DEX — in monthly volumes by roughly 30%, or approximately $30 billion, according to the Messari report.

This followed a narrower win in October, when Raydium outperformed Uniswap by approximately 10%, according to a Nov. 17 post on the X platform by Ryan Watkins, co-founder of Syncracy Capital.

Raydium’s “success is largely attributed to its dominance within the Solana ecosystem,” the Messari report said, adding that the DEX consistently captures over 60% of daily DEX volume on the layer 1 blockchain network.

In particular, “[m]emecoin trading has become a substantial driver of Raydium’s volume, with memecoins accounting for an all-time high of 65% of Raydium’s monthly volume in November,” the report added.

Microsoft shareholders voted against Michael Saylor’s proposal to invest in Bitcoin to diversify its portfolio. The shareholder vote took place on Tuesday, December 12, and the majority of the MSFT shareholders voted against the proposal.

Microsoft Won’t be Investing in Bitcoin

Michale Saylor prepared a 3-minute presentation on December 1, urging the Microsoft board to add Bitcoin to its portfolio. The MicroStrategy CEO said Bitcoin is the seventh largest asset in the world, and its market cap will soon reach $2 trillion.Less than a week after Saylor’s proposal, Bitcoin soared to its $100,000 milestone and, as Saylor had predicted, achieved over a $2 trillion market cap. He also projected Bitcoin’s reaching a $200+ trillion market cap by 2045.

However, these proposals weren’t enough to persuade Microsoft’s shareholders. As BeInCrypto reported earlier, the company’s board cautioned shareholders against this proposal, saying that it would add “unnecessary” risks.Meanwhile, Microsoft’s stock market competitor, Amazon, is taking a different approach. Yesterday, Amazon’s stakeholders proposed allocating $88 billion of its cash reserves to invest in Bitcoin.

This contrasting approach highlights the differing strategies major corporations are adopting regarding cryptocurrency as an investment asset.

The Cosmos ecosystem is undergoing one of its most significant transformations to date.

The Interchain Foundation, Cosmos' leading development organization, announced Tuesday that it is acquiring blockchain solutions provider Skip, now rebranded as Interchain Inc., to centralize product development and unify the Cosmos ecosystem. This move marks a shift away from decentralized leadership as co-founder Ethan Buchman steps down from helping to lead the Swiss non-profit, positioning the ICF to revitalize its focus on growth and solidify the Cosmos Hub's role as the ecosystem's core.

“The acquisition of Skip marks a transformative moment for the Interchain Foundation and Cosmos itself,” ICF President Josh Cincinnati told The Block in a direct message. “By aligning with Skip's unparalleled execution and their rapport with the broader ecosystem, we are re-envisioning the way the ICF works. This is a seismic shift — not just in structure, but in our commitment to realizing the Cosmos vision with renewed purpose and focus by bringing the beating heart of Cosmos — its Hub and the Stack — together.”

Cosmos, the blockchain ecosystem highly focused on interoperability, has long suffered from fragmentation and competing visions for the future of the project. For years, the ICF has pursued a strategy of distributed product development, where individuals or organizations called “stewards” were responsible for building and maintaining key components of the network.

As part of the growth-focused acquisition, Interchain will bring these functions “in-house,” unifying the developer experience of building using Cosmos’ open-source, modular frameworks and “blockchain-in-a-box” software kits.

Launched in 2019, Cosmos pioneered the concept of an “appchain” ecosystem. The idea was to provide the necessary infrastructure to enable anyone to launch a blockchain dedicated to a specific purpose, ultimately creating a multiverse of networks that could all easily communicate with one another and share security.

The key components of this system are the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol, which allows application-specific chains to swap tokens easily with one another, and native Interchain Security, which allows these chains to pool the security features that make blockchains censorship-resistant. Tethering these appchains together is the Cosmos Hub, which has played a greater or lesser role in the vision of the "Interchain Stack" at various times since its launch.

To a large extent, Cosmos has prevailed in becoming a leading network to launch a new blockchain or decentralized app. Today, hundreds of appchains use the Interchain Stack, Cosmos’ blockchain-building software suite, representing tens of billions of dollars in value. Because of Cosmos’ shared architecture, these chains can easily share liquidity and assets.

Some leading crypto networks were launched using Cosmos’ tooling, including Binance’s native BNB Chain and the now defunct Terra blockchain. When Meta was still called Facebook, the company initially turned to Cosmos to build its ill-fated Libra/Diem project. Cosmos has also attracted chains like decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX to migrate over after finding Ethereum too expensive to use.

Competing interests

But Cosmos has also been subject to years of political and technical strife as maintaince of the network decentralized over time. While it is impossible to place the exact start of the infighting, Tendermint, the company that oversaw Cosmos’ ICO in 2017, broke up into several geographically dispersed entities in 2020. (Tendermint later rebranded to Ignite.)

Perhaps the clearest sign of Cosmos' lack of cohesion is the value of the Hub's native token, ATOM. Years ago, ATOM was a top-10 coin by market capitalization, but it barely cracks the top 50 these days. Throughout the years, key figureheads in the Cosmos space have considered launching competing tokens to revamp or eliminate Cosmos Hub as it is known.

In just one instance of this turmoil at the top, Cosmos co-founder Jae Kwon decided to launch a breakaway token called atomone through a network fork amid disagreements over how much token inflation is needed to keep the Cosmos blockchain secure. Over the years, Kwon has repeatedly stepped back and returned to the project.

While distributed leadership is the stated goal of many blockchain efforts, Cosmos’ potpourris of corporations, non-profits and key-opinion havers — who very often have competing opinionated views on how to make the “multiverse” a reality — have often led to technical delays and internal spats that spill over into the public.

Skipping ahead

To some extent, the Skip acquisition is an attempt to draw a line in the sand and announce that Cosmos has been and can remain a leading crypto industry innovator, Cincinnati said. The move is meant to “end the ambiguity surrounding the focus of the ICF. We have a much clearer path forward now,” Cincinnati told The Block.

“Cosmos has long struggled with org fragmentation and a lack of core competencies at the foundation,” Cosmos co-founder and longtime ICF council member Buchman echoed in a post on X, adding that Cosmos Hub has begun to slip from its mantel. “[Skip’s co-founders] also see the critical importance of a hub blockchain at the heart of the ecosystem to coordinate, route, canonicalize, drive liquidity, support chain launches, and overall chain growth.”

“With the best possible leadership in place now at the ICF, I’m excited to move on from the board and pass the torch,” Buchman added. Cincinnati said the Foundation Council, which oversees the ICF, will elect three new board members.

Founded in 2022, the Skip Protocol has become a key infrastructure provider in the Cosmos universe. It provides a suite of tools aimed at improving interoperability between appchains, bolstering cross-chain transactions and abstracting away (or, as co-founders Plunkett and Mareneck often say, “skipping”) the complexities of blockchain bridging.

“They have a consistent record of shipping great products that address real pain-points for users and developers in the Cosmos,” Cincinnati said. “And (I can say with some degree of introspection) unlike the ICF, Skip is universally loved by the Cosmos ecosystem, and has deep relationships with teams that have been growing more distant from the Cosmos. (a trend that I hope will now reverse).”

The hub of hubs

As part of the move to unify Cosmos’ infrastructure, the newly rebranded Interchain Inc. is recentering the Cosmos Hub and ATOM token “as key components of the Cosmos vision,” the team said in a statement. The company and ICF will work to “internalize” the development of the Interchain Stack and “treat it as a full-service bundle,” thereby improving developer experience and user onboarding.

“The Hub will become a true hub, connecting Cosmos applications to users, liquidity, and services, helping each of them thrive,” Interchain said. Consequently, the growth of Cosmos apps will drive growth to the Hub, creating a flywheel to lift the ecosystem up.”

Turning the Cosmos Hub into a true hub for liquidity and security will help individual appchains and the ecosystem at large to expand. However, the Interchain team also said it wants to increase support for more native VMs (i.e., virtual machines) and programming languages like Rust.

The team will also help launch the much-anticipated IBC v2, “IBC Eureka,” a simplified version of the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol that will include native Ethereum support expected to launch in 2025.

All of this, taken together, will “unlock much faster iteration cycles” while improving the usability and reliability of Cosmos, the team said. “It will also enable Interchain Inc. to expand the Interchain Stack to new architectures and environments, like sovereign rollups, L2s, and restaked services,” they added.

It remains to be seen what network users and stakeholders think of this shakeup and whether investors can be lured back into supporting an ecosystem often known more for its drama than development. According to CoinGecko, ATOM was down nearly 20% in the 24 hours before publication time, making it one of the worst-performing tokens amid a wider market pullback on Monday.

“I do think the community is still the open question here — they have to be on board with this direction too,” Cincinnati said.

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

© 2024 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.