First Mover Asia: IOTA’s Shimmer joins the race to become the next big blockchain; Bitcoin goes back and forth before holding near $19.5K.
The Shimmer blockchain platform comes out at the same time as a lot of other new protocols that claim to be faster and cheaper.ย
Prices
โ Bitcoin (BTC): $19,444 โ0.4%
โ Ether (ETH): $1,328 โ1.1%
โ CoinDesk Market Index (CMI): $961 โ0.0%
โ S&P 500 daily close: 3,640.47 โ2.1%
โ Gold: $1,671 per troy ounce +0.6%
โย Ten-year Treasury yield daily close: 3.75%ย +0.04
Stocks were back to going down, but cryptocurrencies were not.
Ether, as well as the majority of the other major altcoins, fell more slowly.This is the latest piece of evidence in a debate about whether digital assets will continue to move in the same way as stocks, especially tech stocks. BTC recently traded for more than $19,400, which is about where it was 24 hours ago after it recovered from a drop early in the morning.
“Bitcoin’s correlation with tech stocks remains, but it isn’t breaking as badly as it has for most of this cycle,” Oanda Senior Market Analyst Edward Moya wrote in an email, pointing to the tech-heavy Nasdaq’s sharp drop Thursday and bitcoin’s recent ability to stay near or above $19,000 support. “It looks like Wall Street thinks crypto is close to the bottom and will be a good way to diversify once Treasury yields reach their peak,” Moya said.
Recently, the price of ether was just above $1,330, which was down a little more than 1% from the same time the day before. Other big cryptocurrencies moved sideways and had a slight red tint. ATOM was down about 4% and UNI was down about 3%. But XRP and XLM were up about 7% and 6%, respectively, in the last few days. The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), which measures how well a basket of cryptocurrencies performed, increased slightly to over 963.
The Nasdaq was down almost 3% and the S&P 500 was down more than 2%. Investors were scared by the latest turmoil in the bond market and a U.S. Commerce Department report that confirmed the U.S. was in recession by the traditional definition of two consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product (GDP). The yield on 10-year Treasurys went up to over 3.74 percent, which is close to its highest settlement date this year. The yield on 2-year Treasury bills has remained well above 4%.
Markets also continued to worry about the new British government’s plan to pull the country out of its current economic slump by cutting taxes and increasing spending. People who watch the U.K. worry that the changes will make the country’s high inflation even worse.
Rostin Behnam, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), said late Wednesday that regulation led by the CFTC could be very good for the crypto industry, including a possible increase in the price of bitcoin. At a fireside chat at NYU School of Law, Behnam told people, “If there’s a CFTC-regulated market, the price of Bitcoin might double.”
Behnam’s comments showed that more and more people think that crypto regulation is important.
Greg Johnson, the co-founder and CEO of investment advisor Rubicon Crypto, said Thursday morning on CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover” show that crypto would likely keep trading at its current levels until regulators can set clear rules. Johnson said, “We’re in a purgatory that probably won’t end for a while.” “There won’t be any big changes in the crypto markets until…regulations are clear. This will make it possible for the next wave of real adoption.”
Johnson also said that clear rules would make traditional financial services companies more likely to grow in the crypto space. “We’re ready to move when traditional broker-dealers and institutions don’t just say they have clarity but also start to hire people to train the whole company on digital assets and when the series 24 exam starts to include questions and topics about digital assets.”
Biggest Gainers
| Asset | Ticker | Returns | DACS Sector |
|---|---|---|---|
| XRP | XRP | +6.9% | Currency |
| Stellar | XLM | +6.0% | Smart Contract Platform |
| Polygon | MATIC | +1.3% | Smart Contract Platform |
Biggest Losers
| Asset | Ticker | Returns | DACS Sector |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cosmos | ATOM | โ3.1% | Smart Contract Platform |
| Terra | LUNA | โ2.7% | Smart Contract Platform |
| Ethereum | ETH | โ1.2% | Smart Contract Platform |
Insights
Will the Shimmer blockchain be the next big one? OATA wishes that
SINGAPOREโCrypto-project IOTA officially launched its Shimmer platform on Wednesday at the Token 2049 conference in Singapore.
The launch comes at a time when there are a lot of new blockchain startups. Each one promises to be faster and cheaper than the last, and they often get a lot of venture capital funding. This year alone, new networks like Sui and Aptos and scaling networks based on Ethereum like Arbitrum and Optimism have been made.
IOTA, like many other networks, has its own cult following. IOTA said that the unveiling of Shimmer came after almost two years of testing a product that will be used to test core protocol improvements and feature upgrades to IOTA-based applications in a “live” environment.
That means Shimmer is not a test net, which is a blockchain used only for testing. Instead, it would be a separate, full-scale blockchain with its own SMR tokens.
Shimmer has a unique model that lets new developers release different types of tokens, such as non-fungible tokens (NFT), tokenized real-world assets, and stablecoins, for free on a layer 1 network (also called the base network).
In other networks, people usually have to pay fees, which can range from a few pennies to a few hundred dollars, to deploy their tokens or projects.
IOTA says that this kind of design is the basis for the smart contract execution layer of Shimmer, which is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). EVM is a broad term for a large database that stores all of Ethereum’s accounts and balances. Developers can use this database to build services and deploy decentralized apps (dapps).
Support for an ecosystem with multiple chains
In the future, developers from other EVM-compliant networks will be able to use other networks to connect to the Shimmer network. This will support a multi-chain ecosystem.
The ability to transfer native assets without using a bridge is another important part of the Shimmer network. Bridges are tools based on the blockchain that let users move tokens between different networks. Over the past year, these kinds of tools have been used in many exploits, such as a $600 million attack on Ronin and a $200 million attack on Nomad.
Over a three-month period, anyone who staked IOTA tokens got SMR tokens. About 1.4 billion SMR were made by users who staked IOTA. The community voted to give 181 million SMR to the Shimmer Community Treasury (DAO), which is run by the community and will fund community projects on its own.
The Shimmer EVM chain is expected to go live in the coming weeks if security tests go well and are enough.