It's that time of the year again, the glorious moment when Bitcoin breaks its previous all-time high and crypto investors start looking at Lamborghini color swatches. Heated arguments break out all over the internet as hodlers argue wether Italian supercars look better in black or orange.
It's not all about Bitcoin though. This week we've got some bullish new for altcoins too.
The Bitcoin dominance chart suggests an upcoming alt season, XRP is trading record volumes and more than $1 billion has been locked up in the Ethereum staking contract.
Altcoins season
These days it's not so easy to be an altcoin investor. Bitcoin is off to the races, smashing through $20k like nothing and yet the altcoins just keep lagging behind. Ethereum is still 50% below its all-time high while other popular coins like XRP and Monero are even further behind. It's a tough game but we are starting to see a few signs that it won't stay this way forever. For one thing, the BTCD charts are telling us that there might be an alt season on the horizon.
Bitcoin Dominance
BTCD chart stands for Bitcoin Dominance, which measures what percentage of the cryptocurrency market Bitcoin accounts for. In other words, the market cap for Bitcoin versus the market cap for all other coins combined.
There is a big resistance zone at 67% on the BTCD chart and Bitcoin seems to be unable to break through that, suggesting that Bitcoin dominance isn't going to be rising. Of BTCD keeps rejecting these higher levels the most likely scenario is that it's going to roll over, which would be bullish for altcoins. Also, it's encouraging to remember that at the start of 2017 the altcoins didn't start their own epic bull run until after Bitcoin had broken its previous all-time high.
So if the same thing happens again then altcoin breaking through $20k could be super bullish for altcoins in the coming weeks and months.
$1 billion in ETH 2.0
When the ETH 2.0 staking contract was released, there was actually a lot of uncertainty about how long it would take to get all of ETH needed for the contract to go live. The contract needed stakers to deposit about $500 million worth of ETH and at first the deposits came in really slow. Then the flood happened and in just a matter of days, the Ethereum 2.0 staking contract got all of the ETH it needed to go live.
Looking back now it seems sort of silly that we ever worried about getting enough ETH, since there's now $1 billion worth of Ethereum locked up in the staking contract.
One of the macro forces that's driving so much money into Ethereum staking is a lock of yield all over the world. For example, there are currently $17 trillion worth of negative yielding bonds in the world. In simple terms, what this means is that there are $17 trillion worth of financial instruments that are guaranteed to pay you back less money than what you put in. It's a pretty crazy situation and it's got investors looking for alternative assets they can buy.
Staking Ethereum currently offers an ROI of more than 10% which is definitely one of the reasons so many people want to stake.
XRP trading volume
Objectively speaking, the XRP price has not done well in the bear market. XRP was way down against the dollar, but it was also down when measured against Bitcoin. XRP hodlers weren't having much fun through this bear market, but there is finally some sunshine on the horizon!
In the last couple of months, XRP has been absolutely crushing it. Just a day or two ago, XRP was up by 26% in 24 hours, but even that is peanuts compared to some price action from a few weeks ago, when XRP was up almost 50% in a day. Looking in a 90 day chart and XRP is up to a beautiful 125%.
All of these gains are happening on top of huge trading volume. In the last 24 hours, almost $20 billion worth of XRP has changed hands, which is basically doubled the trading volume that we've seen up to this point so far. All of this volume tells us that a lot of new buyers are getting supper interested in XRP, which is definitely a good sign for long time investors.
Even though XRP is still a ways off from its previous high, if this trading volume keeps up, it won't be long before XRP gets back to its peak.
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You should include ADA too. It has lots of projects undergoing and it has a potential to break its ATH in the next few months.