Crypto asset markets have been on the back foot for most of this weekend as the major coins slid to monthly lows. Decentralized finance on the other hand continues to grow, hitting a new all-time high over the weekend.
Total market capitalization for all cryptocurrencies slid to a weekend low of $254 billion on Sunday. A slight recovery during the Asian trading session on Monday has lifted them slightly but the overall sentiment is still generally bearish.
Markets are at their lowest level for a month as Bitcoin failed to break resistance yet again and fell back to $8,850 on Sunday. It is BTC’s lowest level since late May when it slid into the $8k range.
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The longer-term view still shows the world’s dominant digital asset as range bound, though it is currently trading below the 50 day moving average according to Tradingview.com.
A drop below the heavy support at $8,600 could see Bitcoin prices dump hard all the way back to the low $7k range. Analyst ‘CryptoFibonacci’ noted that the overall trend was still down.
“That downtrend I have been harping about is still there, and until broken, is a major thorn in the bulls side.”
There was no new higher high the last time BTC broke into five figures and every week now takes it further south.
Predictably, the rest of the crypto market continues to get dragged down by Bitcoin. Ethereum has been in decline for the past week and has fallen to a low of $225 at the time of writing. ETH has had no boost from the major moves decentralized finance markets have made recently and is unlikely to do much until network upgrades are rolled out.
Altcoins are starting to show slight improvements from Sunday’s dip and Cardano, Crypto.com, and Chainlink are making the biggest moves on the day.
DeFi on Fire
As a result of a number of token distribution incentives from some of the largest platforms in the industry, DeFi markets are at an all-time high. Decentralized finance performance can be measured in the total value of digital collateral locked across all protocols.
This ‘TVL’ hit an all-time high of $1.65 billion over the weekend, while DeFi has grown by 140% since the beginning of the year whereas crypto markets have only managed a 36% increase, according to Defipulse.com.
DeFi refers to a decentralized ecosystem of crypto collateral based borrowing and lending markets. Recent token distribution programs from Compound Finance and Balancer have resulted in a ‘liquidity farming’ craze whereby investors provide liquidity to these platforms by locking up their crypto assets for high interest rates and token giveaways.
