October 2022 Recap: Inflation, Market Volatility, and more

What a wild month! Inflation, particularly in the US, continues to weigh on the markets, with all major indices way down and displaying some impressive losing streaks. Not to be outdone, the British have plunged to record lows with the pound and trust in the market.

The war in Ukraine, plus the ongoing energy crises, have weighed down Europe. In China, their staunch approach to tackling Covid combined with a pretty dire housing market is seeing ongoing economic problems.

Missed last month’s recap? Read the previous month’s market recap.

Current state of crypto

On the positive side, the much anticipated Ethereum Merge was a success and is reportedly now close to being deflationary. Plus, we are seeing a large number of institutions, ranging from banks to Google, saying they are increasingly into digital assets.

Despite this, most of the major crypto coins have been remarkably stable, with BTC and ETH remaining at about the same levels since June.

In fact, Bloomberg said Crypto was the 2nd best performing asset of the quarter behind the US Dollar. With some progress in the ongoing XRP vs SEC battle, XRP rallied at the potential of an outcome to these proceedings.

Meanwhile, BNB and Solana both had issues this month and the market penalized them for it.  While the big news item this month was the ETH Merge, Cardano also successfully implemented their Vasil upgrade. However this didn’t appear to influence the market.

Trends and portfolio activities

Turning to our order trends. Overall, we are seeing more buys than sells, however there has been an increase in the volume of sells this month. Given how crazy it is out there, it kind of makes sense. On the flip side, our average buy order size is up quite markedly.

Last month we noted that we had seen an increase in our customers using the Dollar-Cost Averaging approach. This trend continues in September with an even more impressive uptick.

We really want to encourage you all to establish good investing habits so we are delighted to see this result. As a tool to manage the volatility risk, DCA is a great candidate and it also removes the pressure of “buying the dip”. 

This month’s price bolter was QNT, up an impressive 80% on rumors it could be the blockchain of choice for CBDC’s. MKR also had a great month up 50%, and as mentioned XRP had a good month up 33% at the time of writing.

The biggest decreases were felt most by ETC, down 32%, NEAR and EOS, down 27%, and ADA, down 22%. This could have been due to the successful Ethereum merge which may have cast doubt over the usability of these other offerings.

When we look at what is most popular with the Easy Crypto community, we can see that BTC and ETH are still holding strong as they did last month.

Other Layer 1 options like LTC, XRP, SOL and BNB have also been top assets. Stablecoins have risen in activity and remain firm favorites.

As mentioned above, with the increase in sell orders it was not a surprise that stablecoins like USDC and USDT were some of the most popular assets as it is a common choice to lock in profits in stables before selling. In addition there were higher volumes of sells of XRP and LTC this month compared to previous months. 

To see how the coins above, and others, performed last week: Check our latest crypto rates.

What’s been happening in the crypto space?

There has been so much going on in the market at the moment so here are big themes we’ve noticed:

1. Crypto and the dollar are dueling for the best performing assets of Q3.
2. Apple plans to tax NFT companies 30% for their sales using their platform. That’s not going down well.
3. The NASDAQ is way down as well as inflation and recession fears weigh heavily on it.

4.) Messari noted a profound uptick in BTC buys using Euro and Pounds – Gold didn’t spike, just BTC. First time established economies have followed this pattern. Pundits are guessing it is because of the huge pressure the pound has been under as well as a near certain recession in Europe.

Missed last month’s market update? Read our market update from the previous month.

5.) Bloomberg put out its second piece in a week supporting BTC and the USD as the two best assets of the quarter. Gold bug, Peter Schiff must be stoked. 

6.) The UN has called on central banks to halt further rate increases. Possibly because the WTO is now forecasting global deceleration in growth. 

7.) Crypto adoption in Sub Saharan Africa is thriving.

8.) XRP’s had a big month in response to the news that it is settling its SEC lawsuit plus some cross chain integrations via Poly Network. 

9.) NYDIG reports that miner BTC miner balances are creeping up in a potential sign of easing sell pressure.

10.) Tether has completely removed commercial paper as collateral and uses exclusively US treasury bills. 

11.) Bitcoin commentator Willy Woo says that Bitcoin adoption curves are paralleling the internet. Good news if you missed the dot.com boom I guess.

12.) In this month’s hack news, Mango Defi on Solana got hacked, so did a bridge on BSC chain.

13.) And finally, institutional adoption of crypto continues with BNY Melon, the largest bank in the US announcing they will custody BTC. Meanwhile Visa and Mastercard are both expanding their crypto offerings. Google will accept crypto payments for cloud services. And Nasdaq announced they are getting into digital assets.

That’s it for this month’s update! We really hope you found something useful for your awareness of what’s happening out in the crypto space.