Weekly Market Update: Well, we dreamed…

Hitting $100k was kind of this mythical level for the OG Bitcoiners. For newer traders it’s still a milestone, but for people around when it was sub $100, this is a real mind bender. 

Noelle Acheson wrote this piece which kind of sums it up; 

“There’s more than a smidgen of pride: everyone working in crypto in some way helped it get there. Bitcoin has no executive leader and no marketing team other than all of us. And so if you see old-time Bitcoiners congratulating each other on social media today, we’re not being smug – it’s that there’s no-one else to congratulate.” 

Now we’ve hit it. The next leg up starts, some are writing it as $0.1m BTC… you get the point. And predictably, there are people out there with charts saying we are just getting going. As always, do your own research. 

What else happened? President Elect Trump has chosen both the SEC chair he wants and the Crypto Czar, both are known to be crypto friendly, but the appointments are not confirmed yet. South Korea’s political storm caused a flash crash on their largest exchange and quite a few nations are putting forward crypto friendly tax policies. 

Other big news. MicroStrategy continued its relentless buying, and both Amazon and Microsoft’s shareholders are agitating to put BTC on the balance sheet and Crypto ETFs did very well this week. Finally, yesterday all the leverage in the system was flushed in quite an aggressive correction. 

Macro market news was dominated by China as the retaliation and long term positioning due to the tariff war kicked off. There are no free rides.

In the US, the economy is stronger than thought and the Fed has signalled a cautious approach to more rate cuts. It’s worth noting that unemployment ticked up. Oh, and that the Fed chairman said Bitcoin is a competitor to Gold. 💪. Tomorrow CPI is announced so markets are in a wait and see mode. 

In Europe, France’s government collapsed. Along with Germany, they now have their two largest economies basically leaderless… Never letting a good crisis go to waste, the UK is resetting its relations with the EU. 

Turning to APAC, India kept its bank rate steady, while Japan’s GDP was a surprise to the upside. China’s CPI and PPI both underwhelmed. Finally, the Politburo has stepped in and told the central bank to loosen monetary policy in 2025. 

In Australia, their economy is clearly slowing, Q3 GDP missed to the low end and services PMI declined too. The RBA is kind of behind the 8 ball and didn’t have any choice but to hold rates, what was interesting was how hawkish they were. In New Zealand the only real news was how poor the construction sector is this quarter.

Market sentiment remained steady over the last week. In fact,it is identical to a month ago, when BTC traded at $74k USD, just for some perspective. We remain in greed territory.

Highlights this week: 

• There is no sugarcoating it, yesterday was a correction. Probably exactly what we needed given the hype, heat and leverage in the system. For some perspective just look at what prices were 30 days ago and breathe. 
• Our Buy-Sell ratios trended towards the mean with a discernable increase to the buy side by volume and value. 
• XRP continues to be popular, however BTC, ETH and stablecoins all performed well this week. 
• At the time of writing BTC was down 1% for the week. ETH and BNB were flat. SOL was down 7% and XRP has come back 21%. 
• PEPE led the way in the top 30 assets, up 20% on the week. Meanwhile SUSHI was our best performing asset, up 37% in the last 7 days. 
• ALGO was the worst performer this week, down 30%. 

View all top gainers: Visit the top gainers page to find out more. 

Highlights from the crypto space

Well we made it. $100k! 

I prefer Noelle’s version of congratulations to us all, but The Don is totally claiming it. 

Well I guess he can claim some of the kudos, he named Paul Atkins as his candidate for SEC chairman. He then followed up with David Sacks – ex Paypal – as his AI and Crypto czar. Both are known to be pro crypto. 

Crypto ETFs had a bumper week of inflows, $3.8bn across the world. 

The FT kind of apologised for being all cynical on Bitcoin… very tongue in cheek.

Jerome Powell said that Bitcoin is like Digital Gold, in fact he said BTC was a competitor for Gold…..at least one central banker is starting to get it. 

And some are saying we are just getting started. 

Empire says we are tracking just fine, completely in line with the 2018-21 cycle.

Tuesday was the crypto space’s largest correction valued by liquidations since 2021. Apparently it was $1.7bn. Essentially all the leverage in the hot space got vaporised. Level heads are calling that a good thing. 

The DeFi report is saying that long term Bitcoin holders are selling at slightly higher levels than previously but still not like March 2024. 

The (frankly) weird situation in South Korea, with a leading democracy invoking and then revoking martial law, drove down asset prices within Korea which had a flow on effect to the wider market. 

The Czech republic has voted to remove capital gains tax on Bitcoin owned over 3 years. Dobrý den. Apparently there are 22 countries where this is the case. NZ are you watching? 

The UK government announced it wants to take on the US as a crypto hub. The industry kind of called BS on it due to the lack of vision. 

Amazon shareholders are asking the company to investigate putting BTC on the balance sheet. So is Microsoft. 

Meanwhile, while others talk MicroStrategy bought another 21.5k BTC.

Kaiko put out their Q4 spot exchange ranking. Quite interesting 

Vitalik put out a thought piece on what he would like to see in wallets. Bring your AI to decode it. 

ASIC in Australia is consulting on digital assets. Normal coins won’t be considered financial products but things like wrapped coins and stablecoins are in the gun. 

A huge shout out to our local Web3 and blockchain talent. The annual event run by Web3NZ and BlockchainNZ nominated individuals and companies across the entire ecosystem. Well done to all the winners – shameless self promotion, Easy Crypto and some of its wonderful leaders picked up 3 awards. 

Other notable highlights:

• The US government moved ~$2bn of SilkRoad Bitcoin to Coinbase. 
• Panterra’s Bitcoin Fund, which launched in 2013, is up 1000% since inception, and rocking along at 88% CAGR. 
• One possible reason for the big blip in XRP volume was a rumour that BlackRock would drop $9Tn into XRP. I’d emphasise the rumour part of that. 
• XRP also removed the 10 XRP account reserve limit (that pesky reason you always have 10 XRP in your wallet.)
• The Celsius founder and CEO pleaded guilty to Fraud. 
• Austrac, an Australian regulator is going after Crypto ATM’s

🌎 Macro news TLDR: …All quiet as we wait on US CPI

China is underwriting lithium mining despite the global EV tariff war. Speaking of tariffs, China is going after NVIDA in a move seen as retaliatory over the chip sanctions it has been under. 

U.S. economic news

Services PMI increased to 52.1 in November, given the size of the US service sector this is a good result. Jerome Powell said the US economy was stronger than September, and a cautious approach was ok.

The Fed’s beige book shows a gradually expanding economy. The Non-Farm Payroll report came in as expected, however unemployment ticked up to 4.2%. Consumer debt is growing and could be the cause of the bump in retail sales. 

Tomorrow the US CPI data comes out which usually causes a little volatility. 

Over in Europe….

The French government has been felled in a no confidence vote. France is the bloc’s largest military power and the 2nd largest economy, behind Germany. 

Retail sales across the EU rose 2.1% in October which is somewhat of a surprise given the perceived state of the economy. 

The new UK government is looking to reset its EU relations, but is at pains to say it won’t rejoin the union. 

And in Asia Pacific…

The Indian Central bank held rates steady. Japan’s Q3 GDP came in at 0.3%, a slight revision upwards. In China CPI for November fell to 0.2%, below forecast.

PPI continues its rotten run, down 2.5% year on year. The politburo has told the PBOC to move to a moderately loose monetary policy in 2025, pledging more support for the economy. The IMF helpfully suggested this will increase their debt. 

In Australia, Services PMI showed a decline in November. Q3 GDP numbers came in at 0.3%, which was a surprising miss as most expected 0.4%.

The chart says it all really, the Australian economy is slowing, it’s not in recession but it’s not amping. Median earnings are up 7.4% year on year (3x CPI). The RBA kept the OCR at 4.25% saying they are slowly getting on top of inflation but its definitely not done. 

In New Zealand, Stats NZ reports that building activity is down 3.2% on the June quarter and 2.3% year on year. Residential construction has been particularly hard hit

That’s a wrap for this week. 

Stay tuned for the next update.

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