Ether and Bitcoin reached their highest levels in 10 days on Sunday as the market showed some signs of stabilization.
the No. 2 cryptocurrency advanced as much as 5.8% to $1,279.06 on Sunday before pulling back on Monday morning Asia time. The rally comes after the token dropped as low as $880.70 on June 18. It appears to have found support around its 200-week moving average, which currently sits near $1,200.
No 1 Bitcoin topped out on Sunday at $21,860, after having fallen as low as $17,742.83 on June 19. Overall crypto market capitalization retook the $1 trillion level on Saturday, according to data from Coin Gecko, though it was sitting a bit below that as of 9.20 a.m. Singapore's time on Monday.
Ether “is leading the way following sizable short liquidations,” Fundstrat said of the crypto rally in a note Friday. Data from CoinGlass show there were about $60 million of short liquidations in Ether on Friday, the most in five days.
Cryptocurrencies have suffered this year amid Federal Reserve rate hikes and stubbornly high inflation. Ether is still down more than 60% this year, even after rallying from its extreme lows.
A major options expiration on Friday had been watched as a potential source of volatility. However, “short risk cleared surprisingly efficiently” for Ether amid “perhaps unexpected stability,” Genesis Trading’s Ainsley To, Gordon Grant and Noelle Acheson wrote in a note.
India’s largest digital assets exchanges are bracing for a drawn-out crypto winter — one with some unwelcome local twists.
With token prices plummeting, customers unable to transfer money to their accounts and a dreaded transaction tax on cryptocurrencies just around the corner, exchanges like Binance-backed WazirX have put expansion plans on the back burner.
We have cut down all our non-critical costs,” said Rajagopalan Menon, WazirX’s vice president. “We are hiring only critical hires, we aren’t spending money at all. It’s literally crypto winter here,” he said, using industry jargon for an extended bear market.
WazirX isn’t alone. Rival exchanges Unocoin and BuyUcoin are also responding to vanishing trading volumes in a market that just last year ranked second in the world for crypto adoption.
That a crypto marketplace should be in cost-cutting mode is hardly a surprise — Coinbase Global Inc. and Crypto.com have announced layoffs in the last two weeks alone — but Indian exchanges face the added burden of a new tax system that executives fear will wipe out what little trading is left. WazirX’s daily volume has slumped about 95% since October, data from CoinGecko shows.
On July 1, a tax deductible at source of 1% on all digital-asset transfers above a certain size takes effect despite industry warnings that it will sap liquidity. That’s on top of an existing 30% rate on income from such assets plus a proposed value-added tax increase that’s making its way through the bureaucracy.
The government also doesn’t permit offsetting of trading losses on cryptocurrencies, treating them differently from stocks and bonds.
Adding to the pain, crypto exchanges have been largely cut off from the regular banking system since mid-April. That’s when India’s ubiquitous United Payments Interface was made unavailable to them without explanation, prompting some banks and payment gateways to also cut off service, which in turn meant traders couldn’t top up their accounts with cash.
It’s a remarkable turnaround from last year, when India was one of the world’s hottest crypto markets. The country’s cryptocurrency market expanded more than 600% in the 12 months through June 2021, according to researcher Chainalysis, which used a metric that estimates the total amount of crypto received in a country.
Crypto exchanges took out full-page ads in newspapers and signed up Bollywood stars to promote their offerings to one of the world’s youngest populations. Coinbase-backed CoinDCX became the official title sponsor of a cricket series between India and Sri Lanka.
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