Last month, the cryptocurrency space posted a bearish performance to end the year 2022. After its short-lived rally in October 2022, the crypto market has since slowed down because of rising concerns over the possibility of a global recessionary environment for the year 2023.
Although December was generally a bearish month for the cryptocurrency space, the flagship cryptocurrency asset Bitcoin posted a marginally bullish performance, defying the market trend.
Bitcoin began trading from $16,445.48 at the beginning of the month and ultimately ended the month at $16,603.67, representing a 0.96% gain.
The cryptocurrency market capitalization in December lost 8.01% for the month, dropping from $862.6 billion to $793.5 billion.
The Altcoin market experienced similar bearishness, losing 10.75% in December from approximately $532.6 billion to $475.4 billion at the end of the month.
Given the current bearish trend in the market, here is a look at the five cryptocurrencies investors should watch out for in 2023.
Bitcoin’s BTC: At the start of the year, we are seeing strong price action for the price of Bitcoin as the token is trading higher and looking to break above the $17,000 psychological support.
BTC has seen a flash of volatility on the back of fresh economic data from the United States. Nonetheless, the brief uptick delivered Bitcoin’s highest price point since Dec. 20, 2022. Market participants’ attention is now focused on next week’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) print as a key potential catalyst for risk assets.
Futures trader “Satoshi Flipper” explained that should the CPI data show inflation decreasing quicker than expected, it could provide fuel for a trip to multi-month highs near $19,000.
Bitcoin ended the month trading $16,603.67.
Toncoin’s TON: Toncoin is a decentralized layer-1 blockchain developed in 2018 by the encrypted messaging platform Telegram. The project was then abandoned, taken over by the TON Foundation, and renamed from “Telegram Open Network” to “The Open Network”.
Since 2020, the technology has been developing thanks to a non-commercial group of supporters and an independent community of enthusiasts who called themselves the TON Foundation. Toncoin, formerly known as Gram, is the native cryptocurrency of the TON network.
As a result of a recent upgrade to the wallet bot, users of the Telegram app are now able to purchase and sell cryptocurrencies without leaving the application. The bot initially enabled users to buy, sell and trade Toncoin (TON) within the Telegram app, but a new update has added a fully functioning cryptocurrency wallet to the application. An independent team of TON developers created the wallet bot to simplify crypto transactions for Telegram users.
The TON Foundation’s new Telegram bot update may pave the way for a global cryptocurrency payments service. Furthermore, since the app has over 500 million active users globally, it can act as a catalyst for further crypto adoption if the wallet bot proves to be popular.
TON ended the month trading at $2.18.
Ethereum’s Ether: In the digital assets space, Ethereum remains the largest smart contract platform, hosting a plethora of financial products, innovation, and automation, with varying degrees of decentralization (generally referred to as DeFi).
The number of transactions that went through the Ethereum blockchain in 2022 was four times greater than that of Bitcoin. This indicates that the smart contract functionality of the Ethereum blockchain has proven to investors that a use case far beyond using cryptocurrencies as a means of payment is very essential for the growth of any platform, a feat bitcoin has not been able to meet.
Beyond the number of transactions, Ethereum has an upcoming Shanghai upgrade scheduled for March 2023, which could spark another rally like the blockchain’s move to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism in the third quarter of 2022. The upgrade will enable withdrawals from Ethereum staking contracts, which are locked presently. The upgrade will significantly reduce the risk of staking ETH.
It will provide an opportunity for liquidity staking protocols to grow. The governance tokens of some of these protocols have jumped since the start of the new year as hype builds around. There’s a possibility that the upgrade can push these tokens toward last year’s Merge highs. Moreover, Ethereum’s staking space is still in its early stages, providing a market opportunity for the growth of these protocols.
Ether ended the month trading at $1,199.36.
Dogecoin’s DOGE: DOGE has performed much better than SHIB this year, despite the Shiba Inu community actively working on an L2 network, a metaverse and blockchain games.
Amid the severe crypto downturn in 2022, the price of Dogecoin has held up much better than most of the top assets on the market. DOGE is the third-best performer in the top ten, having dropped “just” 58% this year, beaten only by XRP and BNB, which saw declines of 57.2% and 53%.
Looking at the top 10 assets in terms of market capitalization as per Crypto Bubbles data, BTC, Ether, ADA, and MATIC, have all shed considerably more: 65.1%, 67.8%, 80.9 and 68.8%, respectively, over the past 12 months. DOGE also comes in well ahead of other big names in the top 20 such as Polkadot, Solana, Uniswap and Avalanche, which have all plunged, by 84%, 93.8%, 70.3% and 89.9%, respectively.
The strong performance comes despite no significant news for the Dogecoin network or anything in the pipes to justify excitement going forward, barring some recent speculation that DOGE could potentially, possibly, one day be integrated with Elon Musk’s Twitter.
DOGE ended the month trading at $0.07029.
XRP: XRP is the native token of the XRP Ledger and can be used as a currency to transact on the platform and other supported platforms.
Ripple is still dealing with the case with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In December 2020, the SEC charged Ripple with allegations stating that its executives sold $1.3 billion worth of XRP in an unregistered securities offering. Ripple objected to the claims, saying that XRP should not be considered a security.
The case has been on for almost two years, and with recent news, the SEC has requested to seal the infamous Hinman Speech documents, claiming that they are not relevant to the court’s summary judgment decision. The Motion to Seal Summary Judgment Document was filed by the SEC on Dec. 22, requesting the sealing of various information and documents, most notably the Hinman Speech documents.
The Hinman Speech documents refer to the speech given by former SEC Corporation Finance Division Director William Hinman at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit in June 2018, where he reportedly stated that Ether, the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, is not a security. Ripple believes it is a vital piece of evidence to help them with its case against the U.S. regulator.
XRP ended the month’s trading at $0.3399.
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© 2023 Nairametrics
© 2023 Nairametrics
