The Bitcoin price is currently hovering right above the $40k support level. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization had a fourth straight day of posting some losses as the index closed down on 4 monthly lows. Altcoins also dropped in value significantly later in the day, following BTC’s struggles.

Payments giant Paypal is looking to enter the stablecoin market. The company was rumoured to be working on a stablecoin for some time but no strong evidence was presented on the matter. However, a developer recently spotted something in Paypal's iPhone app that wasn’t supposed to be there. More on that later on.

The rise in the use of stablecoins is giving space to speculation that overregulation of the crypto sector is forcing many companies to get into the stablecoin business. Case in point, Paypal’s own coin project. However, with the focus now pivoting towards stablecoins themselves, the idea of owning stablecoins for a while is also not that enticing for investors and they might revert back to cryptocurrencies. 

Experts and top professionals working in the crypto space are weighing how governments around the world are looking to regulate the growing sector. For most of them, it was a hope that the state institutions would finally regulate the digital currency but to many, this was wishful thinking and the state is likely to tighten its control over the digital currency economy.

The US president Joe Biden is sending Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) nominations to the senate for approval. Biden has the opportunity to shape the entire CFTC completely with these nominations and with it, some of the regulatory outlook on the digital currency sector. CFTC for years has been softer on the digital currency sector but now, that could also change in the near future. 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has recently been in the news again. He gave a categorical thumbs down to cross-chain applications with the second largest digital currency network. He believes that such cross-chain bridges are known to have security flaws and therefore, such an idea was not a very good one overall. He also suggested that native assets should be kept within the same network like Ethereum should be kept in Ethereum and Solana should be kept in Solana because that gives it a natural immunity against a 51% attack. 

Bitcoin Tests $40k Support as Bears Advance Further

Bitcoin tested the long-term price support of around $40k before press time. The cryptocurrency was looking to post a slow, flat day overall most of the time during the day but eventually made a big drop just before press time. Now, things are looking bearish once more and today marks the fourth day in a row that the index has continued to slide downwards. 

The last 24 hours started with BTC at around $41.8k. It traded sideways for a long time, often rising to $42k and then crashing back to $41k and doing so several times. However, at around 4 PM, the index began to go down once again. It dropped to a 24-hour low of around $40.5k before recovering slightly to $40.9k. 

Moving forward, Bitcoin is now in bearish territory. The cryptocurrency is trading towards a move below $40k. However, overall Bitcoin indicators are still quite bullish and that has made it a very interesting ordeal at the moment. The bulls are in disarray and need to prevent a move below $40k by all means and if it happens, never let it consolidate there. The bears on the other hand have the advantage and are now looking to make the decisive price drop. The following few days are likely to be very interesting for the digital currency sector. 

The total market capitalization of Bitcoin was around $776 billion and its share of the proceeding was 40.72%.

Altcoins Post Losses

Other cryptocurrencies aka altcoins pulled back their respective indices, more than Bitcoin in most cases. Biggest losers included Ethereum (ETH, -4.5%), Binance Coin (BNB, -6%), Cardano (ADA, -6%), Terra (LUNA, -9%), Polkadot (DOT, -7.5%), Avalanche (AVAX, -7%), Shiba Inu (SHIBA, -6.5%), Polygon (MATIC, -7.5%) and Chainlink (LINK, -9%) all posted significant losses.

In Other News….

Paypal Confirms Stablecoin is in the Works

Payment solution provider Paypal has confirmed earlier reports that it was looking to launch its own USD-pegged stablecoin. This is going to be the first such step from the company and that has generated some excitement around the company. 

The company confirmed after a developer unearthed new stablecoin-related code on its Apple App Store app. The move was in the works for quite some time and could be near completion. What has made it more complex is the increasingly hawkish attitude of governments towards stablecoins and Paypal believes it needs to tread the water very lightly. 

It certainly wasn’t a good start of the year for crypto investors. Instead of a massive bull run we all hoped for, the first week of 2022 brought us a huge crash on the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin has fallen to the lowest level it has been since July 2021, and many popular altcoins have followed its course. But while most altcoin enthusiasts don’t have much to be happy about, some alternative cryptocurrencies managed to make impressive gains despite the bear market.

Let’s take a look at what the altcoins have been up to in the first week of 2022!

Best Performing Assets of December Erase Most of Their Gains

The Bitcoin crash affected almost all altcoins, but the cryptocurrencies that were hit the hardest were the ones which were making the most spectacular gains in the last couple months of 2021. It seems now that the bull run in these assets was very short lived, and that the price increases from November and December of the past year are soon to be reversed, or in some cases have already been reversed.

Among the coins which were affected the most are gaming-related tokens. Gaming cryptos have rallied massively in the last quarter of 2021 fueled by metaverse hype, but plummeted in prices drastically in the last 7 days. The price of Gala (GALA) decreased by almost 22%, Axie Infinity (AXS) by 17.5%, The Sandbox (SAND) by over 15%, and Decentraland (MANA) by over 12%.

Other altcoins which have previously been the best performers are now the biggest losers. SushiSwap (SUSHI) has depreciated by over 18%, Polygon (MATIC) by almost 14%, Loopring (LRC) by over 13% and Zcash (ZEC) by almost 11%.

A word of mention should go to Shiba Inu (SHIB), which has consistently been one of the worst performing assets in the ecosystem over the past couple months. This week has not been different: the SHIB price has decreased by 11% to less than $0.00003, making the dream of “losing a zero’” a distant memory for the meme token’s fans that are still trying to cope with their losses.

Cosmos Rallies Massively, But Can It Enter the Top 10?

Despite the bear market, some altcoins managed to grow massively over the last 7 days. The most successful one was Cosmos (ATOM). The ATOM price has increased by over 32%, which made Cosmos one of the top 25 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

The success of Cosmos proves that projects with strong technologic fundamentals and effective development process can thrive even if the market sentiment is bearish. Unlike many rallies which are motivated mainly by hype, the ATOM price increase is caused by important technological breakthroughs.

Recently, Cosmos users were introduced to Evmos - an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) providing the Cosmos ecosystem with cross-chain interoperability that allows easy asset transfer between Cosmos and Ethereum. But that’s not the end of good news for ATOM investors - Cosmos plans to roll out a massive upgrade called Theta soon, which will greatly increase the functionality of ATOM (including NFT support), and can very likely send the Cosmos price even higher.

What’s Actually Going On With SOL? Solana CEO Denies the Reports of a DDoS Attack

On Tuesday, January 4th, Solana users experienced massive problems in many cases making them completely unable to send any SOL transactions. Coinbase, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, warned its customers that Solana is having ”network-wide degraded performance.”

The situation was resolved after 5 hours. In the meantime, Solana users were speculating that the cause of the problems might have been a DDoS attack. However, the CEO of Solana Labs Anatoly Yakovenko has denied it: according to Yakovenko, Solana was down due to “some congestion due to mis-metered transitions”.

The outage on Tuesday was the second SOL downtime in the last few months. Previously, Solana was down in September 2021, when the network was completely unusable for over 18 hours.

According to blockchain experts, the root of all of Solana’s problems is the same: sacrificing decentralization to gain faster transactions and lower fees. As one of the most highly centralized corporate blockchains in the world, SOL seems to be much more vulnerable than traditional decentralized networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Whether Solana Labs will be able to resolve the problems or not, it definitely seems like the reports of SOL being the “Ethereum Killer” were greatly exaggerated.

Binance Drills Over $2 Billion Into Bitcoin, 

Analysts Divided On How Fed’s Decision Affects Bitcoin

Mozilla Forced To Stop Accepting BTC Donations After Seven Years

A Bitcoin wallet belonging to Binance, the leading cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has drilled more than $2 billion into the leading coin. The amount translated to 43,000 Bitcoins at an exchange rate of roughly 46,553 US dollars.

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin stash was worth approximately 1.7 billion USD at a price of $41,763 per coin.

The addition of 43K BTCs brought the address’s total holding to 116,601.13 BTCs worth 4.8 billion USD at press time. In the past, the crypto community was divided on who owns the wallet. However, in June 2019, the crypto exchange posted the wallet as their “reserve address.”

Over time, the address has turned into Binance’s Bitcoin storage. The exchange has used the address to mint more than 13K Bitcoins on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and no BTC has ever left the wallet since its creation in 2019.

Binance’s move to accumulate more BTC coincided with Bitcoin dipping to 41,000 USD, a level last seen towards the end of September last year. Currently, BTC has a weekly decline of above 12.5 percent.

The king coin manifested a weakened spirit mid this week when the United States Federal Reserve revealed plans to increase the interest rate, among other measures likely to affect liquidity negatively.

Analysts Divided On How Fed’s Decision Affects Bitcoin

Laurent Kssis, an analyst, told Coindesk that BTC traders exited long positions worth around 200 million USD within hours.

The analysts added that the price of Bitcoin is likely to dip below $40K if bonds fail to recover from the Fed’s decision.

According to Kssis, “if the Fed allows equity to fall, it will increase the borrowing costs of the governments because as bond prices fall, yields rise! That could trigger more selling in BTC.”

But some observers disagree with Kssis. Jeff Dorman, Arca’s CIO, tweeted that the interest rate hike by the Fed is not to blame for “long-lasting market selloffs.” Dorman pegs long periods of bear dominance to “very long Fed hike cycles.”

The CIO added that “If digital assets fall, it’s not going to be because of the Fed.” Others like Bloomberg’s Mike McGlone consider the Fed’s rate hike a golden opportunity for Bitcoin and the wider crypto market.

According to McGlone, BTC is part of the “early reversion leaders” when it comes to “stretched markets.” Apart from a plummeting price, Bitcoin’s dominance level is also spiraling. In its early days, Bitcoin ruled more than 90 percent of the total market capitalization.

Firefox Forced to Stop Accepting BTC, ETH, and DOGE Donations

The dominance level remained over 80 percent until early 2017 before starting to decline. According to CoinMarketCap, the king coin now controls 39.9 percent of the 1.9 trillion USD crypto market.

As Binance buys the Bitcoin dip, Mozilla has been forced to stop accepting Bitcoin donations. The move comes after widespread criticism from its community.

In a statement on Thursday, the firm which runs the Firefox browser project cited Bitcoin and other cryptos’ negative impact on the environment as the main reason for halting the donations.

Mozilla admitted that it halted accepting crypto donations after listening to its community on how crypto impacts the environment. According to the Firefox creator, the move has offered them a chance to relook its crypto policy, especially how it fits into its overall climate agenda.

“As we conduct our review, we will pause the ability to donate cryptocurrency. […] In the spirit of open-source, this will be a transparent process, and we’ll share regular updates,” Mozilla tweeted.

Don’t “Partner with Planet-Incinerating Ponzi Grifters”

The Mozilla community started airing their grievances on the last day of 2021 when the company posted a tweet reminding them that the crypto donations option was still active.

In the Twitter post, the company said that the Mozilla Foundation accepts donations in leading virtual currencies such as BTC, Dogecoin (DOGE), and Ethereum (ETH).

Judging by the responses to the tweet, some Firefox users were unaware that the company behind their beloved web browser accepts BTC. Some were even shocked to learn that the option has been active since 2014. Unhappy Mozilla community members included Jamie Zawinski, a Mozilla co-founder.

According to Zawinski, the project’s team “should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.”

However, Bitcoin supporters such as Blockstream’s Adam Back mounted strong support for the leading coin. Replying to the Mozilla co-founder’s comment, Back said that it “turns out some early coders have been living under a rock about Bitcoin.”

Bitcoin is currently trading right around the $44k level. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization had a slow last 24 hours or so but just before press time, the cryptocurrency began to record a price drop below key support. While the move itself wasn’t exactly too convincing and the cryptocurrency is still within reach of recovery, the easiest past forwards is downwards and bears are on the move. Altcoins also posted losses of their own. More on that later on.

In other news, Goldman Sachs has stated that Bitcoin could reach $100k in the future but only if it can continue to eat into the share of Gold, the top asset in the store of value sector. This prediction by Goldman Sachs is for the coming years but may be relevant the most in this year only as Gold’s price also fluctuates a lot. More on that later on.

Bitcoin’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) is now at lowest levels since September 2020 after which it rose to new heights within no time. This considerably a big indicator that shows that despite the current bearish setup, Bitcoin can still bounce back. 

In a bizarre incident, the second largest Bitcoin mining nation in the world Kazakhstan caused a commotion in the crypto world and politics when it blocked its internet. The country was facing mass-level protests that ultimately led to the resignation of the besieged government. The situation got so out of hand that the government had to put internet curbs on the general population. That dealt a significant blow to the crypto mining sector as the country has a whopping 18% of the entire crypto hash rate which took a considerable hit in the process. 

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has once again postponed its decision on a new Bitcoin Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). The latest application was from the powerful New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) and even then it was delayed to March 16 later this year. While the SEC has allowed Bitcoin Futures ETF in the country, the much awaited Bitcoin ETF itself is still nowhere close to happening as it has rejected two of them in the last few months. 

The EU is calling for public input on how to best incorporate Decentralized Ledger Technology (DLT) into trading and settlement. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) is calling out for this public participation. 

A Twitter poll by Airbnb CEO shows that users overwhelmingly want crypto payment options in the application. The popular renting service has no such option available at the moment but is likely to take some time in adopting Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrency network Solana (SOL) is facing yet another performance issue that could take some days to fix. The Proof of History network has been facing network slowdowns for quite a while and the latest is yet another question mark on the overall progress of the network. 

Bitcoin Drops Below $43k

Bitcoin dropped below $45k just before press time and kept dropping till it was below $44k. However, the bearish move is taking a breather at that level but they are expected to be back in no time.

The last 24 hours started with Bitcoin at around $46.2k value. It traded sideways for much of the last 24 hours until at 8 PM when the price began to go downhill aggressively. The index dropped to as low as $44k at one point but further price drop has stopped for now. 

Going forward, the bears are now angling in for the attack. While many indicators are flashing green, the ultimate one of them is the price and the price suggests that the bears can still pull the price below. However, considering many of the long-term indicators and short-term signals that are flashing green, the move below could easily be a bear trap and the index could recover yet again. 

The total market capitalization of Bitcoin was around $830 billion at press time and its share of the proceedings was 39.68%.

Altcoins Post Some Losses

Other cryptocurrencies aka altcoins also posted some losses at the end of the last 24 hours. Some bigger losers include Solan (SOL, -7%), Terra (LUNA, -8%), Polkadot (DOT, -8%), Avalanche (AVAX, -7%), Polygon (MATIC, -8.5%) and Crypto.com Coin (CRO, -9%).

In Other News….

Bitcoin Can Reach $100k Valuation: Goldman Sachs

Premier investment bank Goldman Sachs has predicted in a recent note sent to its investors that Bitcoin could reach a $100k valuation, provided it continues to eat away into the store of value market. 

According to Goldman Sachs note, Bitcoin’s adjusted market cap is around $700 billion while Gold’s is around $2.5 trillion. If Bitcoin gains around 50% of the entire market dominated by Gold, it can rise to just above $100k. However, the estimate is for the next five years and since a lot can change in that time including Gold’s own price, for Bitcoin bulls, it is relevant for the next few months as it tries to re-ignite the bull run.