Ethereum and Link Hit All-Time Highs on DeFi Revival, FTM, BTC, Jan. 25

Coins and Tokens 4 min, 52 sec READ

by Kevin George

Ethereum and Link hit record highs on the week as the crypto investment buzz continues. FTM also hits new highs and BlackRock moves into BTC.

ETH

I said in last week's article that Ethereum was “nicely poised” for a push to the all-time highs and the coin got there early in the week. The price sold off with Bitcoin’s dump, but the price of ETH has vaulted to further new highs over $1,475 this morning. 

Ethereum is getting another boost from the Decentralized Finance (DeFI) coins, which sold off from a big summer 2020 rally but have now recovered with the cryptocurrency optimism.

The price of ETH was becoming a headwind for DeFi as the majority are hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. This saw transaction costs rising to uncomfortable levels and many new projects were looking outside of Ether for their foundation. 

This problem is being tackled with ETH 2.0 and third-party scaling options coming closer, while the finance coin values are seeing a boost for their longer-term potential. Further adoption would lead to additional volumes in areas such as decentralized lending.

The price of ETH is trading under last week’s high and this will determine whether the price moves forward or corrects once more. Support in ETH is at the $1,100 and 1000 levels.

LINK

Chainlink was a key benefactor of the DeFi interest and the number one coin in the space was up 12% at fresh all-time highs. The market cap of LINK is now touching $10 billion and the coin is at number 7 in the overall cryptocurrency market. Cardano and Ripple’s XRP are ahead with $11bn and $12.5bn respectively. 

The LINK coin got another boost as three projects in a week signed up to use the Chainlink technology. SKALE network was the latest to integrate their unique oracle solutions.

This has been an issue I have covered in the past and the money laundering issue is just the excuse that the policymakers will use. The reality is that they do not want to lose control of the money supply. If a decentralized asset such as Bitcoin becomes the keystone of the financial system, the bankers would lose control of the financial system. The current system is only still operating with trillions of bailouts, which is seeing larger and larger sums thrown into the system.

Chainlink also saw its oracle technology adopted by Warp Finance this week. Warp announced that it would use the price feeds for security. Prophet Finance was another signing up, this time, for the Verifiable Random Function (VRF). VRF will be used to run an internal lottery system.

The announcements are the latest in a long list of projects that are underlining the importance of the Chainlink in the cryptocurrency space. Google is among the big names that have relied on the project for oracles.

The price of LINK blasted through the $20 highs recently and now trades near $25. The path forward can be judged on $5 increments while the cryptocurrency sector remains bullish. 

FTM

Fantom was another coin seeing new highs as the project continues its recovery from lows in October and December. 

The FTM coin saw new highs over the last week and traded just below the $0.0700 level. Price has since dipped back below the $0.0600 level and this will be key for the week ahead. 

The Fantom project is an open-source smart contract platform, which can host digital assets and dApps, and Chainlink is actually one of the project’s partners. The project is seeing gains due to its Fantom Finance platform. The platform allows users to “Mint, trade, lend, and borrow digital assets.” 

FTM was one of a host of DeFi coins showing strong gains with 7 coins up over 50% for the week.

BTC

Bitcoin is still trying to recover from last week’s plunge to the $30,000 level. The price has held that support for the third time and could see further gains, but Monday’s early signs are of weakness.

In the financial markets, BTC could get a boost from further lows in the US dollar and the greenback could come under pressure from another stimulus deal this week, while Wednesday also sees the latest meeting of the Federal Reserve to decide on interest rates. The central bank is likely to keep rates steady but may push new stimulus measures to boost the new administration. Former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen is Biden’s nominee for the Treasury Secretary and she has urged politicians to go big on spending and forget about debt in the near-term. This may boost the economy but could see the dollar pushed lower once more. One of the key drivers for Bitcoin’s surge from last summer was the drop in the dollar as investors feared depreciation in other assets. 

Tyler Winklevoss, the co-founder, and CEO of the Gemini Exchange echoed this, saying in a Tweet:

The amount of hedge fund managers and investors that I’ve been talking to lately about #Bitcoin has never been greater. Even the most conservative of them are worried about the future of the US dollar.

If the dollar gets hit by the Federal Reserve this week then we could see a blow-off top in stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin got another boost last week when it emerged that Wall Street’s largest money manager had filed for approval to trade Bitcoin in two of its funds. BlackRock currently has around $8 trillion of assets under management and the move would see a host of investment funds seeking to copy them.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink once called Bitcoin an “index of money laundering, but in a recent interview, he said it could possibly evolve into a global market.