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Bitcoin price taps 5-day highs as Shiba Inu leads altcoin gains
Bitcoin (BTC) saw continued strength on June 21 as Wall Street trading opened with a trip to near $21,500.
Analyst eyes diminishing BTC stocks correlation
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView followed BTC/USD as it reached $21,633 on Bitstamp, its best performance since June 16.
The largest cryptocurrency managed to avoid fresh losses into the new week; so far, these are reserved for the weekend. As such, futures markets reopened without being subjected to the dip to $17,600.
While some planned to short BTC at current levels, the mood among market participants was broadly one of “wait and see” as U.S. equities opened up. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 both added around 2.5% on the open.
Popular trader Bierre was eyeing the 200-period moving average (MA) on the four-hour chart. For him, breaking it on the day would be a sign of strength not seen for multiple weeks.
To highlight differently why today fight should be all about H4 trend -> May 14-16th.
Post dump rally, broke H4 trend for the first time since > 38-39k, US opened, failed to hold H4 trend back to the lows into days (and eventually weeks) of ranging.
Just some thoughts. pic.twitter.com/TasEwVS5gx
— Bierre (@pierre_crypt0) June 21, 2022
On the topic of stocks, meanwhile, data from Bloomberg showed that Bitcoin was in fact swiftly reducing its correlation with the Nasdaq 100 in particular. A potential benefit could come in the form of Bitcoin trading less like a tech stock, boosting its ability to weather the monetary tightening of central banks.
As Cointelegraph reported this week, global stocks are currently facing their worst quarter in history.
#Bitcoin’s tight relationship w/Tech stocks, fueled by declines in both amid Fed hikes & high inflation, drops amid crypto rout. Bitcoin“s 20d correlation w/Nasdaq 100 has fallen from ~0.88 in early May to the low-0.30’s now, BBG has calculated. pic.twitter.com/0j3fRb6gtJ
— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) June 21, 2022
“Plunging risk assets in 1H are taking away inflation at a breakneck pace, which may translate into pre-pandemic deflationary forces resurfacing in 2H,” Bloomberg Intelligence chief commodity strategist Mike McGlone added in part of a tweet posted June 20.
“Primary beneficiaries of this scenario may be gold, Bitcoin and US Treasury long-bonds.”
McGlone additionally queries whether stocks were “too hot” versus a “maturing Bitcoin.”
SHIB headlines altcoin rebound
On altcoins, relief was also visible as Bitcoin made strides higher.
Related: That’s not hodling! Over 50% of Bitcoin addresses still in profit
The top fifty cryptocurrencies by market cap were led by a surprise mover, however, in the form of Shiba Inu (SHIB).
The meme-based tribute to Dogecoin (DOGE) added 20% on the day, this coming after its namesake received fresh assurances of support from Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Elsewhere, Ether (ETH) neared $1,200 at the time of writing, also its highest since June 16 on the back of 5% daily gains.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Alameda Research is a cryptocurrency trading firm and liquidity provider founded by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). Before founding his firm in 2017, SBF spent three years as a trader at the quantitative proprietary trading giant Jane Street Capital, which specializes in equity and bonds.
In 2019, SBF founded the crypto derivatives and exchange FTX, which has quickly grown to become the fifth-largest by open interest. The Bahamas-based exchange raised $400 million in January 2022 and was valued at $32 billion.
FTX’s global derivatives exchange business is separate from FTX US, another entity controlled by SBF, which raised another $400 million from investors including the Ontario Teachers Pension and SoftBank.
The self-made billionaire has big dreams, like purchasing finance giants like Goldman Sachs, and in July 2021, he previously mentioned that “M&A [mergers and acquisitions] is going to be the most likely use of the funds,” raised from investors.
On June 18, crypto brokerage Voyager Digital announced that Alameda Research had agreed to give the company a 200 million USD Coin (USDC) loan and a “revolving line of credit” of 15,000 Bitcoin (BTC) worth $319.5 million at current prices.
During an interview with NPR on June 19, SBF stated that Alameda Research and FTX “have a responsibility to seriously consider stepping in, even if it is at a loss to ourselves, to stem contagion.”
In the interview, SBF noted that his companies had done this “a number of times in the past,” including a $120 million loan to the then financially-troubled Japanese crypto exchange Liquid.
This news raises some interesting questions, but more importantly, traders should understand what a proprietary trading firm is and how market makers work in the crypto industry.
What is a proprietary trading firm?
Proprietary trading means the investment firm or vehicle uses their own money instead of seeking commissions from clients’ trading. Banks and financial institutions use this trading strategy to make profits, carving risk from their balance sheet.
By applying sophisticated modeling and trading software, quantitative firms resort to diverse strategies to find a competitive advantage over regular traders and investors, including arbitrage, derivatives and high-frequency market access.
Also known as “prop trading,” this activity is a popular concept in traditional finance, bonds, stocks, commodities and debt instruments.
What’s liquidity provision?
Entities that provide liquidity facilitate trading in financial instruments by offering their own resources so that buyers and sellers can easily trade. Liquidity is the ability to convert an asset into cash, so, essentially, “liquidity providing” means market-making.
Market makers are regulated entities in traditional finance. Their job is to keep a minimum bid and ask for quotes at all times so that investors find the necessary liquidity when entering or exiting a market.
This process is usually handled by specialized trading firms, but the activity can also be carried out independently. Official market markets have access to lower trading fees and funding, but anyone can run arbitrage trades at their own expense and risk.
What is Alameda Research’s involvement with crypto?
Alameda Research, Jump Trading and DRW Cumberland, are some of the leading prop trading firms that provide liquidity for centralized exchanges and decentralized finance (DeFi) usage.
These businesses aim to generate profit for their respective shareholders, but sometimes this means creating direct exposure to crypto assets and intermediaries. In a nutshell, they take on risk for a potential longer-term gain — risk is a key part of the liquidity-providing business.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Bitcoin (BTC) focused on $21,000 into the weekend amid warnings that volatility could still consume the market before Monday.
S&P 500 sees second best week of 2022
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD broadly higher in its recent trading range after U.S. stocks ended the week strong.
As noted by markets commentators Holger Zschaepitz, the S&P 500 sealed its second best week of 2022, indicative of modest relief across risk assets.
In case you missed it: S&P 500 has gained >6% in 2nd-best week of 2022 as disinflationary forces gather steam & #Fed tightening expectations recede. Investors now see the key interest rate at only 3.4% at the end of 2022, a full 35bps lower than at the start of the week. pic.twitter.com/pE4TsrXXAp
— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) June 25, 2022
Bitcoin was on track to log slights gains at its weekly close, the first weekly green candle — albeit small — since May.
Before then, however, anything could happens, according to on-chain analytics resource Material Indicators (MI).
Referencing recent weekend price action, MI recommended Twitter followers not to be complacent in the absence of weekday volume.
“If BTC can take out the 200 WMA there is room to run,” part of one post read.
“Wknds have been wild so buckle up. A retest of the lows can come as fast as a rip to $24k.”
An attached chart of order book data from largest global exchange Binance offered a glimpse into buy and sell plans from traders. Below spot price, there was little support in terms of volume until $19,000, while conversely, heavy resistance lay just north of $22,000.
That level marked the key 200-week moving average (WMA) for BTC/USD, this being necessary for bears to reclaim to change the trend, various sources believe.
Altcoins set for first green week since March
Altcoins were also calm on the day while eyeing an impressive week of gains within the gloomy overall macro market context.
Related: Ethereum price breaks out as ‘bad news is good news’ for stocks
In the top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap, several tokens stood around 30% higher than seven days previously at the time of writing.
Among them was Ether (ETH), up 28% and lingering around $1,200.
In a dedicated order book post, MI noted that ETH/USD had also performed a retest of the 200WMA, but that trouble could still lie ahead.
#ETH with a legit retest of the 200 WMA on volume of the latest Trend Precognition signal. Want to see next week’s candle w/ a clean open and close above it without another sweep of the lows to validate. Concerned the 21 WMA will cross the 100 WMA and trigger another dump. #NFA pic.twitter.com/aLOXFideJX
— Material Indicators (@MI_Algos) June 24, 2022
Elsewhere, Shiba Inu (SHIB) was up 50% versus last week, while Polygon (MATIC) stole the show with 70% weekly gains.
For Cointelegraph contributor Michaël van de Poppe, there was still every reason to enter crypto markets now.
“From an investment thesis (all things ceteris paribus), it’s a great period to look for those altcoins that you want to have,” he told Twitter followers.
“In 2021, everyone dreamed of buying those at those low price values. Now the chances are there and people don’t dare to make the decision. Typical.”
On the weekly basis, the altcoin market cap was up $37 billion over the week, set for its first green candle since March.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Photography often has to weather disruptive changes — from film to digital, for example — and photographers find themselves needing to master new technologies or face losing out to more tech-savvy competitors. NFTs are just another transformation in how we consume images. Can photographers adapt and benefit from them?
Back in the dark ages
I go back a long time in photography. To the dark ages — or at least the darkroom ages, to be more precise — when images were analog and negatives or color transparencies had to be developed through some arcane magical process I didn’t quite understand. If you had told me you had to wave a Harry Potter wand and shout “Developus!” I would have believed you.
You could make a decent living as a professional photographer in those days. There were a lot of career avenues: portrait shops on High Street, highly paid advertising and fashion photographers, local newspapers employed “snappers,” and specialist travel or nature photographers could make money from magazines and TV.
During the 1990s, there was a huge, disruptive transformation from film to digital imaging. Anyone could do it, and smartphones started to outperform many cameras. The culture changed so that a selfie was more valid than something beautifully lit in a studio. Local newspapers folded or stopped employing professionals. It became a hard slog for many talented people. Stock photography sites cut prices and now sell images for only a few dollars, of which the photographer is lucky to get 20%.
I have noticed that the photographers who are successful are good at marketing. Many people are talented, but you have to ensure that your work is in front of the right people to make money. It’s especially important in the brave new world of NFTs, which have become popular with the art and photography communities, even among those who know virtually nothing about crypto.
How do you go about it?
Anyone can go out with their camera or smartphone and take a picture. Then you “mint,” turn it into an NFT, showcase it on a platform like OpenSea, and wait for buyers to come in… Is it really that simple? As it turns out, no, it’s not — even though you’ll sometimes hear things like this:
“June 2021 was just crazy: I had some collections completely sold out. In the short period of time till August or perhaps early September, the market was peaking. I sold maybe 50 pieces in one day!” says photographer Jan Erik Waider.
Waider is a fine art and landscape photographer. Based in Hamburg, he has a fascination with the arctic regions and an interest in technology.
Some years ago, I came across his work through his Northlandscapes “presets” for the professional photographer’s tool of choice, Adobe Lightroom.
Waider created his images with a set of filters for Lightroom, and he realized that other photographers would benefit from them. So, you can buy them as plug-ins for the application. They can speed up complex post-production of landscape images quite a bit. They are also customizable, so you can tweak them to fit your particular vision.
Before he took the leap into full-time professional photography around five years ago, Waider was involved in design and marketing, so he has a firm grasp of the importance of reaching out to find an audience.
As a technophile, he got interested in crypto in the early days. “I love to try out new things that pop up here and there. About eight or nine years ago, I got into Bitcoin. Then I stumbled upon NFTs, maybe earlier than some of my colleagues because I wanted to try them out and see where they took me.”
When he started creating NFTs, few photographic artworks were on platforms like OpenSea or Rarible.
“I was listening to a lot of YouTube crypto channels, and people started talking about NFTs in 2019,” he says. “I was interested but cautious. It kept growing, so I decided to put up three single works to try it out.”
“I quickly realized that you have to be active, connect with collectors, so I was tweeting five times a day. I was posting constantly, using optimization tools, but it was still exhausting [laughs].”
For an old-school photographer, it’s an entirely new marketplace with new rules. People who collect NFTs would probably never go into a fancy gallery to buy some art. The way to draw attention to your work is to build up a following on Twitter — and that’s it. Other social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook aren’t even in the game, according to Waider.
What are the benefits for creative people?
After a while, Waider sold a “genesis piece” — that is, the first NFT he put up online — to a collector of them for 0.5 ETH, which was $1,500 at the time. “I was really a little bit in shock at the price.”
One of the major benefits of NFTs for creative people is payment for resales. The visual arts market has long been dogged by an imbalance, where someone might sell an artwork for pennies that goes on to be very valuable without the creator profiting at all. Vincent Van Gogh comes to mind, but it is endemic to secondary markets.
Waider says, “I normally sell an image and don’t see a cent of it afterward. With NFTs, I am getting secondary sales, which is purely passive income.”
Christina Hawatmeh is the co-founder and CEO of stock image agency Scopio. It was set up nine years ago to showcase diversity in images and licenses visual content from 14,000 photographers, illustrators and creators in 150 countries. “We actually have hit the most creative generation in history,” Hawatmeh says.
She quickly realized the potential of NFTs, so it was one of the first photo agencies to offer both conventional licensing and NFTs, on the Solana blockchain.
Each image can be published in mainstream media — such as a book, advertisement or video — but also purchased as a collectible NFT.
“For me, it is a practical thing,” Hawatmeh says. “It solves a lot of my business problems — payments, tracking, giving ownership to multiple parties through wallet splitting, giving a chance for the model in the photo to earn also. Web2 photography is broken. This gives us a fresh start and more ownership for the artist.”
“We have a goal of elevating human stories from underrepresented communities and regions. Our photographers come from all over the world, and often there are barriers for all these different artists to participate, principally the payment method. How can they receive money for their work? There are things like PayPal, but it is still a problem. Crypto has transformed that. No government can take that away from them.”
Hawatmeh continues, “I think we are in a new Renaissance era. Perhaps COVID is similar to what the Black Death did to the Renaissance era — meaning people want art and culture more than ever. They want it at the center of their society because they were deprived of joy for so long. Imagery, media and content open up our minds. We now have the tools to connect different parts of the world together to tell better stories on a micro level.”
What are the pitfalls and challenges?
Scopio was due to launch its first book on June 21: The Year Time Stopped: The Global Pandemic in Photos. It’s a visual history of COVID-19 with 200 images from around the world. The photos are available individually as NFTs.
Scopio uses Solana as its blockchain network because the cost of minting is cheaper and the carbon-neutrality of the network appeals to both buyers and creators, who often have environmental concerns.
Selling an NFT for 1 SOL is a far lower price point than the 1 ETH that is often offered on the leading NFT platforms — the idea being that it’s a price range more suitable for a broader range of buyers.
Hawatmeh thinks that narrative and storytelling are a big part of the appeal of photographic NFTs. “The more information, the more storytelling, the more time you spend on building that narrative is going to make your images more valuable.”
The murky world of legality
It’s all well and good for photographers and photo agencies to start selling NFTs of their work, but it’s not entirely clear yet what they are selling. What rights are creators giving up, and what rights do the NFT owners purchase?
Nancy E. Wolff, a partner at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, is a New York lawyer specializing in intellectual property. She is widely respected as someone grappling with the complex legal issues around new media.
“It’s a whole new frontier, and technology is always leaping years ahead of the law,” she says, while being careful to point out that existing copyright laws and precedents can be applied to NFTs in many cases. In most cases, copyright or commercial use rights are not transferred by the sale of an NFT (though with Bored Ape Yacht Club, you famously do get the commercial use rights.)
“In the same way you might buy a print in a gallery, you don’t own the copyright of an NFT. If you want to buy an NFT, you need to look at the platform’s terms and conditions: What rights are you getting?”
“Likewise, if you want to sell on an NFT platform, you need also to be careful about what rights you are signing away. There’s a lot of potential for infringements. For example, if you create NFTs from pictures of NBA stars, something like a collectible trading card. There are still third-party rights to be cleared, whether it’s a poster to put on the wall or an NFT. Some organizations have become very aggressive about enforcing their rights.”
There is still the gray area of what to do with an infringing NFT: The token is immutably on the blockchain, and while the image itself usually isn’t (given storage costs), it is often be hosted on a decentralized platform like IPFS, making it more difficult to take images down or delete them.
Occasionally, printed works have been pulped after legal cases, but that’s tricky to do with an NFT. Centralized platforms like OpenSea have pulled down infringing NFTs, but decentralized platforms are unlikely to.
Waider believes that in the future, NFTs may give him more say over the final destinations of his imagery. “I can see the potential for photographers to control where their images are used. I don’t see that happening right now, but it could be implemented,” he says.
The audience for NFTs
Being at the intersection of art, finance and internet meme culture, NFT fans are not your typical purchasers of conventional photographic art.
“Almost always a totally different audience,” says Waider. “They are mostly coming from the crypto world. It’s a lot of tech people in general. So, that also explains why they’re coming from Twitter, as you have a lot of tech people on there. It’s a completely different approach to how a classic collector would look at buying a piece in a gallery.”
“It’s really hard to get into their mindset — to know what they like.”
He says the collections of some of his patrons are marked by their Catholic tastes. “It’s every genre you could imagine from photomanipulated stuff to classic landscapes, to portraits, to urban photography, black-and-white photography. So, it’s a big mix.”
Waider thinks NFT collectors are motivated as much by fun and enjoyment when purchasing as any other consideration. Some people have made money in crypto trading, and they want to enjoy it. If they like a photo, they will buy it, with price being a minor consideration. Many people collect NFTs because the image “speaks to them” — creates an emotional connection. Wolff says that motion is an important element:
“Often, a lot of the interesting NFTs are ones that have some kind of interaction or are built digital, rather than static images.”
Wolff says, “I think the NFTs that are most successful are where your buyer and the creator of the object have an experience together, or there’s some kind of engagement or they learn something, so they feel like they’re part of an experience. It works very well for concepts and conceptual art, as well as storytelling, where you express more than just the visual aspect.”
Waider’s tips for photography NFT noobs
- It’s a patience game: Sales rarely happen overnight.
- You need to study the market.
- Some platforms, like SuperRare, have a “quality vibe.”
- An active Twitter profile is a must.
- Research pricing and what sells on what platform.
- Start with a small number of images to test the response.
- A collection should have a theme, not just be a “road trip” of vaguely connected pictures.
- Narrative is important.
- Creating a good showcase collection of images is a significant investment of effort: Images with good descriptions are more likely to get noticed than ones without text. Careful planning and execution will pay off in time.
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