The broad cryptocurrency market is red, with Bitcoin falling to $28,346 early on Thursday, the lowest since Jun 21, and Ether to about $1,785. Since these losses, prices have recovered a bit, and as of writing, BTC is trading at $28,437 while ETH is exchanging hands at $1,786.
Weakness in the largest cryptocurrency prices caused major altcoins to drop significantly. With that, the total crypto market cap has fallen under the $1.2 trillion mark and is currently at $1.175 trillion.
As prices broke down from a period of stagnancy to move under their support levels, Bitcoin and Ether futures traders took on some of the largest losses in over a month. Liquidations on futures tracking major tokens crossed the $155 million mark in the past 24 hours.
Bitcoin futures racked up about $50 million in losses, followed by Ether at $22.6 million and Litecoin (LTC) at $5.76 million, according to Coinglass. Long trades, which are bets on higher prices, accounted for most (90%) of the total liquidations. Meanwhile, open interest (OI), or the number of unsettled contracts, dropped 1.85% to $27.46 billion.
With the crypto market lacking any immediate catalysts and prices having no reaction to positive developments like the launch of a stablecoin by PayPal, prices have been expected to go lower. With volatility and volume metrics continuing to drop to multi-year lows, Bitcoin could also be seen under $25,000 in the coming months.
As per the US Commodity and Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) report on the commitment of traders (COT), leveraged funds, which include hedge funds and commodity trading advisors, have been ramping up their bearish bets in the CME-listed cash-settled bitcoin futures.
Amidst this, Coinbase announced that it had gained approval from the National Futures Association (NFA) and the CFTC to sell cryptocurrency derivatives directly to retail consumers in the US. Crypto futures will be launched within weeks.
Strengthening US Dollar Affecting Markets
The crypto market’s downward movement actually mirrors the risk aversion on Wall Street that has US stocks falling on renewed banking sector concerns and China recession fears.
Additionally, on the macro front, a record of the Federal Reserve’s July policy meeting is set to show that another rate hike is on the table as only a minority of officials favored holding interest rates steady over the rest of the year.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) released the minutes of its July 25-26 meeting that showed that most federal reserve officials saw “significant” upside risks to inflation and that could require further tightening. The Fed raised interest rates at the July meeting, as expected, by 25 basis points to 5.25%-5.50%, the highest level in 22 years, after a pause in June.
It’s yet to be seen just how the Fed acts as Chair Jerome Powell had said in July; “it’s certainly possible we would raise (rates) again at the September meeting, and it’s also possible we would hold steady.”
As a result, the US Dollar Index has risen to 103.48, up from 99.6 in mid-July and at the level recorded at the beginning of the year. A strong dollar doesn’t do well for the crypto market. So, while Bitcoin prices are down against USD, the crypto king reached its highest level of 10.2 million against the Argentine peso (ARS).
This comes after the reports from earlier this week that Argentina’s central bank will raise the benchmark interest rate to 118% from 97% previously, and the country’s fiat currency will be devalued to 350 pesos per dollar in the aftermath of a shock primary election that saw crypto-friendly libertarian Javier Milei winning.
The anti-establishment candidate aims to dollarize the economy and remove the central bank, which he has called “a scam.” “Bitcoin is the natural reaction against the scam that are central banks,” said Milei last year.
Bitcoin’s all-time national high comes at a time when Latin America’s third-biggest economy is battling a severe economic crisis with one of the world’s highest levels of inflation, rapidly devaluing fiat currency, and dwindling central bank reserves.
According to Chainalysis, digital assets are popular in Argentina, with the country ranked as having the tenth highest rate of cryptocurrency adoption anywhere in the world.
AKT Enjoys a Stellar 2023
While Bitcoin and altcoins are experiencing a drop in their prices after a period of lull, AKT is one of the very few cryptocurrencies enjoying an uptrend at this time.
AKT is a $265 million market cap cryptocurrency which, as of writing, is trading at $1.28, up 9% in the 24 hours while managing more than $3.48 mln in volume, which has increased 27.70% from a day ago.
The altcoin’s gains started on Aug 6 when it was trading around $0.573, and within a week, it had risen more than 144% in value to hit $1.40 on Aug 13, only to see a drop of about 19%. Since then, the price has been ranging between $1.13 and $1.32.
Now, AKT is in green by 41.5% in the past week and 116% in the past fortnight. 2023 has actually been a great year for AKT, which has rallied more than 575% year-to-date (YTD). While up 213% over the past year, AKT is still down 84% from its $8.07 peak in April 2021.
These latest gains for the native token of the Akash Network came as the protocol kickstarted its hackathon.
Co-founded by CEO Greg Osuri and CTO Adam Bozanich, the network is spearheading a paradigm shift in cloud computing by leveraging the power of blockchain technology to develop an open-source, decentralized marketplace for cloud computing with unprecedented speed, efficiency, and affordability. Soon, the marketplace will also support GPUs, which have been gaining a lot of traction lately with all the attention on AI.
Akash Network, the cloud-focused decentralized finance (DeFi) which also focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence, announced the rollout of the testnet for its Stable Payments feature last week. This will enable traders to settle payments using the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC).
The feature has been successfully tested and is now being made live on the public testnet to be included in the upcoming Akash GPU mainnet upgrade. Up until now, transactions have been settled in AKT. But with this new addition, Akash Network will now have another cryptocurrency besides AKT for payments over the protocol, which will help its native token achieve more stability and make Akash more accessible. After all, USDC is more widely held and used than AKT. Besides that, using a stablecoin will also make it more predictable for payments.
As an open Supercloud network, Akash makes it easy to rapidly scale and access services worldwide. It uses a “reverse auction” system, where customers submit their desired price and providers compete for the business, allowing prices up to 85% lower than other cloud systems.
At the center of it all is AKT, which is used to secure the network, execute transactions and contracts, and incentivize community participation through staking and rewards. The token holders also get an opportunity to decide the protocol’s future by voting on network advancements and the distribution of the reserves and resources of the decentralized cloud foundation.
The token has a maximum supply of 388.5 million AKT, out of which 217 million are currently circulating in the market.
Click here to learn all about investing in Akash Network (AKT).
Building the Akash Network
Recently, Akash Network completed the testing of the first open-source Supercloud, which was launched on its testnet in May. A supercloud is a cloud architecture that enables seamless app migration across multiple and diverse cloud providers — one unified cloud spanning all platforms.
The testing phase saw over 1,300 people from around the world signing up to participate in the Akash GPU testnet. Having already developed a robust marketplace for cloud resources, by adding GPUs to it, the network will power the development of AI as well.
When it comes to the testnet achievements, the network noted that they hosted GPUs from the highest-performing data center models to widely-available consumer GPUs, with high performance noted at both ends of the GPU range. Additionally, providers onboarded permissionlessly and successfully connected with deployers in many different countries worldwide.
Participants also deployed the leading open-source AI models on available GPU providers that saw some high-level testnet deployment stats. As per the update provided by the team, the largest number of concurrently hosted GPUs was 80.
The network is now preparing for Supercloud with the Akash GPU Mainnet upgrade code completed and final testing underway. “The successful completion of the testnet provides a strong indication that the features tested will ensure the success of the Akash GPU Mainnet upgrade,” said the team. The upgrade is expected to be completed later this month.
Once available to everyone on the mainnet, the general public will officially have access to the first open-source marketplace for high-density GPUs, including the ability to provide and deploy on NVIDIA H100s and other high-performance GPUs.
On Tuesday, the project announced that its standout community contributor Cloudmos, whose flagship application Cloudmos Deploy is one of the most widely used tools in the Akash ecosystem, has been acquired by Overclock Labs with the goal of co-developing products to further expand the Network. As part of this collaboration, Cloudmos will receive $300,000 in AKT to open-source its entire codebase.
Earlier this week, crypto data provider Messari’s researcher Micah Casella, who is an AKT holder, detailed reasons for the explosive growth the token has been witnessing this month. In his X (previously Twitter) thread, Casella noted how this memetic growth for a project which is not a meme coin but rather a supercloud enabling users to buy and sell compute resources on a decentralized network has been due to the vast usage potential of the network.
He pointed out how users on the Akash network can buy computing power for a range of purposes, such as hosting websites/frontends, middleware interactions (APIs, RPCs), validator/mining nodes, and deploying apps which will soon also cover data-intensive workloads requiring GPUs like machine learning, rendering, and AI.
As a decentralized alternative to centralized cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), Akash Network benefits from censorship resistance, privacy, resiliency, and building within the decentralized ethos. And unlike the uptime issues of a centralized entity, users can create deployments spanning multiple areas & providers, choosing their desired resources on Akash, noted Casella.
He then went on to state that Akash ensures developers can use its network by providing persistent storage and running on the leading and trusted container system Kubernetes. Moreover, the network’s persistent storage enables data to remain available throughout the lifetime of a lease, saving data between restarts so users do not lose data, making Akash a reliable solution for databases, blockchain full nodes, and programs that store large datasets.
Click here to learn all about buying Akash Network (AKT).
Final Thought
As we saw, the Akash Network is preparing for a big step with its GPU mainnet launch. With all the hype and development surrounding AI, Akash seems to be positioning itself to benefit greatly from this trend. Also, as GPUs see a spike in demand, a decentralized network like Akash stands to gain traction, enabling compute providers of any size to earn revenue with excess resources.
In addition to this, with the recent developments in the form of accepting USDC as payment and its highly anticipated hackathon, the network is focusing on building ahead of the next bull cycle. Already, AKT’s price is enjoying a bullish momentum, and with a string of planned development activities, we may see the token rally even further. However, with Bitcoin showing weakness and the broad crypto market trending downwards, AKT may also see some pullback, especially after the significant upside recently.
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