Crypto Market Forecast: Week of July 26th 2021

The digital asset market enjoyed a week of healthy price gains led by its two largest assets. The Bitcoin price ends the week up ~9% while Ethereum is up ~13%. Other assets that had particularly strong trading weeks included NFT token Axie Infinity (AXS) and DeFi token Terra (LUNA).

Bitcoin ended the week strongly on speculation that e-commerce giant Amazon is set to accept Bitcoin payments by the end of 2021. The plan was revealed by an anonymous source within Amazon to London-based business newspaper City A.M. Amazon has recently been seen to be advertising for a crypto and blockchain lead. The source told City A.M. Amazon wasn’t just dipping a toe in the crypto waters. “This isn’t just going through the motions to set up cryptocurrency payment solutions at some point in the future,” they said. “This is a full-on, well-discussed, integral part of the future mechanism of how Amazon will work. It begins with Bitcoin – this is the key first stage of this crypto project, and the directive is coming from the very top… Jeff Bezos himself.”

Similar to when Paypal announced in October 2020 that it would begin integrating cryptocurrency payment and trading options for its users, markets are reading this news as a sign of further mainstream acceptance of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin opens the new week with strong bullish momentum and price pushing past monthly highs above US$35,000.

Ethereum’s strong week was driven by expectations surrounding the London Hard Fork that are set to make gas payments on the network more consistent & stable during periods of congestion. Staking on Ethereum 2.0 also continues to surge in anticipation of the network’s switch from Proof-of-work to a more processing power-efficient Proof-of-stake network. Last week the number of committed ETH2.0 validators crossed 200,000 and there is now just over 6.4 million ETH chain or around US$14 billion worth of ETH staked to this version of Ethereum.

Trading set-ups for the week

Pro trader Josh Olszewicz explores trading options and signals for BTC and ETH – and lays out the trading setups he’s watching for the upcoming week. Start your week off right with Josh’s thoughts on trading strategies on a weekly basis.

Bitcoin, ALTs and Ethereum – Trading setup for the week of the 26th of July 2021

Crypto news for the week ahead

July 28 – Fed Chair Jerome Powell press conference and Fed open market committee announcement

This week the U.S Fed is set to have discussions about taping off monthly bond purchases. The Fed’s program of supporting the US economy through an accommodating, pandemic-influenced monetary policy may slow down due to inflation concerns. A shift to a more conservative monetary policy by the Fed would have consequences across all financial markets, including commodities and crypto.

July 29th – Fetch.Ai mainnet release

Fetch.Ai, an infrastructure builder within the decentralized finance space, is set to upgrade its mainnet this Thursday. The upgrade will entail new features such as Fetch.ai shifting to the Stargate version of Cosmos-SDK. With Stargate, Fetch.ai will be able to facilitate interchain transfers to the Cosmos Hub and other supported chains. In anticipation of the upgrade, the price of Fetch.ai (FET) is up ~59%.

Top 10 Crypto Summary

It was a strong and steady week for large-cap assets on the Brave New Coin market cap table, with most enjoying relief bounces after a period of bearish trading. Dogecoin (DOGE) rose ~9% after Elon Musk posted a meme about the cryptocurrency which profused, in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, that “dogecoin is money”. Last week, during a panel that was a part of the B word conference, Musk also revealed that he personally owns some DOGE.

Bitcoin Price Chart

The BTC price has steadily moved upwards this week and looks set to continue to rise on the bullish Amazon rumours. Fundamental tailwinds are also emerging from Bitcoin’s leading layer-2 scaling solution, the Lightning network. The node and bitcoin capacity of the lightning network has doubled in the last three months, the network currently has 23,504 nodes and a capacity of 1993.02 BTC.