Crypto Market Forecast: The week ahead, 20th July

Crypto markets experienced a middling week with most big crypto coins moving by only a few percentage points. The Bitcoin price fell by ~1%, as did the Ethereum Price and XRP Price. The overall market cap for cryptographic assets also fell by ~1%.

The total gas used on the Ethereum network hit a new all-time high last week following a recent vote by Ethereum miners to increase the block gas limit by 25%, from 10,000,000 to 12,500,000. Gas refers to the fee, or pricing value, required to successfully conduct a transaction or execute a contract on the Ethereum blockchain.

The increased gas limit theoretically allows the network to handle 44 transactions per second, when it could previously only handle 35. Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, Co-Founder & Chief Architect at bloXroute Labs suggests that the recent increase may not be enough to handle surging on-chain transaction volume. Writing in the ‘Our network’ newsletter he notes, “Despite the gas limit increase, the demand for on-chain transactions on the Ethereum network remains high. In the days after the 25% gas increase, Ethereum blocks are full, which implies that further gas limit increase is needed.”

While large-cap asset markets were quiet, a number of smaller cap assets had strong weeks. The Algorand news on the 17th of July that Coinbase.com and the Coinbase iOS and Android mobile apps would begin supporting it saw the Algorand price (ALGO) up ~37% over the last week. Algorand was founded by cryptographer and Turing award winner Silvio Micali. It is a permissionless, proof of stake platform blockchain with a focus on open participation scalability, security, and transaction finality.

In Aave news, the announcement of a $3 million investment from Framework Ventures and Three Arrows Capital last week saw the LEND price (the native token of the Aave’s DeFi lending protocol) up ~62% for the last week. The token offers holders discounted fees when using the platform and in the future, it will be staked for governance rights. The investment firms will be purchasing LEND tokens directly from the company. "We believe there will be a significant market shift of private borrow/lend activity moving to decentralized money market protocols," Framework Ventures’ Michael Anderson said in a statement. "Aave stands to significantly benefit from this underlying shift.”

Crypto news for the week ahead

July 20 – Haven Protocol launches private stablecoin

The Haven Protocol (XHV) is a blockchain network built on top of Monero (XMR). The protocol recently expanded to include a new USD-stablecoin, xUSD. Haven inherits all of the Monero privacy features and creates private commodities that exist through the burning of Haven’s native XHV base currency. The xUSD launch will be implemented through a hard fork and pricing will be supported by Chainlink’s decentralized pricing oracle.

July 27 – Cosmos network launches Stargate Testnet

Cosmos is a dual-layer network that enables token, data, and asset exchanges between blockchains. The project will launch what is described as its “largest upgrade yet” at the end of this week. Stargate will enable higher transaction throughput, cross-chain transactions, and accelerated UI development. The native currency of Cosmos, ATOM, has risen ~6% in the last week.

Top 10 Crypto Summary

It was a tame week for assets on the Brave New Coin Market Cap top 10 with most trading in the red and falling by a few percentage points. A new entrant last week, Chainlink (LINK), was an alpha performer and continues to surge up the market cap leaderboard rising ~16% in the last week. The Chainlink token has benefited from a number of integrations within the booming defi market in recent months. These include protocols like the Kyber Network utilizing Chainlinks decentralized price oracles.

Bitcoin Price Chart

The Bitcoin price (BTC) stagnated over the course of the week and ranged between 9100-9200 price levels in the second half. In a recent price analysis of BTC, Brave New Coin lead analyst Josh Olszewicz, points out that network hash rate and difficulty are both again near all-time highs after a volatile past few months. He also suggests that historically, legacy markets have needed to stabilize before buyers return to crypto markets.