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11/27/2020 – Settle in for your Crypto Current Daily Roundup!

Surging prices, anticipation, and steady coin interest round out today’s headlines.

Black Friday Sales Extended: The Bitcoin Price Sheds Over $2,000 in Two Days

The Bitcoin price is down, dumping towards $17,000 a few days after retesting $19,300. It remains this year’s high and could take a couple of weeks before buyers find strength and rally. 

For now, analysts are pinning the selloff to several fundamental and technical events. 

Admittedly, after gains from late September, the Bitcoin price was “massively overbought” according to Vijay Ayyar, the head of Business Development of Luno. With such conditions, a correction was inevitable. 

Even with the dip, Crypto Cobain, a crypto analyst, said this will be another chance to build strength, accumulate before a shot above $20,000 to a new all-time high. 

Aside from conclusions gleaned from technical analysis, recent comments from US Secretary of Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, reportedly suggesting an imminent crackdown of self-hosted wallets (non-custodial wallets used by DeFi farmers) caused panic. It isn’t exactly what the crypto community wants right now as per a tweetstorm by Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong.

Ethereum Has a Gas Fee Problem as ETH Prices Crater from $500

Aside from the Ethereum price tanking from over $600 to around $530 (and towards $500) in two days of chaos, Gas fees surprisingly soared to over $2 according to statistics from BitInfoCharts. 

Gas is priced in ETH. Often, the amount paid is directly dependent on the network’s activity. It is directly proportional. 

Only that this time, the ETH price was contracting instead of expanding, an unusual development. 

Meanwhile, the number of assets under management by different DeFi dApps fell from around $14 billion on Nov 22 to around $12.4 billion as on Nov 26. 

The shrinking assets may point to farmers exiting their positions to safe havens or protocol liquidation. It is this uptick that may have sparked activity, forcing Gas fees to marginally rise.

Monero Is a Technological Masterpiece but Not Without Flaws

A Chainalysis employee, Ales Janda, is impressed by Monero’s technology. He likes the network and its determination to roll out untraceable money. 

In his view, Monero is smartly designed. Coupled with regular hard forks–making it harder for coders to launch tracking solutions, Monero is a refined software better than Bitcoin—and most of its hard forks, in preserving user privacy. 

However, he thinks Monero is not 100% anonymous and with some well-documented flaws. He has been working on deanonymizing the project for the last 1.25 years.