Digital Asset Weekly, July 27

Digital Assets extended last week’s gains to finish this week up just shy of 1%. BTC continued to do most of the heavy lifting – dominating the bulk of price and volume gains. Strength in BTC helped to briefly lift sector market cap back above the US$300B mark for the first time in almost 2 months.

News flow this week was largely dominated by ongoing ETF applications with reports of likely approvals as early as September of this year and a very well articulated dissenting opinion articulated by Commissioner Hester M. Peirce to the SEC’s decision later in the week to push back a ruling on 5 BTC ETFs until 4Q18.

Outside of ETF speculation, one of the top themes of the week was a string of constructive opinions from a number of global policy makers and governmental bodies, including: the Indian Law Commission, the Central Bank of Canada, and the European Parliament.

In terms of infrastructure development, we had an impressive list of 2Q highlights out of Coinbase this week, the first ever EFP transaction (exchange for physical) facilitated by itBit, Binance revealing more expansion plans and startup Voyager positioning itself to compete with Robinhood.

Looking into next week, would expect a period of consolidation after a 2^nd week of significant BTC outperformance. Given better BTC price and volume action over the previous 2 weeks it feels as if risk in increasingly being skewed to the upside. Alt coins may be a completely different story, though, given an a more eroded value proposition and the low probability of attracting institutional money in the short – mid term. The failure of smaller coins / tokens to catch any sort of tail wind from BTC strength over the previous 2 weeks is also concerning. This will like change somewhat for 2^nd and 3^rd tier coins / tokens once BTC breaks more convincingly out of the current downtrend, but smaller coins / tokens may struggle to repeat the kind of mean reversion that has typically followed periods of significant BTC outperformance.

Read the full report here:Digital Asset Weekly July 27 2018