Welcome to Around the Blockchain, Huobi Learn’s daily rundown of the crypto markets.
Ark Investment Management has predicted that the price of Bitcoin could surpass $1 million by 2030. In the firm’s Big Ideas 2022 report, analyst Yassine Elmandjra said that as Bitcoin’s market cap reached an all-time high last year, “its network fundamentals remained healthy” and that it has “the potential to transform monetary history by providing financial freedom and empowerment in a fair, global, and distributed way”. The report also noted that while Bitcoin’s market cap represents a mere fraction of global assets, it is “likely to scale as nation-states adopt it as legal tender”.
Ethereum’s average-sized fees (ASF) are at their lowest level in 30 days, at 0.0096 ether ($24.64 per transaction), a drop of about 53% from its 10 Jan high of $52.46 per transaction. The network’s median-sized fees (MSF) are also lower today at $8.37 to $10.82 per transaction, a 63.83% dip from 10 Jan. Additionally, LI2fees.info metrics show that Polygon Hermez is the cheapest Layer Two (L2) transfer fee today at $0.25 per transfer, just behind Loopring ($0.29) and Zksync ($0.37) fees.
According to Coindesk, some altcoins are “getting clobbered relative to what their expected returns were” relative to BTC. The site calculated these expected returns by multiplying the beta of 20 “very liquid, highly capitalized assets” times BTC’s return from 1 to 26 Jan and found that most of them (except for Algorand, Cardano and Dogecoin) “woefully underperformed” BTC. This was in stark contrast to the tremendous growth altcoins had experienced in the last year, compared to BTC and ETH. Still, Vite Labs co-founder Richard Yab predicted that “functional” alts would outperform BTC in the long run, saying that during a pull-back, “functional coins still end up higher than BTC in percentage change from when the bull market got started”.
Big tech firms hoarding information may hinder the availability of good data for AI data training via the play-to-earn (P2E) model. To solve this problem, Web3 data utility and NFT marketplace Synesis One is allowing users to create datasets for AI use, pegging each dataset to an NFT. As an NFT, the data is decentralized and more easily accessed by AI projects. To strengthen the AI data use case, Synesis One has positioned itself as the world’s first DAO for P2E data yield farming and NFT data market place on Solana and is working with Yield Guild Games and Mind AI, which uses natural language reasoning to produce conversational AI systems.
Citing fraud prevention and user security, Binance has restricted 281 Nigerian user accounts. CEO Zhao Changpeng said around 38% of these accounts were “restricted at the request of international law enforcement”, and that 79 of these cases had been resolved. He further highlighted what Binance would resolve “all non-law enforcement-related cases” in two weeks, and said the firm would “dedicate more CS and risk agents with a great understanding of the Nigerian market”.
Show me the money
As most of the Asian markets headed to the week-long Lunar New Year break, Bitcoin moved little over the weekend with light trading volume. At the time of writing, BTC is transacting at above $38,100, a slight increase over the last 24 hours. ETH was trading at over $2,600, up slightly over the same period. According to CoinDesk data, BTC’s trading volume across major crypto exchanges dropped considerably over the weekend, compared to the previous week.
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