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Cryptocurrency prices are tanking this morning, with some of the biggest coins recording double-digit percentage drops as the global Black Friday discount shopping event gets underway and fears over a new Covid “variant of concern” spread. The combined crypto market has dropped under $2.5 trillion, down from a peak of around $3 trillion earlier this month.
- 24-hour crypto market snapshot
Bitcoin (-7%) $53,793
Ethereum (-10%) $3,959
Avalanche (-18%) $103.12
Cro (-19%) $0.6518
The bitcoin price is this morning off by over 7%, with ethereum down by 10%. Bitcoin is quickly falling towards $50,000 while ethereum has edged below the closely-watched $4,000 level. Bitcoin’s price fall comes amid a sharp dip in its hash rate, a measure of the computing power directed at the bitcoin network. Quantum Economic’s Jason Deane spotted the decline.
Ethereum rivals Binance’s BNB, solana, cardano and polkadot are all down by more than 10% with recent big gainers Crypto.com’s cro and avalanche down by almost 20% since this time yesterday.
Expect a lot of “buy the dip”-style advice from price boosters on Twitter and YouTube today and over the weekend amid claims of a crypto “Black Friday sale.”
Facebook sparked huge interest in the so-called metaverse when it rebranded as Meta last month
Metaverses, the idea that we’ll all soon be living in a virtual world accessed via the likes of social media giant Facebook and VR headsets, could eventually create $1 trillion in annual revenue across the advertising, digital events, e-commerce and hardware industries, research from crypto investment company Grayscale has found.
It matters because as people’s lives move more online, digital scarcity, smart contracts and online ownership created through bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will help form the foundations of the virtual economy. Video games are already embracing tokenization and Facebook’s rebrand under the Meta umbrella has kicked off a wave of interest in how digital assets will fit into the new virtual economy.
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ROI: Revenue from virtual gaming worlds could grow to $400 billion in 2025, from $180 billion in 2020, Grayscale, which runs the world’s biggest cryptocurrency fund, found. The overwhelming majority of that $400 billion will be in-game spending, compared to spending on premium games, the company noted. In Q3, total fundraising for crypto was $8.2 billion, $1.8 billion of which went to Web3 (a more decentralized successor to the Silicon Valley-centric Web 2.0) and NFTs, Grayscale said.
Fundraising for gaming applications overshadowed all other verticals of NFTs in the third quarter, hitting around $1 billion. According to Grayscale’s report, “compared to the $10 billion that companies like Facebook plan to invest, and the amounts that could follow from other companies and venture capitalists, the metaverse is in its early innings … if current growth rates remain on their current trajectory, this emerging segment has the potential to become mainstream in the coming years.”
A trillion-dollar virtual gold rush into the wild web is just getting started
As global regulators increasingly turn their attention to crypto markets, Spain’s financial watchdog has shown a yellow card to one of the country’s soccer heroes for promoting the world’s largest exchange Binance in a tweet.
“I’m learning how to get started with crypto with Binance,” Andrés Iniesta, who scored the winning goal in Spain’s 2010 World Cup victory, posted to Twitter this week alongside photos of him apparently using Binance and “#BinanceForAll.” Spain’s National Securities Market Commission responded, reminding Iniesta that “crypto-assets, as non-regulated products, have some relevant risks.”
Cryptocurrency trading platforms are rushing to reach sports fans around the world, with the exchanges FTX and Crypto.com spending hundreds of millions of dollars on sports sponsorship.
