Period: 22^nd August 2022 – 29^th August 2022

· While the crypto market hasn’t fully recovered from the dump on August 19th, bitcoin encountered yet another bloodbath a week later on the 26th. Unlike the previous dump with no obvious reason, last week was due to the hawkish speech by Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman. The stock market inevitably plummeted.

· Crypto tanked and so did the NFT market. However, some of the floor prices of blue-chip NFTs rebounded (in terms of ETH). Ethereum Name Service (ENS) gained a lot of traction suddenly and ranked fifth in trading volume last week.

Jackson Hole, a wilderness recreation area as well as the venue for the annual gathering of central bankers from around the world, has become investors’ favourite topic last week. “Jackson Hole Economic Symposium”, as the name of this two-day conference, allows an open discussion of economic issues, stock, and currency issues facing the economies of the world. It will then conclude with the Fed chairman’s speech on Friday morning Pacific time zone (GMT-7). On this day, investors will be listening closely for any clues about how the US central bank is thinking about the current economic situation and outlook, including rate hikes, inflation, fiscal policy, etc.

During Friday’s livestream, Fed Chair Jerome Powell delivered a stark message that the Fed will likely impose more large interest rate hikes in the coming months to attack inflation that is still running near its highest level in more than 40 years, and it will cause “some pain” to the U.S. economy. The market did not like such a hawkish speech, in response, both stock and crypto markets tumbled. The S&P 500 fell 3.37% to 4,057.66 and bitcoin slid 6.12% to $20,119, which the latter failed to defend its psychological barrier of $20K during the weekend.

Even though the whole crypto market is falling sharply, there is always one or two altcoins that manage to escape death. The week before was EOS, last week was eCash (XEC). Formerly Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA), XEC was rebranded as eCash in July 2021. eCash is literally named as a cryptocurrency that was designed to function as electronic cash. Electronic cash isn’t big news in the world of blockchains, the developers made an announcement during its conference that the Avalanche Post-Consensus will go live on Sept 14, meaning that eCash will soon enter a new era of a high-speed network. . This good news resulted in the pump of XEC price.

The countdown to eCash’s Avalanche Mainnet launch

The sentiment in the NFT market remained cool, both market value and trading volume fell sharply following the crash of Ethereum’s price. Even though the floor price of some of the blue-chip NFTs rebounded, their value in US dollars dropped following ETH price.

Source: NFTGo.

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains managed to stand out last week in this bear market. If you are new to crypto, the term ‘ENS’ may sound unfamiliar but you might see it before. Say the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, uses vitalik.eth; the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, uses barmstrong.eth. ENS can be used to represent our crypto wallet address which consists of long strings of numbers and letters. Without drilling too much into technical details, ENS is in the form of an NFT. This means that these domain names can be transferred and sold in the same fashion as the NFTs we generally know.

Vitalik Buterin’s ENS - vitalik.eth - and its wallet details on Etherscan

Of all ENS domains, digit domains are the most welcome by collectors and traders. The floor price of a 3-digit ENS is worth at least a whopping 30 ETH while 4-digit ENS is trading at 1.6 ETH currently. The NFT market was in its craze trading for 5-digit ENS last week, the floor price nearly doubled from 0.038 ETH to 0.075 ETH highest over the last seven days. In my honest opinion, a 5-digit ENS has not much different from a 6-digit DNS, the shopping mania might be just another round of speculation in the daily NFT market.

5-digit ENS domains aka the 100k club. Source: https://www.ens.vision/

Disclaimer: This article is an update on the top-performing crypto & NFT for the past week. Any views, opinions, research, analyses, or other information contained in this piece is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. Every investment involves risk, please conduct your own research when making a decision.

Written by: [Coinlive] Nell