Crypto Market Review, Dec. 15

The market reaction to the FED’s 50 bp rate hike was expected; despite tuning down the rate hike pace, inflation in the U.S. is still significantly above the regulator’s target and additional monetary policy tightening is needed, which heralds a few more months of depression on both cryptocurrency and tradfi markets.

Cardano’s staking enabled in Trust Wallet

Recently, one of the biggest and most popular wallets in the cryptocurrency industry, Trust, announced the enabling of ADA staking directly inside the application. While the news may seem irrelevant during Cardano’s devastating performance on the market, it is a significant contribution toward ADA’s fundamental value and may help it in the long term.

$ADA @Cardano staking is now available in Trust Wallet!

Here’s how you can easily start staking #Cardano in your #TrustWallet👇https://t.co/LpFyWTi3x4 pic.twitter.com/hM9LfQTjNJ

— Trust – Crypto Wallet (@TrustWallet) December 13, 2022

While staking creates some selling pressure for assets in the future, it is a good tool to ease up the existing stress on a cryptocurrency and support a potential relief rally that may occur if the market enters recovery mode.

XRP is struggling

Despite the strong rally, which brought a lot of attention back to XRP in November, the price of one of the most notable competitors of Ethereum and Bitcoin tumbled back to the price range we witnessed back in the summer.

The lack of bullish fundamental signals that will make XRP more attractive among investors creates conditions where no entity is ready to provide support for an asset that has a shady future ahead, considering the lack of positivity coming in from Ripple’s case against the SEC and the overall depressive state of the cryptocurrency market.

Recently, the network has been experiencing a flurry of massive transactions that caused a dispute in the community, as some users assumed that foundations managing XRP had been selling their holdings while the cryptocurrency traded at the local top. However, the on-chain data showed that those transactions had nothing to do with selling activities and were simply inner operations of some centralized cryptocurrency exchanges.

However, XRP is still showing anemic performance on the market, moving in the continuous range bound for the last 20 days.

Ethereum hits speed bump

After the solid performance we witnessed two days ago, Ethereum rapidly reversed back to the already forgotten $1,200 price range, which has been intimidating investors for the last few months. Despite expecting the 50 bp rate hike from the Fed, the market received a cold shower during Jerome Powell’s press conference, when he reassured journalists about the Fed’s target for inflation, which still stays at around 2%.

Considering the speech, Ethereum and other digital assets quickly reversed from yesterday’s high as investors realized that the easing of the USA’s monetary policy will not happen until around the middle of the next year in the best-case scenario.

Ethereum is currently trading at $1,287 and might move upward in the foreseeable future, considering the recovering network activity that should fuel ETH’s burn rate. At press time, Ether’s supply remains inflationary, despite the most recent drop in issuance. As of today, the issuance offset stays at 0.93x, while the burn rate saw a 10% increase in the last four days and currently sits at 1.11 ETH/min.