Our Monthly Review is Out: Insights from September 2022

The overall cryptoasset market tumbled by almost 5% over the past month to rest at $933.7B. Bitcoin and Ethereum declined by 3% and 14% over the past month. This month’s winners were Solana and Uniswap, which jumped by 6% and 5% respectively. Optimism performed better than its peers within the major L2s in terms of total value locked (TVL). The figure below shows the performance of the top cryptoassets within the major categories, month over month.

Figure 1

Source: 21Shares, Coingecko, DeFi Llama

Key takeaways from this report

• Bitcoin under-levered for the first time this year

• Stablecoins and proof-of-work mining have been the talk of regulators

• The Merge settled, boosting development in Ethereum’s scalability solutions

• OpenSea and Decentraland introduce innovations to the NFTs industry

Spot and Derivatives Markets

Figure 2

Source: Glassnode, Swissblock Technologies

The figure above plots this year’s meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) against spot and derivatives 28-day rolling volume. The chart reveals that Bitcoin is under-levered for the first time this year, which in itself is a sign of true capitulation.

On-chain Indicators

Figure 3: Ethereum’s NUPL ratio

Source: Glassnode

On September 30, Ethereum’s NUPL ratio was at -0.09, which means that the second-largest cryptoasset by market capitalization is still at the capitulation zone. The current level is similar to levels seen in December 2016 when ETH was at $8.4, with a market cap of $626M, a few months before it jumped within the belief and euphoria levels for a little over a year.

Figure 4: Ethereum’s Network Value to Transaction Signal

Source: Glassnode

The NVT Signal (NVTS) is a modified version of the original NVT Ratio, using a 90-day moving average for transaction volume instead of the raw daily transaction volume, making it function better as a leading indicator. NVTS in Figure 4 indicates that ETH’s ratio reached the same level as the prior bear market around June 2018. At that time, ETH was valued at $73.9B which is currently 45% of today’s value while the daily number of transactions on the number today is 1.5x as much as the last crypto winter. In other words, ETH value increased significantly more than its fundamentals.

Read full report here

Research Newsletter

Each week the 21Shares Research team will publish our data-driven insights into the crypto asset world through this newsletter. Please direct any comments, questions, and words of feedback to research@21shares.com

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