Top Indicators For Max Gains!

When it comes to making moves in the crypto market, most of the time your main enemy is: you. You’ll talk yourself into buying tokens you know you shouldn’t; you’ll talk yourself out of taking profits when you know you should; you’ll get inside your own head and give yourself the yips. Bad you! Give yourself a smack round the head.

Ok, now that you’ve refocused, let’s move on to the other enemy you’ll face in the crypto market: everyone else. Fortunately, this lot are much easier to deal with and there’s no self-flagellation involved.

There are many tools you can use when evaluating what’s going on in the market and with a particular coin or token. These all help you gain an edge over the competition. Of course, there will be others using them too, but you’d be surprised how many aren’t. By making use of a few on-chain indicators, you can put yourself at a distinct advantage relative to other market participants.

In today’s video, we’ve put together ten of the most useful on-chain indicators. You may already be familiar with some of them, but likely not all. As crypto starts to get crazy again, these are all tools that will help you manage the madness.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

There’s a lot to look out for this week. For starters, the SEC has delayed the Global X spot Bitcoin ETF application. For context, the SEC had until Tuesday to make a decision about this application, but decided to postpone it and the Franklin Templeton application on Friday.

This reportedly marks the closure of the first window for the SEC to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF between now and early January. In practical terms, this means that we’re unlikely to see any spot Bitcoin ETF-related catalysts that could cause the crypto market to pump (or dump).

The caveat however is Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, whose tweets about the spot Bitcoin ETF applications have been provably shown to move the crypto market. It’s believed that this is being done by crypto trading bots which are tracking any mentions of the spot ETF from Eric, and buying or selling based on what he’s saying.

Besides tweets from Eric, another catalyst that could move the crypto market is potential issues in the banking sector. As you may have heard, Citigroup will reportedly begin another round of layoffs tomorrow. These layoffs are apparently expected to be in the thousands.

Of course, this isn’t concrete evidence of another banking crisis by any means, but the fact that JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently announced he would be selling one million shares of the megabank for $140 million suggests that there could be trouble brewing. Consider that this is the first time Jamie has sold any of his JPM shares.

This bearish indicator is hard to miss when the stock market is looking so bullish. Some would argue it’s also irrelevant given that crypto is not as correlated to stocks these days. As we saw back in March however, any issues in the banking sector would be rocket fuel for the crypto market, particularly BTC. 

This begs the question of where we are in the crypto market cycle. As we’ve mentioned in recent videos, we believe that we’re likely in the 2019 bear market rally phase. What this means is that the recent highs could have been the local tops for most cryptos, and the market could chop sideways to down until ETF approval.

If you need more concrete evidence of this, look no further than Ethereum. In case you missed the memo, BlackRock and Fidelity recently filed for spot Ethereum ETFs. Although BlackRock’s filing did cause ETH to pump 10%, these gains were quickly given back, and ETH barely moved on Fidelity’s announcement.

Logically, if we were at the beginning of a new crypto bull market, then this catalyst would have caused significant rotation out of BTC into ETH. However, we have yet to see this. This could be because investors have already priced in a spot Ethereum ETF. This is possible given Ark Invest and 21Shares were the first to file back in September. 

However, ETH’s surprisingly poor price action could also be due to the possibility that the spot Ethereum ETF may not be approved, or rather, that investors don’t believe it will be. This could be because the SEC has yet to provide clarity about ETH’s status the same way it has done for BTC.

Believe it or not, but there’s even a small possibility that the spot Bitcoin ETFs will be rejected. According to BitGo CEO Mike Belshe, this is because of the relationship between crypto exchanges and custodians, namely the Coinbase exchange and Coinbase custody. For reference, the SEC wants these activities to be clearly segregated.

Obviously, Mike has reason to spread this kind of FUD, given that he’s the CEO of a competing crypto custody company. Even so, he may have a point. That’s simply because the reasons why the SEC rejected previous spot Bitcoin ETF applications have yet to be addressed, namely USDT’s overrepresentation in BTC trading.

At the same time, we’ve seen a resurgence in FUD about crypto’s use in illicit activity. This would be negligible were it not for the fact that Binance’s head of counter terrorism has reportedly resigned after two years at the exchange. Note that Binance recently closed accounts linked to Hamas.

On that note, you might have heard that the head of Dubai’s crypto authority, VARA, has also stepped down. For those unfamiliar, VARA recently tightened its crypto regulations, and at least a dozen crypto companies will be fined for failing to meet these regulations. Binance has reportedly been given extra time to comply, though it’s not clear how long.

In sum, it looks like we could see a fairly mixed week for the crypto market. In the absence of bullish catalysts related to the spot Bitcoin ETF, we could see more bearish catalysts enter the spotlight, such as Elizabeth Warren’s anti-crypto bill, which is reportedly gaining traction. Funnily enough, this could result in the same choppy price action we saw after the 2019 rally.

As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme…

💯 Deal of The Week 💯

With recent movements in the markets, you might be considering adding to your altcoin stack to prepare for the next bull run. If that is you, then you’ll need a top-notch exchange with access to a huge selection of altcoins.

One exchange that we’ve used for our altcoin shopping since 2017 is Kucoin! Here you can find a massive selection of exotic altcoins and trading fee discounts of up to 60%!

👉 Give Kucoin a try & get up to 60% fee discount + FREE trading bot!

💲 U.S Crypto Tax Drama 💲

About three months ago, two United States federal agencies - the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), reignited the conversation around an almost-forgotten and controversial crypto tax rule.

Specifically, these federal agencies released a proposal for a set of crypto tax regulations detailing reporting requirements for ‘brokers’ of digital assets. To be fair, this proposal did not come out of the blue.

In fact, industry participants have been waiting for crypto tax guidance from the IRS for over two years, ever since the 2021 infrastructure bill mandated the agency to provide it.

The problem is that the IRS sought to bring back a controversial definition for the word ‘broker’ in its recent proposal. If you were around in 2021, you’ll remember that the crypto industry took up arms against the initial draft of the infrastructure bill for the very same reason.

Specifically, that initial draft of the bill defined ‘broker’ ambiguously, such that it could have potentially have applied to miners, validators, dApps, decentralised service providers and anything else the US government wished to lay its hands upon.

While we were able to successfully narrow the scope of the initial ‘broker’ definition back then, the IRS has brought back that broad definition by expressly stating that certain, non-custodial entities can also be regarded as ‘brokers’ for the purpose of imposing ‘third-party’ tax reporting obligations.

We examined this in great detail in our video on the topic two months ago. If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend you watch it – the ins and outs are fascinating.

The reason we’re bringing this up again is that the official comment period for industry stakeholders to express their thoughts on the proposal just ended earlier this week on November 14th. The number of comments sent to the IRS and the Treasury Department was overwhelming.

Over 120,000 public comments were made during this period, the most notable of which included ones made by Coinbase, the Blockchain Association, and Coin Center. I suspect a significant contribution to the sheer volume of comments came from the efforts of AI software, such as the one offered in the LeXpunK Army’s Treasury Raid campaign.

According to Niklesh De, CoinDesk’s managing editor for global policy and regulation, who read through some of these comments, some of them repeated concerns about the implications for individual liberty, such as the impact on privacy and free speech.

Others highlighted the procedural and compliance difficulty of the proposed rules, including reporting requirements on stablecoin transactions, the collection burden on brokers and the possibility of requirements for DeFi applications beyond what the proposal stated. To put it simply, the new rules just demand too much information that cannot realistically be collected and maintained properly by these entities.

Notably, recent CoinDesk op-eds highlight how this would significantly increase the costs of filing crypto taxes, while providing no official tools to standardise the process or make it secure. These are valid concerns, especially when you consider crypto’s reputation for security breaches and exploits.

After all, if these rules were to be implemented as they are, they could make it mandatory for DEX front-end operators like Uniswap Labs to implement KYC controls. Those Uniswap v4 KYC hooks don’t seem so amusing anymore, do they?

And, imagine the private server of such an entity being compromised - a $5 wrench attack apocalypse. Just recently, Eric Wall wrote a thread about how Sweden’s public tax record system has created an alarming culture of criminals targeting crypto holders in the country.

Thankfully, there’s some support for the industry from a group of bipartisan US lawmakers led by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) and Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY). The group is putting some pressure on the Treasury to completely rework the untenable parts of its proposed rules.

We’ll have to wait and see whether this is effective or not.

📊 Guy’s Personal Portfolio 📊

A bit of portfolio rejigging took place this week, for the first time in a long time. The dip we saw after the frenzy of the last couple of weeks prompted me to add a little more BTC and ETH to my existing positions, but the main change was a deployment of some of my dry powder into SOL. 

Solana has been melting faces recently and, although I think those gains could retrace a little over the coming weeks, I’m pretty confident that the project has climbed out of the hole it was in following the collapse of FTX and Alameda. I expect plenty more upside for SOL in the coming months and I’m happy to have it back as a part of my portfolio again.

BTC 42.0% | ETH 29.7% | USDT 22.8% | ATOM 2.4% | SOL 2.1% | DOT 1.0%

🔮 Video Pipeline 🔮

The Global Shift To CBDC’s: What you need to know!
Coin Bureau Crypto Portfolio Update
Candlestick Patterns: Complete Beginner’s Guide
Bitcoin Myths: Fidelity report and what it says!

🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

✅  YoBit Review 2024: Scam Exchange? Pros, Cons & Features

✅ Polygon Review 2024: Updates You Don't Want to Miss!

✅ Android Bitcoin Wallets 2024: Top 10 Best BTC Wallets!

✅ M6 Labs: BlackRock Moves and Market Slumps

✅ Aptos Review 2024: The Next Solana Killer?

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

Did you miss the rally? Worried that it may be too late to stack sats? The truth is that you are never too late. Despite how far we have come, crypto technology is still in its infancy.

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” - Chinese Proverb

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.