The Defiant

The Bulls are Back Despite Crypto’s Washington Woes

The crypto rally is raging even as regulation that has the potential to clampdown on the industry looms in the U.S. Digital assets are up across the board — Bitcoin has surged 14% in the last seven days, hitting a high of $46,704 in the last 24 hours before settling around $45,000 in early morning…

By: Owen Fernau Loading...

The Bulls are Back Despite Crypto’s Washington Woes

The crypto rally is raging even as regulation that has the potential to clampdown on the industry looms in the U.S.

Digital assets are up across the board — Bitcoin has surged 14% in the last seven days, hitting a high of $46,704 in the last 24 hours before settling around $45,000 in early morning trading U.K. time. Ether has done even better, spiking more than 15% in the last week and cresting at $3,267 on Wednesday.

Still, it looked like investors were keen to take profits early Thursday morning as the the DeFi Pulse Index (DPI) skidded 3%, with leading tokens from Uniswap, Aave, and Maker backsliding a bit. Yearn, Ren and Harvest’s tokens were bucking the mini-selloff with gains. But DeFi’s overall arc is light years away from the bearish bent that prevailed earlier this summer — the benchmark index has rocketed more than 28% in the last seven days. Whew.

The crypto market’s rally is striking given that the U.S. Senate passed a bill that seemed antagonistic towards the industry on Monday. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) said on Twitter, “Would be terrible for cryptocurrency… and would devastate crypto and blockchain innovation.” He asked that all crypto-related provisions be struck from the bill.

Zooming in on DeFi — the sector’s three lending giants, Aave, Compound and Maker have continued to issue loans to users. The total amount among the three, $21.2B is at the highest mark ever, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard.

Daily decentralized exchange volume isn’t quite at mid-May levels when Ether hit its all-time high of $4,183, but has been over $2B for the last eight straight days, according to another Dune Analytics dashboard. That hasn’t happened since late May.

And at 196K, the BTC used in Ethereum smart contracts continues to trundle upward, according to DeFi Pulse. The figure appears unaffected by fluctuations in the most valuable cryptocurrency’s price — BTC started May at $57.8K and ended it at $36.7K, but it appears users largely kept their tokens locked in Ethereum.

In all, it’s a rosy picture for a space which, despite the efforts surrounding the #dontkillcrypto hashtag, took a major loss in the Senate this week.

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There is still time for American legislation to rain on crypto’s parade — the other branch of the U.S. Congress, the House of Representatives, is set to address the changes to the infrastructure bill in the fall. These changes include the crypto-related provisions.

For now though, the bulls are back in crypto land.

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