Something Brewing?

Let’s get the elephant out of the room: Bitcoin is down ~10% for the month of June, briefly touching lows below $60,000 not seen since, well… only last month.

Either way, BTC with a $59k print over the weekend and a bloody bath for alts was enough to stir some jitters.

While many blame the Mt. Gox distribution event, the German government selling Bitcoin, or consecutive ETF outflows for the drop, as always, we suspect there’s more to the story.

Consider this: Have you seen what is happening to NVIDIA lately? In just the last week, the stock lost more than half a trillion dollars worth of market cap in three trading sessions. Let that sink in. The world’s largest stock, riding on the world’s largest - and perhaps the only - growth trend, also known as AI, is selling off.

While the stock has since recovered a bit, moves like this are enough to instill fear in millions of traders.

Furthermore, are you paying attention to the macro environment? It’s a long list, but the situations around inflation, US national debt, consumer CC debt, two wars, and Japan’s yen crisis aren’t getting any better lately. Geopolitical tensions only grew over the weekend after Ukraine reportedly attacked Crimea with US-supplied cluster munitions.

All this goes to say that many things are happening in the world right now that indicate we may be reaching a tipping point.

The question is whether you view crypto as risk-on or risk-off.

Ethereum Transaction Fees Reach Multi-Year Low

This week did bring some positive news…

After peaking at an average of over $30 in March, transaction fees on the Ethereum network dropped to $1.34 over the weekend, marking the lowest level since April 2020.

What changed? This reduction in fees is largely attributed to the Ethereum Dencun upgrade, which was implemented earlier this year.

In March, we wrote about how this upgrade would aim to enhance the efficiency of Ethereum L2s (i.e. Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Base):

And for the naysayers, so far the credit for this improvement really does goes to the Dencun upgrade. Why? Because there hasn't been a significant drop in transaction volume.

According to The Defiant, "Data from Etherscan shows daily transactions dipping from a local high of 1.37 million on March 20 and largely trending between 1.1 million and 1.3 million since."

The combination of sustained high demand and historically low fees indicates that the enhancements promised by Dencun are indeed effective.

Why it matters: With Ethereum ETFs coming soon, investor’s will be looking for every reason to invest in the $400 billion asset.

Last week CoinSnacks had a bit of a moment…

As outlined in last week’s newsletter, after publishing our writeup on what we called a “coordinated pump” around DeFi Technologies (DEFTF), the company responded by stating our writeup was a “short and distort report.”

Soon after, we quickly responded that regardless of their insinuation, it was not a short report because we had no position in the stock nor any financial incentive.

Now, had things ended there, your friendly CoinSnacks editors would have been on our merry way.

But what happened next quite surprised us…

While a handful of publications began reporting on the story, none of it felt very organic. Let’s take a look at some headlines:

Slams… claps back… denounces…

Change the adjectives around, and every one of these headlines sound exactly the same.

Or how about these…

Why these two? Because as we pointed out in our original reporting, DeFi Technologies ONLY HAS ONE NON-INCENTIVIZED ANALYST.

You know what didn’t happen?

Not one major crypto publication that covered this story took the time to look into anything we were saying. Not one of them reached out to us for comments. Most failed even to report that we denied the claims of us being involved in some kind of fraudulent, sketchy hedge fund activity. The only person to actually dig into our claims was Edwin Dorsey from The Bear Cave.

Why? Like all other media, this is what happens when you are reliant on Google and salacious headlines to drive traffic and show advertisements.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We still read and support (some of) these crypto publications. We’ve privately and publicly advocated for individuals to read and support them as well.

Hell, part of the reason we built onepagecrypto.com, was to get more eyeballs on these sources – so much so that we didn’t even include CoinSnacks as a source on the site.

But overall, we can’t help but be a little sour about the whole ordeal.

What you’re seeing is a first-hand example of why media can lose trust over time.

Related: Crypto media publications are suffering traffic woes, likely for a lot of the same reasons mainstream sites are

Tweet Of The Week

Other Content You Might Enjoy

About CoinSnacks

Launched in December 2017, CoinSnacks is home to the longest continuously running crypto newsletter. Each week, we publish our cryptoasset musings to an audience of 35k+ crypto enthusiasts and investors.

In a space flooded with new projects, research, and narratives, you may feel overwhelmed or confused. CoinSnacks offers a solution by doing the digging for you, so you don't have to spend hundreds of hours sifting through the noise. Learn more here »

Reach Our Audience

If you’re a brand interested in partnering with CoinSnacks to find your next customers, partners, or allies, we’d love to hear from you. Learn more here.

_{*APY is not hypothetical but based on underlying APRs borrowers pay in existing loans. Create an account to view more details about those loans.}