Dear all,

Bullish sentiment gathers as Bitcoin rises 16% in two weeks. Let us bring you the usual NFT and digital market overviews for the first week of July.

🌐 Two Weeks Market Brief

Bitcoin for the past 2 weeks ending 3rd July rose 16.09%, Ethereum 12.79% and rest of the market 8.05%. The market sentiment has turned quite bullish as we approach the 31k resistance in Bitcoin.

The bullish sentiment is being driven by the potential institutional adoption of the major digital assets. Following Blackrock, a host of other traditional insitutions applied for a spot Bitcoin ETF including the likes of Fidelity and Cboe. In Hong Kong, HSBC is said to allow its customers to trade Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs listed on the Hong Kong exchange. Bitcoin and Ethereum both rallied on the back of these news and several baskets of altcoins followed. Those include BTC forks such as $BCH and $LTC and de-fi 1.0 coins such as $UNI, $COMP and $AAVE etc.

Figure1: ISM Manufacturing PMI remains in recenssion territory / Source: Tradingview

The rally in risk assets continues with no real signs of slowing down as traders remain optimistic about inflation coming down. Also the US treasury debt issuance following the extension of the debt limit seems to be absorbed in large part by the idle liquidity in reverse repo facility preventing any liquidity crunch. However, the economy keeps showing signs of rolling over as ISM PMI record another low at 46 (Figure 1). The yield curve also remains deeply inverted which has been a cause for concern as it often indicates an upcoming economic downturn. The fate of the market in the second half of the year hangs in the balance, as the looming possibility of a recession will determine its trajectory.

NFT Market Overview

Volume was up a bit in the past two week due to Azuki Elements airdrop but it came back down. We can’t be so reliant on volumes these days as majority of the trades are happening on Blur marketplace, which means volumes are caused by airdrop farmers. Number of traders are relatively flat compared to two weeks ago.

Source: nftgo.io

What is most notable lately is the fall of floor prices in major collections, reflecting the broader cooldown in the NFT market. The situation is so bad that the community responded by no longer calling them “blue chip” collections. Amongst them is Bored Ape Yacht Club, where its floor price has at one point sunk below 30 ETH, reflecting a new low that has not been observed since October 2021. Also, the floor prices of Azuki collections, including the original, Beanz and the newly released Elementals have shown a drop in price after the airdrop due to several issues, including the new image not having a significant difference from its original, even though it costs holders 2 ETH to purchase it.

Source: Twitter