Major News in The Crypto Marketplace

The second quarter of 2022 has not been a calm one for crypto traders and investors. There are several reasons for the current state of affairs, and all of them are independently newsworthy. For starters, the world’s most highly capitalized crypto, bitcoin (BTC), dropped 30 percent of its value between April 1 and early May. But that’s not all. Virtually every aspect of the alt-coin marketplace has been cracking with changes, unexpected developments, and volatility. What else is impacting the digital currency space besides BTC’s huge decline? In London and other big cities, there’s been a rise in crypto muggings, or people being robbed of their phones so crooks can access brokerage accounts and siphon money out of them.

Additionally, stable-coin UST dropped below its safety point and caused all sorts of trepidation within the financial world. Even after UST recovered the majority of its price drop, experts were still wondering what happened. The second-biggest crypto, ethereum, also saw a significant value drop around the same time as bitcoin did. That’s not a surprise because the two often travel together on price charts. A significant shock for some was ETH’s seeming inability to recover after the precipitous fall. As of May, the smart contract cryptocurrency was still fighting its way back. If any economic story has dominated the alt-coin Bitcoin news for Q2 so far, it’s the highly volatile price changes in both BTC and ETH.

In order to get a grip on all the latest developments, it’s important to review the recent price charts for those two coins and see how cryptocurrency trading might play out for the remainder of the year.

BTC Takes a Nosedive

From April 1 to the first week of May, bitcoin lost nearly a third of its total value and landed very near the bottom of its 2022 price chart. As is the case with all things crypto, analysts have multiple theories to explain why the drop took place. Likewise, there are at least a half-dozen predictions about where BTC will go from here. Volatility is nothing new to the cryptocurrency marketplace. Indeed, it’s expected, but a 30 percent drop in a five-week period is worrisome to crypto enthusiasts and investors across the board. Late in 2021, there was hope that the alt-coin might reach a psychological $100,000 benchmark before the end of the year. Now, most who hold any amount of BTC will likely be happy to see it claw its way back to the early April level of $46,300.

UST Tremors Still Unexplained

The stable-coin UST dropped about two percent in value during the first week of May and proceeded to slowly recover most of the falloff. However, pundits and analysts still aren’t sure how a stable coin with such a vast capitalization can defy its pegged price and decline even a little. The lesson of the UST experience is that even pegged stable coins aren’t all that stable.

Ethereum Struggling to Recover

Ethereum (ETH), the world’s second-largest alt-coin and the one with a smart contract platform to support it, followed bitcoin’s lead and gave up about 30 percent of its price from early April through May 10. ETH enthusiasts are excited about new developments in the coin’s blockchain, which they hope will further differentiate it from arch-rival BTC. However, the recent wave of volatility that struck the entire cryptocurrency market sent shocks through the ETH community and has advocates wanting to hurry up with the new architecture. The goal is to get ethereum to a point where it won’t ride along with every one of BTC’s ups and downs and will stand alone as a fully independent virtual currency.

Crypto Thugs a New Phenomenon

Recent reports of on-street robberies are boosting calls for better digital security in cryptocurrency and other types of brokerage accounts. In London, New York City, and Paris, victims say they were accosted by robbers who demanded passwords to banking and brokerage accounts. When victims resist, the criminals threaten or beat them to get the passwords. Then, the crooks proceed to transfer brokerage account capital to ATM-accessible banks and pull the money out of nearby machines. The problem is that anyone with a smartphone is a target, and IT security specialists are scrambling to come up with a solution to this new kind of strong-arm robbery.