Bitcoin and ether, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, surged to all-time high prices on Tuesday, hours before the shares of crypto exchange Coinbase are due to start trading on Nasdaq.

“Coinbase going public provides a further boost of confidence in the cryptocurrencies sector,” David Russell, vice president of market intelligence at TradeStation, wrote in an email.

• The price for bitcoin (BTC), the oldest cryptocurrency and the largest by market value, set a new record of $64,829.14 before setting back to $63,633.51 at press time, up 0.8% in the last 24 hours based on CoinDesk 20 data.
• Ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain and the second-largest overall, set a new high-water mark of $2,399.61, before subsiding to $2,380.84, up 4.7% in the last 24 hours.
• The new marks continue a two-day surge by the two cryptocurrencies in the lead-up to Coinbase's direct listing, a seminal moment in the history of crypto. Analysts said the extra publicity and investor-relations chatter surrounding the listing might lead to an uptick in the pace of cryptocurrency adoption, or at the very least, speculation.

Bitcoin is up over $500 on a four-hour basis after testing lower supports near $44,000 during Asia’s late morning trading hours.

The rebound from 24-hour lows of $44,248 follows a period of profit-taking, seen Tuesday, on the back of short-term fatigue, as CoinDesk reported. Bitcoin is currently changing hands for around $45,000 and is down 2.9% from a 24-hour high of $47,157, CoinDesk data shows.

Bitcoin continues to cool upon multiple attempts at the $50,000 price tag, evoking moments of price action gone by, though that may be less of a concern now given demand from bigger players, according to some.

“In comparison to the bull runs in 2017 and 2018, the current movement takes a more mature trend,” said Cynthia Wu, head of sales at Singapore-based digital asset services firm Matrixport. “The market landscape has become much more institutionalized – where now you have proprietary traders in crypto hedge funds, crypto-offerings from foreign exchange brokers and institutions … that are transacting on an institutional scale.”

The ongoing price trend for bitcoin (BTC, -2.31%) and the fusion of retail and institutional interest are a sign that the search for yield by investors, big or small, has extended into crypto and “will be around for good,” Wu added.

Bitcoin’s daily price action remains relatively flat with the weight of the previously discussed 200-day moving average bearing down on prices near $45,500, a sign a further sell pressure could be lurking around the corner.

Though the altcoin market continues to hold firm with most in the top 20 by market cap remaining in the green when viewing over a seven-day period.

“Overall, the markets have seen a positive trend continue this week; altcoins are up while bitcoin has coasted flat,” said Byron Goldberg, Australian country manager at crypto exchange Luno. “Interestingly, we are seeing ether (ETH, -5.12%) slightly outperform bitcoin week-on-week.”

Over a 30-day period, ether is up 67.6% compared to bitcoin’s 46.3% over the same period, Messari data shows.

Goldberg points to Ethereum’s London hard fork as the likely catalyst for driving prices higher on the world’s second-largest crypto by market capitalization.

Indeed, futures premium on ether stands at 7.36% to bitcoin’s meagre 2.8%, meaning the crypto markets are likely anticipating ether to rise further than bitcoin over the next three months with a shift in institutional interest, Goldberg added.

All major cryptos in the top 20 posted results in the red over a 24-hour period by press time, with dogecoin (DOGE, -10.16%) having shed the most while uniswap (UNI, -10.91%), and chainlink (LINK, -9.97%) followed close behind.

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Trading in non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, is soaring to multiples of the levels seen earlier this year when the phenomenon burst into public consciousness with breathless headlines in mainstream media and gasps among art dealers.

The number of sales on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, reached more than 60,000 per day over the past week, nearly eight times the peak in March, according to a report by crypto intelligence firm Coin Metrics. According to another data tracker, DappRadar, OpenSea’s trading volume over the past 30 days was $1.22 billion, up 933% from the previous 30 days.

Such growth suggests the hysteria epitomized by the artist Beeple’s $69 million sale of his work, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” at Christie’s may have merely represented a glimpse of the industry’s potential.

“If NFTs start gaining as much outside attention as they did earlier this year, there may be an even bigger boom yet to come,” wrote Coin Metrics.

The latest boom was partly driven by the sale of NFT collections such as CryptoPunk, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Pudgy Penguins. 

Google search activity globally still ranks lower than in March: 

A tricky question for cryptocurrency traders is how to play the trend. There’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma over how the NFT market affects the price of ether (ETH, -5.12%), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, where much of the NFT ecosystem resides.

As NFTs are usually priced in ETH, a sudden rise in ETH price may deter new entrants to the NFT markets, the report noted. However, higher NFT sales may help attract new users to Ethereum.

In March and during the recent NFT boom, OpenSea sales and ether increased in tandem, according to Coin Metrics. During other times, such as in May, the ETH price peaked while NFT sales on OpenSea plummeted. 

Cryptocurrencies were mostly lower on Tuesday as declining volume suggests a pullback is near. Bitcoin was trading around $45,418 at press time and is down about 1.6% over the past 24 hours. 

Some analysts are optimistic about the long-term recovery in crypto prices, although the pace of the upside will likely slow over the short term.  

“While many of the technical and on-chain indicators confirm this rebound’s strength, it may still be early to say we are out of the woods,” Nathan Cox, chief investment officer at digital asset management firm TwoPrime, wrote Tuesday in an email to investors.

Latest prices

Cryptocurrencies:

• Bitcoin (BTC) $45,418, -1.59%
• Ether (ETH) $3,103.5, -1.98%

Traditional markets:

• S&P 500: 4448, -0.7%
• Gold: $1,785.01, -0.08%
• 10-year Treasury yield closed at 1.263%, down from 1.268% on Monday.

Traders are also monitoring the ongoing regulatory crackdown in several nations, which could damp bullish sentiment. 

On Tuesday, the Shenzhen branch of the People’s Bank of China plans to “promptly clean up and rectify” 11 companies for providing illicit crypto trading activities, state-owned Shanghai Securities Journal reported. 

In Spain, the National Securities Market Commission issued a warning notice for 12 companies, including crypto exchanges Huobi and Bybit, for providing investment services without being registered with authorities, CoinDesk’s Eliza Gkritsi reported. 

And in South Korea, a crypto exchange subsidiary of Japanese tech giant LINE, is reportedly limiting its services next month, according to a report by Yonhap News.

For now, technical charts suggest bitcoin remains in breakout mode with support around $42,000. The loss of short-term momentum could trigger a brief period of profit taking. 

Bitcoin mining revenue rise

Miners are experiencing greater revenue as the Bitcoin blockchain’s hashrate recovers from July lows. This is a positive sign for the blockchain network and could point to further bitcoin accumulation by miners. 

“Over the course of the last two months, hashrate has increased by around 25% from the lows, suggesting hashrate equivalent to around 12.5% of the affected miners have come back online,” Glassnode analysts wrote in a blog post.

The hashrate refers to the total combined computational power that is being used to mine and process transactions. 

“In response, the Hash-Ribbons, which attempt to model where stress enters the mining market, have commenced another positive cross-over,” Glassnode wrote. “The Hash-Ribbons are formed by taking the 30-day and 60-day moving average of hashrate with the following signals,” as shown in the chart below. 

Decreasing volume

Bitcoin’s trading volume on leading spot exchanges declined over the past week as the short-squeeze rally stalls. 

“After the seven-day average real BTC trading volume pushed towards $7 billion last week, we’re now back to $5 billion,” Arcane Research wrote in a Tuesday report.

If bitcoin continues to trade higher on declining volume, “it can signify an exhausted market, and it will probably not be a sustainable move,” Arcane wrote. “We want to see a clear uptick in volume if the BTC price jumps up towards $50K again.”

Latest on Poly Network hack

The Poly Network cyberattack saga has dragged into its second week with the hacker or hackers yet to provide the key for the multi-signature wallet needed to complete the full return of the roughly $600 million that was stolen, with the exception of the $33 million worth of the stablecoin USDT that was frozen by Tether, reports CoinDesk’s Nelson Wang.

China-based Poly Network had previously offered $500,000 to the attacker or attackers as a reward for returning the money taken on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Ethereum and Polygon platforms in what is likely the largest-ever hack of a decentralized finance (DeFi) site. 

In a message posted to the Ethereum blockchain at 1:45 p.m. UTC on Monday, the attacker, who the Poly Network is calling “Mr. White Hat” but who some others doubt is a true white-hat hacker, said that they were considering taking the bounty and using it to reward anyone else who can hack the cross-chain platform. A “white hat” attacker is one who tries to exploit vulnerabilities in a protocol to help expose and ultimately fix bugs or loopholes in the underlying code.

”MONEY MEANS LITTLE TO ME, SOME PEOPLE ARE PAID TO HACK, I WOULD RATHER PAY FOR THE FUN,” the attacker or attackers wrote.

Altcoin roundup

• AUDIO Market Cap Surges Past $1B: Prices for AUDIO, the governance token of decentralized music streaming protocol Audius, nearly doubled in the past 24 hours, pushing its market capitalization above $1 billion for the first time. The price surge comes after Audius announced its partnership with popular video-sharing app TikTok. Data from TradingView and FTX shows that AUDIO’s price started pumping around 16:00 UTC on Aug. 16 and reached a high at $4.04 at approximately 6:00 UTC on Aug. 17. News of the TikTok tie-up first emerged at 15:00 UTC on Aug. 16.
• Dfinity’s ICP Rebounds: The blockchain company Dfinity made headlines in May when its internet computer (ICP) tokens were officially released for public trading at a price of $630, giving the project a $45 billion market capitalization. The enthusiasm quickly evaporated as the token plunged 95% over the following month to as low as $27. Since then, the token’s price has doubled to more than $60, according to data from Messari, signaling renewed appetite from investors. Some traders are feeling fresh enthusiasm for the token thanks to a recent increase in developer activity taking place on the network. That’s despite lingering ill will among some investors and developers, including dissidents who have formed a splinter group as well as plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed in a U.S. federal court. 
• 1inch Network Launches on Ethereum Optimism: 1inch Network, a platform that aims to find the best deals across multiple decentralized exchanges (DEXs), has expanded to the Optimistic Ethereum mainnet. The move to the layer 2 network makes 1inch Network the second decentralized finance (DeFi) app on Optimistic Ethereum, with the first being Uniswap, 1inch spokesperson Sergey Maslennikov told CoinDesk. 

Relevant news:

Other markets

Notable winners of 21:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

the graph (GRT) +4.69%

Notable losers:

eos (EOS) -6.86%

stellar (XLM) -6.56%

ethereum classic (ETC) -6.12%

The blockchain company Dfinity made headlines in May when its internet computer (ICP) tokens were officially released for public trading at a price of $630, giving the project a $45 billion market capitalization. The enthusiasm quickly evaporated as the token plunged 95% over the following month to as low as $27. 

Since then, the token’s price has doubled to more than $60, according to data from Messari, signaling renewed appetite from investors. 

Some traders are feeling fresh enthusiasm for the token thanks to a recent increase in developer activity taking place on the network. That’s despite lingering ill will among some investors and developers, including dissidents who have formed a splinter group as well as plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed in a U.S. federal court. 

According to Dfinity, as of July, just 10 weeks after its public trading launch, the Internet Computer network had attracted 500 developers and nearly 250,000 users of its applications. Earlier this month, Dfinity announced that a project called distrikt, described as the world’s first decentralized social media network running entirely on a blockchain, had launched on the Internet Computer network. 

“There’s interest from developers and engineers because ICP is superfast to build on,” said Tom Serres, ICP investor and co-founder of Warburg Serres Investments. “This is what differentiates it from Ethereum.”

The token allows users to participate in and govern the Internet Computer network, which aims to help users publish on the Internet while avoiding going through large tech giants such as Amazon or Facebook. The network was built by the Swiss-based Dfinity Foundation and currently has a market cap of just over $8.5 billion. 

According to Messari, Internet Computer will rely more on large data centers and high-end node machines (validators) when compared to networks like Ethereum. 

“The mainnet of Dfinity runs on world-class servers and data centers, making the speed faster, almost instant,” said Serres. 

Dfinity has faced extensive backlash for its handling of the token launch and now, with founder Dominic Williams, faces a class action complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

According to the class action complaint, “Defendants have promoted, offered and sold throughout the United States unregistered securities called ‘ICP tokens’ and have engaged in insider trading of such securities, in violation of federal law.”

The complaint goes on to say that “by selling and promoting these unregistered security tokens to investors, and by transacting in them while in possession of material, non-public information, defendants have reaped billions of dollars in profits.” 

A group of former ICP community members frustrated with Dfinity’s leadership and what they describe as a lack of transparency has formed a splinter group called ICP Reboot. The collective says it aims to “relaunch” the ICP protocol by forking the project to “establish democratic control over this new network,” according to a website for the group.

Ross Jackson, who identified himself as a marketing volunteer for ICP Reboot, said he found frustration with Dfinity’s handling of the token distribution in May. 

According to Jackson, most members of the new ICP Reboot community were part of the seed or presale rounds of ICP funding, and some of them have a significant stake in ICP. The ICP Reboot project is funded by donations and operates on a volunteer basis, he said.

“Dfinity didn’t provide concrete information on how to access wallets in the lead-up to the Genesis event,” said Jackson. He said Dfinity and other venture-capital investors had no vesting periods imposed on them, but the project’s leaders didn’t announce that fact until 16 days after the launch.

“This allowed these insiders to sell large quantities of ICP while pre-sale, seed round and retail investors were getting squashed,” said Jackson. 

Jackson said Dfinity executives have not been transparent with the community members of ICP and external stakeholders about how many tokens they have sold since the event in May and have avoided most questions regarding the matter. Additionally, Dfinity only announced that insiders were not vested 16 days after the launch of ICP, said Jackson. 

On Twitter, BlockTower Capital co-founder Ari Paul wrote that it “seems impossible to get accurate info on Dfinity on some of the most basic and critical financial aspects.”

According to a report published in June by Arkham Intelligence that analyzed blockchain data, “It appears Dfinity was not transparent about how tokens were distributed and when they would be unlocked, contrary to industry best practices.” 

“What we found from our research concerned many ICP investors and worried me as well,” said Miguel Morel, CEO of Arkham Intelligence, a crypto analysis firm, in an interview. “I wanted to help clarify these questions.” 

Dfinity “quietly allowed the treasury and insiders to send 18.9 million of ICP to exchanges, while making it extremely difficult for their longtime supporters to access the tokens they were promised,” according to the report.

Dfinity’s founder Dominic Williams said in an email with CoinDesk that there’s a lot of “misinformation out there (primarily, shills from blockchains that are being made obsolete, people wanting to manipulate markets, and lawyers trying to extort money),” and that he would soon rebut this in a blog post.

“This project is going to be huge and it’s a shame media reporting is so dominated by noise from detractors,” Williams wrote in the email.

So why the recent investor interest? 

“ICP is built with a view that Web 3.0 is a matter of when, and not if,” said Denis Vinokourov, head of research at Synergia Capital. “Thus it is no surprise that it has been one of the best performers.”

Web 3.0 represents a vision of the future of the Internet, powered by blockchain-enabled financial applications and focusing on making data interconnected in a decentralized way. It’s considered a leap forward from the current generation of the Internet, referred to as Web 2.0, where data is stored in centralized repositories, according to CoinMarketCap. 

“It’s open and it cuts out the middleman,” said Pablo Quiroga, COO of Star Atlas, a virtual gaming metaverse, when describing Web 3.0. “ICP created an environment where gatekeepers are bypassed, demonopolization is happening and the buildout of technology is democratized.” 

“ICP’s price action in the last few weeks is likely driven by news of ongoing traction in their ecosystem,” said Kay Khemani, managing director at Spectre.ai. 

DeckDeckGO, ICDrive and Distrikapp, an ICP-powered social platform, are examples of recent additions to their growing library of decentralized applications, or dapps, according to Khemani. 

He said that currently over 1,400 developers are developing dapps for ICP. 

Internet Computer announced Aug. 12 that Windows users can now access dapps through its ‘Internet Identity,’ opening up a huge new user base for Internet Computer-based dapps. 

“As we see with Ethereum, the more the developer activity, the stronger the tailwind on price,” said Khemani.

Some analysts in digital-asset markets have also been scrutinizing flows of the ICP tokens on and off of cryptocurrency exchanges. Inflows are often interpreted as traders moving their tokens into position to sell, while outflows are seen as traders moving tokens to longer-term custody or wallets, with the intent to hold. 

“ICP seemingly had its largest exchange inflow days in May and June,” Morel said. “Its largest exchange outflows appear to have been in July and August. This, combined with overall market bullishness recently, is what traders I know have stated as a reason for ICP’s recent price increase.” 

Matt Blom, global head of sales trading at Diginex, said he predicts ICP could “rally hard” at some point. 

“My view was that a coin that had that much belief from smart investors has to come back at some point,” Blom said. “It’s not going to zero.”