The prices are low and the panic is high. Is this the time to sell?

If you’ve been around crypto for longer than a couple of months, you’re probably familiar with the feelings that come with your average market-wide correction.

Euphoria fizzling away as that first red candle starts dropping down, down, down. Confidence in a quick recovery giving way to sweaty-palmed anxiety as the correction passes the 10, 20, 30% mark. Is this the big one? We all know what happened on March 13th last year. Finger hovering over the “Sell” button, knowing that if you just pressed it this horrible feeling would go away.

And even worse are the recriminations. How could I have been so blind? How did I let this happen? Why didn’t I sell when the going was good? Will I ever feel joy again?

Unrealised profit and loss

Look, I’m not going to say I told you so, but if there has ever been a market in need of a correction it was the crypto market of the last two months. It wasn’t a question of if your alt was going to do a 50 or 100% day; it was a question of when. Meanwhile, Bitcoin basically tripled its 2017 all-time high over the course of eight weeks, making it (briefly) a trillion dollar asset.

It’s not that bitcoin doesn’t deserve to be in that August club, but more to point out that markets will always revert to the mean, no matter how compelling the background narrative might be. And in the same way that you don’t expect to see an elephant jump over a small apartment block, an asset of bitcoin’s size shouldn’t be tripling in size like it ain’t no thing. Especially not when it’s taken three long, hard years to get back to its previous peak.

Timing is everything

Here’s the thing though: in every other market that humanity has ever created, taking three years to make a new all-time high actually is perfectly reasonable, bordering on suspiciously fast. Investments aren’t supposed to be measured in days or weeks. They’re supposed to take years, if not decades to play out. But the speed, 24/7 relentlessness and hyper-visibility of the crypto markets means it’s very easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. People who bought in at the absolute peak of the last bubble are still up 250% – presuming that they had the patience to hold on for a measly three years.

Nonetheless, selling can produce a real and concrete advantage. Get out near the top and you might be able to buy back in close to the bottom, thereby compounding your gains. (Despite what the people of TikTok Investors would have you believe, this is far harder than it appears.)

More simply though, money is money and when assets are appreciating like crypto assets have recently that can mean getting ahead of your mortgage, or buying a car, or paying for a holiday for your family, or being able to cover rent for the next month. If what you’ve made could make a difference in your life, then it makes complete and total sense to sell some – even if you think the crypto market is going to keep on going up. As the old adage goes, no-one ever went poor from taking profits.

Respect the sell-out

That’s not an invitation or a suggestion to sell it all right now – a good rule of thumb is sell when it feels hard (i.e. on the way up) not when it’s easy (on the way down) – but more to start thinking about what your endgame is. What do you hope to gain from this bull run? How much is enough? And will you be strong enough to start getting out when you reach your target? (Also, on a more prosaic note, what would taking profits mean for your tax?)

These are questions without easy answers, but start planning now and you’re less likely to be swept up in the mania and delirium that marks the real, bloody and unmistakable end of the bull market. And until then? DIAMOND HANDS ENGAGE.

Source: https://blog.coinjar.com/the-hard-sell/

Overview

• Total spot trading volume at $1.68 billion, down from the 30-day average of $2.09 billion.
• Total futures notional at $584.1 million.
• The top five traded coins were, respectively, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, Cardano, and Polkadot.
• Strong returns from Curve Dao (+12%), Flow (+5.1%), and Melon (+6.4%).

#####################. Trading Volume by Asset. ##########################################

Trading Volume by Asset

The figures below break down the trading volume of the largest, mid-size, and smallest assets. Cryptos are in purple, fiats are in blue. For each asset, the chart contains the daily trading volume in USD, and the percentage of the total trading volume. The percentages for fiats and cryptos are treated separately, so that they both add up to 100%.

Figure 1: Largest trading assets: trading volume (measured in USD) and its percentage of the total trading volume (March 02 2021)

Figure 2: Mid-size trading assets: (measured in USD) (March 02 2021)

Figure 3: Smallest trading assets: (measured in USD) (March 02 2021)

#####################. Spread %. ##########################################

Spread %

Spread percentage is the width of the bid/ask spread divided by the bid/ask midpoint. The values are generated by taking the median spread percentage over each minute, then the average of the medians over the day.

Figure 4: Average spread % by pair (March 02 2021)

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#########. Returns and Volume ############################################

Returns and Volume

Figure 5: Returns of the four highest volume pairs (March 02 2021)

Figure 6: Volume of the major currencies and an average line that fits the data to a sinusoidal curve to show the daily volume highs and lows (March 02 2021)

###########. Daily Returns. #################################################

Daily Returns %

Figure 7: Returns over USD and XBT. Relative volume and return size is indicated by the size of the font. (March 02 2021)

###########. Disclaimer #################################################

The values generated in this report are from public market data distributed from Kraken WebSockets api. The total volumes and returns are calculated over the reporting day using UTC time.

Source: https://blog.kraken.com/post/8108/kraken-daily-market-report-for-march-02-2021/

In an ongoing effort to battle escalating transaction fees while creating a unified ecosystem, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a solution for a particular type of cross-rollup scaling.

The proposal outlines how two protocols using rollups can communicate with each other while maintaining interconnectivity and composability.

Rollups are layer-two solutions that are essentially smart contract networks that process and store transaction data off the main chain. However, there are a number of different rollup types, with each using unique smart contracts such as optimistic and zero-knowledge.

While a number of DeFi projects have deployed layer-two rollups, such as Loopring and Synthetix, the particulars of the various rollups mean projects are unable to communicate to one another directly on layer-two.

Buterin’s proposal assumes that one rollup can process simple transactions whereas the other has full smart contract support. There are already proposals for transfers between two smart contract enabled protocols using rollups.

To explain how the proposal works, Buterin provides the example of a hypothetical exchange intermediary he called ‘Ivan’ — where Ivan has an account ‘IVAN_A’ on rollup A that he fully controls, and also has some funds deposited in a smart contract ‘IVAN_B’ on rollup B.

The smart contract would be programmed to accept “memos” that include additional data from anyone sending to it in order to secure any future transactions. The transactions create a connecting layer that keeps deposits in all these isolated contracts, allowing rollup A to send to rollup B via this layer.

Buterin suggested that the behavior would work as follows;

“Alice sends a transaction to IVAN_A with N coins and a memo ALICE_B. Ivan sends a transaction sending TRADE_VALUE * (1 – fee) coins through IVAN_B to ALICE_B”

He added that the worst-case behavior would be if Ivan does not send coins to ALICE_B as he is expected to.

Addressing the “worst-case” scenario that could arise as a result of using the proposed situation, Buterin emphasized that Alice would still be able to wait until the transaction on rollup A confirms, find some alternate route to getting coins on rollup B to pay fees, and then simply claim the funds herself.

Responding to the proposal, Alon Muroch pointed out that it worked in a similar way to how banks clear transactions:

“That’s very interesting, similar to how banks clear transactions between themselves. Batching assets into separate “accounts” could have limitations, a solution could be just big pools on either ends and fees split pro-rata.”

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-proposes-solution-to-link-certain-layer-two-scaling-projects