Second Half Of The Year Begins

Main Takeaway: H1 2022 Was Rough

June is finally over, and it will go down as one of the worst months in crypto history. From January 1st, 2022 to July 1st, 2022 the crypto market cap dropped from $2.25 trillion to $875 billion, which means a decline of $1.37 trillion for a percentage decline of over 60%. In the image below you can find this statistic visualized. In other words, 2022 has been terrible for crypto, but not crypto alone.

It’s worth mentioning that the S&P 500 is down 21% and the Nasdaq is down 30%, so crypto is certainly falling in the general direction of the equity markets.

(S&P 500 is down 21% in H1 2022)

(The Nasdaq is down 30% in H1 2022)

Interestingly, yesterday continued a two-day decline in the cryptocurrency markets and traditional equities, with Bitcoin and Ethereum both falling below their psychological levels of $20,000 and $1,000, even falling almost as far as last week’s multi-year lows. We mentioned before that the bottom may not be in, so investors will have to see solid accumulation at these support levels before they can feel more comfortable.

In addition, Michael Saylor announced another Bitcoin purchase, and banks such as Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have made crypto bullish statements lately, but none of these factors are enough to reverse course. The sideways market and volatility to the downside will likely continue until the Fed and other advanced economies slow down their interest rate hikes and get inflation under control, which is not yet going to happen.

Key Stories: Celsius & BlockFi Deals Off The Table, Ethereum Getting Ditched

Going back to DeFi contagion, Celsius and BlockFi have been entertaining buyers to take over their assets and business, but after further investigation into these acquisitions, buyers are still wary of moving forward, especially with regards to Celsius, which reportedly has a huge $2 billion dollar debt.

Secondly, dYdX, a decentralized exchange will be ditching StarkWare to launch a Cosmos chain due to throughput, and Ethereum layer 2 rollup solution Optimism couldn’t handle the load of a recent token airdrop, and lastly, Arbitrum, a layer 1/layer 2 token bridge is pausing its Odyssey program due to congestion. All three of these instances show the issues surrounding Ethereum and blockchain scalability, decentralization, throughput, gas, and modular blockchains.

Investor Insights: STEPN Forward In The DEX Rankings

STEPN, the popular move-to-earn, sneaker NFT marketplace game and economy’s decentralized exchange called DOOAR just surpassed Orca to become the largest decentralized exchange on Solana.

This is potentially bullish news for the STEPN game as it seeks to add more features, continue attracting more users and downloads, and continues developing its Web3 business.

Phemex is a great platform for those wanting to buy the STEPN game’s governance token GMT  – recently the token is trading in the upward direction, following a few months of significant downward pressure on the token.

Today’s Top Gainers

As the second half of 2022 begins, these are the leading increasing coins on Phemex: PlayDapp (PLA/USDT), AMP (AMP/USDT), Trust Wallet (TWT/USDT), IDEX (IDEX/USDT), and Storm X (STMX/USDT).