12th April 2023 - Shanghai.

tl;dr

Ethereum upgrade Shanghai is happening today.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

That breach of $30k to the upside yesterday was most welcome. Though we have dipped below that for now this psychologically important level does not appear to have triggered a wall of selling.

With the leveraged shorts placing stops around this price, I am surprised to see that perpetual futures funding rates have not turned hugely positive. Indeed, it seems the leveraged children continue to add to their shorts, which can only be good for the price of BTC in the short term.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Ethereum upgrade Shanghai

Today is the day for the Shanghai upgrade to the Ethereum network (see CCC 5th April 2023). Whilst most commentary has been directed at predicting a sell-off in the price of ETH, regular readers know that is most unlikely to be the case. Glassnode has come to a similar conclusion (https://insights.glassnode.com/the-week-onchain-week-15-2023/).

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Want to party to Shanghai?

The upgrade is scheduled for block 6209536 which is predicted to be validated at sometime between 10 and 11pm tonight UTC. There are events planned to celebrate this significant milestone. For example, The Ethereum Cat Herders are hosting an online Watch Party:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVq1pz3FrDo

Or perhaps an online “paint party” is more your thing:

https://twitter.com/POAPart

Or, if you fancy organising your own event, well you will need to know exactly what is going on in each block immediately after the upgrade:

https://beaconcha.in/

…

I know I can easily be accused of being over-enthusiastic about cryptos, but this is all a step too far for me.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – MicroStrategy (MS)

MS continues to put its treasury funds to work by buying BTC. Now the proud owner of 140mm BTC valued at $4.2bn or so, this stash is worth 112% of the market’s valuation of MS. Since we first looked at MS on 31st December 2020, the shares have returned a loss of 15% whilst BTC has shown a gain of 3%.

The investment made by MS into BTC has been at an average price of $29.8k so just about squeezing into the green now, though some earlier losses have been realised as part of a legitimate tax-minimisation strategy.

I remain convinced that this leveraged play on the price of BTC will significantly outperform BTC itself during bull markets and will underperform during bear markets. Both convictions have been proved right in the intervening 28 months since we first started following this company. The CCC continues to add MS to its treasury holdings, though that is most certainly not to be interpreted as investment advice of any kind.