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Crypto markets have hit a new 2019 high; Bitcoin dominating, ETH, BNB and XMR moving, LEO enters top twenty.  Market Wrap It has been another fruitful Friday in crypto land. Markets have hit a new high for the year and as usual it is Bitcoin driving them. A total market cap top of $300 billion was touched a few hours ago as BTC broke through resistance once again surging to a new 13 month high.

The move came a few hours ago during early Asian trading. This time it wasn’t a ‘Bart type spike’ but a gradual grind up through the resistance at $9,600 and on towards an intraday high of $9,800. Since then gains have mostly held as Bitcoin remained around $9,700 with plenty of talk about a further move to $10k today or over the weekend.

Ethereum also got a boost this time as a 4 percent climb lifted it to $280. In comparison however ETH is still way down, over 80 percent of ATH compared to BTC which is now close to 50 percent. There is no doubt that Ethereum will crack $300 and make bigger gains when altseason kicks in but at the moment the going is slow.

Altcoin Outlook The crypto top ten has not reacted with the usual fervor and aside from Binance Coin adding 6 percent nothing else has really moved much. There is a little green with Bitcoin Cash and EOS adding 2 percent each but others such as BSV are falling back.  There has been no movement on XRP, LTC and XLM.

The top twenty is equally lethargic aside from Monero which is still climbing with a further 6 percent today to reach $108. The Bitfinex transparency initiative UNUS SED LEO has arrived on the scene as CMC has just registered a market cap of $1.8 billion jumping it straight into 14th place above Dash. LEO tokens were trading at $1.84 at the time of writing. The rest of the altcoins are up a percent or flat at the moment.

FOMO: Egretia Climbing Higher Today’s top performing crypto top one hundred altcoin is Egretia again as entertainments based token surges 24 percent. A listing in Singapore’s BiUP exchange may have driven some of the momentum for EGT as the team rejoices.

Breaking News: Egretia is currently ranked 77 as per CoinMarketCap!!! EGT has seen the highest gain, growing almost 30% over the past 24H! More info, welcome to join us on telegram : https://t.co/G8oBPqZT64

#egt #blockchain #cryptocurrency #coinmarketcap pic.twitter.com/N0FoeUHwvj

— Egretia (@Egretia_io) June 21, 2019

Nash Exchange is getting a 12 percent boost today and Vestchain has made ten, these are the only three cryptos in double digits. Waltonchain and Grin are at the other end of the list dumping 10 percent each.

Total market cap 24 hours. Coinmarketcap.com Total crypto market capitalization surged almost $15 billion to top out at a new 2019 high of $300 billion a few hours ago. A slight correction has dropped markets back to $297 billion at the moment but things are still bullish. Bitcoin is the only thing driving market gains at the moment as dominance increases to 58 percent in its push to five figures.

Market Wrap is a section that takes a daily look at the top cryptocurrencies during the current trading session and analyses the best-performing ones, looking for trends and possible fundamentals.

Investors are rushing to stake Nash Exchange (NEX) tokens, in order to maximize returns from the exchange’s fee-split model.

The address for Nash’s staking smart contract has seen a sharp surge in its balance. More than 700,000 NEX has been added to the wallet since Monday, when Nash went live. That takes the total number of staked NEX tokens up to 2.8M, which is roughly 8% of the circulating supply.

NEX tokens staked in the NASH staking smart contract. Source: NEOSCAN. Creators describe Nash as a ‘distributed finance‘ platform.  In addition to the usual trading facilities found in a DEX, users can also make payments in cryptocurrencies through NashPay.

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Nash’s matching engine was built on the NEO blockchain, but cross-chain integrations allow communications with other protocols. All five Nash founders participated in the ‘City of Zion’ decentralized developer community, and are reportedly still involved in developing NEO infrastructure.

But the project is “not dependent on the NEO network,” said Co-founder Fabio Canesin in April.  The exchange has already incorporated scripting protocols for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).

Crypto Briefing first wrote about Nash when the project announced its ICO, to be held in early 2018. But the offering was delayed pending regulatory approval from Liechtenstein’s Financial Market Authority (FMA). Originally scheduled for Q1, the ICO was launched  in September of 2018.

An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for the exchange went live on Monday, allowing token holders to stake NEX tokens to receive a share of the trading fees. The staking rewards increase according to how long the tokens have been staked.

But the long-awaited launch failed to halt a considerable sell-off of NEX tokens, whose prices began to sink yesterday. After rising to $2.40 per token on Monday, they traded at approximately $1.70 at the time of writing.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Paddy Baker. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

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SponsoredUpdated May 9, 2024, 5:49 p.m. Published May 9, 2024, 5:00 p.m.

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Hyperbolic CEO Jasper Zhang (Hyperbolic)In mathematics, Jasper Zhang figures to be a sort of Zeus. He says he won gold medals at math olympiads in China and Russia, and it took him just two years to get a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Now he's trying his hand at solving a key problem at the intersection of two of the fastest-growing but most complicated areas – blockchain and AI.

Jasper Zhang is a speaker at CoinDesk's Consensus Festival, May 29-31, in Austin, Texas.

Hyperbolic, the two-year-old startup that Zhang leads focused on decentralized AI computing, said Thursday that it is introducing a protocol called “Proof of Sampling (PoSP),” aimed at addressing challenges with trust in decentralized AI networks.

Hyperbolic was co-founded in 2022 by Zhang and Yuchen Jin, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington.

The concept for the new protocol was created in conjunction with researchers from Berkeley and Columbia University, according to the team. It combines math, computer science and economics, deploying “advanced sampling methods and game theory to incentivize integrity and minimize computational demands across decentralized networks,” Hyperbolic shared in a press release with CoinDesk.

Zhang, 28, said in an interview with CoinDesk that he sees PoSP as the next iteration of verification for decentralized networks.

“People in the beginning thought there's only one way to do verification, which is with consensus," Zhang said. "Later on people discover optimistic proving and then ZK proofs.”

Now there's PoSP, he said, and it can not only be applied to AI, but also to rollups, a type of layer-2 blockchain, as well as so-called actively validated services (AVSs), which are protocols secured by restaking protocols like EigenLayer.

A research paper on the Proof of Sampling Protocol by Zhang and several co-authors was submitted on May 1 to arXiv, an open-access repository hosted by Cornell University for scientific papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed.

According to the paper, the design relies on a "pure strategy Nash Equilibrium." That refers to a game theory concept attributed to the Princeton University-educated mathematician John Nash, who was the subject of the 2001 Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe.

Here's a figure from the paper illustrating the architecture:

The Proof of Sampling architecture (Zhang et al)As part of the release, Hyperbolic is introducing “spML,” an implementation of PoSP built specifically for AI verification.

"SpML leverages the foundational principles of PoSP to create a verification mechanism that is not only faster and more secure but also economically feasible," Zhang said in the press release.

Now they just have to prove it works in practice.

Read more: The Enablers of Decentralized AI

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Funstrat co-founder Tom Lee says Ethereum could be the crypto market’s near-term leader, targeting a move to $12,000 by January on the back of Wall Street’s tokenization push and rising growth expectations for smart-contract platforms. In an interview released Nov. 10 with Tom Nash, Lee emphasized that while Bitcoin remains under-owned, “there’s a bigger move in Ethereum” over the next several weeks as capital reallocates toward the rails that power stablecoins and tokenized assets.

Why Ethereum Is Poised To Rally Soon Lee anchored his call to a blend of technical and fundamental drivers. Citing Funstrat’s head of technical strategy, he noted: “Mark Newton […] thinks we can be like $9,000 to $12,000 by January. I think that’s about right. I think Ethereum […] more than doubles between now and year end or between now and January.” In parallel, he said Bitcoin could reach the “high $100,000s, maybe even $200,000 by the end of the year,” while reiterating that Ethereum likely has the bigger near-term upside.

The crux of the Ethereum thesis, as Lee laid it out, is that the demand side of crypto is shifting toward applications that depend on smart contracts—precisely the domain where Ethereum is most entrenched.

“Even Cathie Wood wrote about it. She thinks stablecoins have been cannibalizing demand for Bitcoin and gold and tokenized gold is cannibalizing demand for Bitcoin. But stablecoins and tokenized gold run on smart contract blockchains like Ethereum,” he said. He added that “Wall Street is building and Larry Fink wants to tokenize everything on the […] blockchain. That means Ethereum is where people are starting to raise their growth expectations.”

Lee argued that this change in growth expectations matters as much as, if not more than, headline monetary policy over short windows. While acknowledging that the Federal Reserve remains a critical backdrop, he framed potential December easing as a catalyst for risk assets broadly—financials, small caps, and tech—and, by correlation, crypto. “If they cut in December, they’re confirming they’re on an easing cycle,” he said, calling that “really bullish” for equities most tightly linked to growth and liquidity. In Lee’s framework, those same flows support crypto assets—and Ethereum in particular—into year-end positioning.

The fund manager also located the crypto setup within a larger “super-cycle” he’s been mapping for years. He contends that markets are still in the early innings of an AI-driven capex boom and a demographic regime that keeps demand for productive technology elevated. That backdrop, he said, has repeatedly wrong-footed bears who anchored on yield-curve inversions and 1970s inflation analogs.

“People have a hard time understanding and grasping super cycles […] we look for story arcs that last 10 to 15 years,” he said, arguing the last three years showcased “mass misconceptions” about recession and persistent inflation that never reconciled with reported earnings.

The Macro Backdrop Pressed on risks to the call, Lee downplayed the idea that inflation is about to re-accelerate and argued that oil would need to approach levels near $200 to deliver a true growth shock to US households. “The most overrated risk is that inflation’s coming back,” he said, pointing to cooling housing and labor metrics and stating that recent claims about re-heating core services inflation were “dead wrong” when checked against the PCE series.

On policy path-dependence, he suggested that even a December hold by Chair Powell would likely accelerate political pressure for a leadership change, muting the medium-term impact on risk assets.

Timing-wise, Lee sees positioning as the near-term accelerant. He argued that institutions remain behind their benchmarks after repeatedly fading rallies through 2023–2025 and that the final weeks of the year often force a chase into outperforming segments. “There is incredible demand for equities because people are really off-sides […] 80% are trailing their benchmark this year […] they’re going to be buying stocks,” he said, adding that the AI trade “is going to come back strong” and that crypto tends to correlate with that move.

For Ethereum specifically, Lee’s case reduces to a simple through-line: the pipes getting built are where the next leg of growth accrues. Stablecoins, tokenized gold, and Wall Street’s broader tokenization agenda are traffic that runs on programmable blockchains; the market, in his view, is only beginning to price that through. “If you’re raising your growth expectations, then your discount to the future is going up,” Lee said, explaining why he believes ETH can “have a huge move into year end” and reach the $9,000–$12,000 range by January.

At press time, ETH traded at $3,447.

ETH bulls need to defend the 0.618 Fib, 1-week chart | Source: ETHUSDT on TradingView.com Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com