Decentral Block Post

Blockchain company LBRY Inc. — the creators of the LBRY blockchain — has issued its final message to the crypto, citing “several million dollars” of debts that have now made it impossible for the firm to continue.

“This will be our last post,” said the LBRY Inc. team in an Oct. 20 statement on Odysee, a LBRY-powered video-sharing website, which was also shared on X.

LBRY said several millions of dollars of debt owed to the SEC, its legal team and a private debtor ended up being too big a barrier to overcome.

“LBRY Inc. must die, there is no escaping this. It has lost a judgment to the federal government, has several million dollars in debts, and has pledged to shut down.”

“Thank you to everyone who fought with us for online freedom,” LBRY added in an Oct. 19 X post.

Sui's native SUI token has struggled to regain ground after plunging more than 9% amid allegations from South Korean regulators, which have accused the Sui Foundation of manipulating the supply of the token for its own gain. 

SUI token gained a little under 1% in the last 24 hours after falling from $0.41 on Oct. 16 to new lows of $0.37 on Oct. 18. Current prices mark a 7% decline in just two days, according to data from CoinGecko.

In an Oct. 18 post to X (formerly known as Twitter), the Sui Foundation — the organization behind layer-1 blockchain Sui — slammed the allegations of supply manipulation as “unfounded and materially false.”

“We want to address some inaccuracies that have been reported today,” said the Sui Foundation.

"The unfounded and materially false statements surrounding the supply of SUI tokens need to be addressed. There has never been any sale of SUI tokens by the Foundation after the initial Community Access Program (CAP) distributions. Period,” it explained.

Reddit has said it will soon shutter its long-running, blockchain-based rewards service “Community Points,” citing scalability concerns. 

In an official Oct. 17 announcement in the r/cryptocurrency subreddit, a Reddit team member said while the platform saw “some future opportunities for Community Points, there was no path to scale it broadly across the platform.”

The Community Points service, including the special memberships feature, will be wound down on Nov. 8. “At that point, you’ll also no longer see Points in your Reddit Vault nor earn any more Points in your communities,” the Reddit team member wrote.

First launched in May 2020, the community points feature rewarded users with points for positive engagement in certain subreddits and was designed to incentivize higher-quality content on the platform.

The points were Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens stored in the platform’s in-house crypto wallet service dubbed the “Reddit Vault.”

Stablecoin TrueUSD (TUSD) announced a potential leak of certain Know Your Customer (KYC) and transaction history data as one of TrueCoin’s third-party vendors got compromised. 

TrueCoin was the operator of the TUSD stablecoin till July 13, 2023. On Oct. 16, a third-party vendor’s security team informed TrueCoin of “an anomalous account change within [TrueCoin’s] organization made by a compromised support vendor.” As a result, TrueCoin suspects the compromise of some of TUSD’s existing customer data.

TrueCoin’s internal systems were not impacted or accessed, as the company confirmed that the attack was an isolated incident on a third-party vendor. “TUSD system is SECURE and not attacked. Both TUSD system and TUSD's reserves are UNAFFECTED,” affirmed TrueUSD through its official X (formerly Twitter) account.

Data collected from such breaches — names, email addresses and phone numbers, among others — are typically used for phishing attacks. Attackers reach out to unwary investors by mimicking various crypto services, often promising high profits in short amounts of time.

The impact of the attack and the resultant data leak is yet to be identified, as the total number of users’ data was not revealed during the announcement.

Decentralized liquid staking protocol Lido Finance has announced a decision to cease operations on the Solana blockchain following a community vote in Lido’s decentralized autonomous organization.

The proposal to sunset Lido on Solana was first put forward by Lido’s peer-to-peer team on Sept. 5, citing unsustainable financials and low fees generated by Lido on Solana. Voting commenced on Sept. 29 and finished a week later on Oct. 6.

“After extensive DAO forum discussion followed by community vote, the sunsetting of the Lido on Solana protocol was approved by Lido token holders and the process will begin shortly,” Lido explained in an Oct. 16 post.

Lido will not be accepting staking requests as of Oct. 16. Voluntary node operator off-boarding will begin on Nov. 17 and Lido users will need to unstake on Solana’s frontend by Feb. 4.

“After this date, unstaking will need to be done using the CLI,” Lido added.

After two successive weeks of gains, the S&P 500 Index (SPX) started the week on a positive note. This suggests a risk-on sentiment which is a bullish sign. The volatility is likely to pick up as 11% of the S&P 500 companies are expected to report results this week.

The risk-on sentiment could boost buying interest in select cryptocurrencies. One area where bullish activity is seen is the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). Grayscale’s legal victories have reduced the discount on the GBTC to its lowest level since 2021. This indicates that the investors are factoring in the possibility that the trust will finally convert into a spot Bitcoin  (BTC) ETF.

When the price does not break below the support levels on bad news and rises above the overhead resistance on favorable news, it shows that the shorts are running low on confidence. This increases the likelihood of an up-move in the near term.

What are the important overhead resistance levels on Bitcoin and altcoins that need to be crossed to start an uptrend? Let’s analyze the charts to find out.

S&P 500 Index price analysis

The S&P 500 Index (SPX) turned down from the 50-day simple moving average (4,401) on Oct. 12, but the bears could not sink the price below the important level at 4,325.

The S&P 500 Index nudged higher by 0.45% to record its second positive week. While the United States equities markets were a slow mover, gold witnessed a massive run-up of more than 5% this week. Its rally of 3.11% on Oct. 13 was its best one-day performance since Dec. 1 of last year. However, the Bitcoin (BTC) bulls did not have any such luck as Bitcoin is on track to end the week down more than 3%.

Bitcoin’s weakness and the regulatory overhang have kept crypto investors away from altcoins. That has kept Bitcoin’s market dominance hovering near the 50% mark for the past few days.

Market observers are likely to keep their focus on Bitcoin for the next few days. The longer the bulls sustain the price above $25,000, the greater the possibility that the next move is likely to be higher. A bullish move in Bitcoin is likely to spur buying in select altcoins as crypto investors will then sense a bull market.

Select cryptocurrencies are showing signs of forming a base. If they breakout to the upside, a new up-move may start. Let’s study the charts of the top-5 cryptocurrencies that could outperform in the near term.

Bitcoin price analysis

Bitcoin has been trading between the moving averages for the past few days, indicating indecision between the bulls and the bears about the next directional move.

A trending move in an asset class attracts traders, while a dull price action drives investors to the sidelines. Bitcoin (BTC) has largely been stuck in a range for the past several months, which could be one of the reasons for the drop in spot volumes. Bloomberg reported on Oct. 11 that Coinbase’s spot trading volume plunged 52% in Q3 2023 compared to Q3 2022.

While the short-term remains uncertain, traders need to be watchful because long consolidations are generally followed by an explosive price action. The only problem is that it is difficult to predict the direction of breakout with certainty. Considering that the bulls have not allowed Bitcoin to dip back below $25,000 in the past few months, it increases the likelihood of an upside breakout.

Investing legend Paul Tudor Jones said in a recent interview on CNBC that he is not bullish on the equities markets as he believes that an escalation in the Israel–Hamas conflict may bring about a risk-off sentiment. If that happens, it will be bullish for gold and Bitcoin, Jones added.

Wil bears sink Bitcoin below the immediate support and could that cause a further? Let’s analyze the charts of the top 10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

Bitcoin price analysis

Bitcoin sliced through the 20-day exponential moving average ($27,148) on Oct. 11 but the bears could not tug the price below the 50-day simple moving average ($26,634).

Ether (ETH) price experienced a 7% decline between Oct. 6 and Oct. 12, hitting a seven-month low at $1,520. Although there was a slight rebound to $1,550 on Oct. 13, it appears that investor confidence and interest in Ethereum are waning, as indicated by multiple metrics.

Some may argue that this movement reflects a broader disinterest in cryptocurrencies, evident in the fact that Google searches for "Ethereum" have reached their lowest point in 3 years. However, Ethereum has underperformed the overall altcoin market capitalization by 15% since July.

Interestingly, this price movement coincided with Ethereum's average 7-day transaction fees declining to $1.80, the lowest level in the past 12 months. To put this in perspective, just two months ago, these fees stood at over $4.70, a cost considered high even for initiating and closing batched layer-2 transactions.

Regulatory uncertainty and lower staking yield back ETH’s price decline

A significant event that impacted Ether's price was the remarks made by Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson regarding U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission director William Hinman's classification of Ether as a non-security asset in 2018. Hoskinson, who is also an Ethereum co-founder, alleged on Oct. 8 that some form of "favoritism" influenced the regulator's decision.

Ethereum staking has also garnered less interest from investors participating in the network validation process, as the yield decreased from 4.3% to 3.6% in just two months. This change occurred alongside an increase in ETH supply due to reduced activity in the burn mechanism, reversing the prevailing scarcity trend.

One of the developers working on “BitVM” — a Bitcoin-based virtual machine — reiterates the tech is intended to scale Bitcoin rather than launching Ethereum-like decentralized finance applications on the network.

BitVM’s whitepaper was released by ZeroSync’s project lead Robin Linus on Oct. 10 with technical support provided by pseudonymous developer “Super Testnet” — implementing BitVM’s first proof-of-concept and working on expanding BitVM’s capabilities.

Upon its release, some industry pundits formed the impression that BitVM would bring DeFi to Bitcoin like what the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) did for Ethereum.

However, Super Testnet tells Cointelegraph that BitVM is scaling-focused rather than being about implementing smart contracts and an avalanche of altcoins:

“The real killer app is scaling Bitcoin. [Robin Linus isn’t] a big fan of smart contracts. He's not a big fan of increasing Bitcoin's expressivity. He really is interested in making it so that Bitcoin can process millions of transactions per second.”

Ethereum staking protocol Lido Finance has disclosed its protocol saw 20 slashing events due to a series of infrastructure and signer configuration issues from validators operated by Launchnodes.

The incident occurred on Oct. 11 at about 3:30 pm UTC, according to Launchnodes. In an Oct. 11 post on X, Lido said Launchnodes' validators nodes are now offline, and slashings have ceased while the root cause was being investigated.

The slashing took place on the Ethereum blockchain and Lido projected the impact to be around 20 Ether (ETH), worth $31,000, as well as additional penalties while the validators are offline for troubleshooting, along with inactivity penalties that the validators will accumulate.

Slashing is a process where a validator breaches a blockchain’s proof-of-stake consensus rules, which often results in the removal of that validator or slashing a portion of the staked-Ether that they provided as collateral.

In a post hours later, Launchnode said the slashing events occurred due to an infrastructure and signer configuration issue.

Since September, Chainlink (LINK) price has gained more than 25%, outperforming Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and most altcoins. Currently, the project is the leading decentralized blockchain oracle solution and ranks 15th in terms of market capitalization when excluding stablecoins. 

In September, LINK's price surged by an impressive 35.5%, but in the month-to-date performance for October, LINK has faced a 10% correction. Investors are concerned that breaking the $7.20 support level may lead to further downward pressure, potentially erasing all the gains from the previous month.

It's worth noting that the closing price of $8.21 on Sept. 30 marked the highest point in over 10 weeks, but when looking at the bigger picture, Chainlink's price still remains 86% below its all-time high in May 2021. Moreover, over the past 12 months, LINK has shown little growth, while Ether (ETH) gained 21.5% in the same period.

LINK marines placed all their hope on the SWIFT experiment

The LINK bull run began after SWIFT, the leader in messaging for international financial transactions, released a report on Sept. 31 titled "Connecting Blockchains: Overcoming Fragmentation in Tokenized Assets," suggesting that linking existing systems to blockchains is more feasible than unifying different central bank digital currencies (CBDC).

Following a series of tests, SWIFT reported its capability to provide a single access point to multiple networks using existing infrastructure. This system relied on Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and was said to significantly reduce operational costs and challenges for institutions supporting tokenized assets.

Buyers are finding it difficult to maintain Bitcoin (BTC) price above $27,000. The selling increased after the September producer price index rose 0.5% for the month versus expectations for a 0.3% increase. This shows that the inflation pressures are unlikely to ease in a hurry for the United States economy.

The uncertain near-term environment has shifted analysts’ focus to November and the upcoming halving event expected in April 2024. Crypto analyst Miles Deutscher cited a chart from CryptoCon and said that if history repeats itself, then Bitcoin may turn up by November 21 and start its journey higher to the next halving.

Going further ahead to 2026, BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes is even more bullish. While speaking as a guest on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, Hayes said that Bitcoin’s price could reach $750,000 to $1 million by 2026. Hayes argues that incessant money printing by the U.S. government to avoid a financial crisis will trigger a massive bull market in several asset classes.

Several analysts are bullish about the long-term but the near-term remains uncertain due to various headwinds. Could Bitcoin and altcoins stage a recovery or will they continue moving lower? Let’s analyze the charts of the top 10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

Bitcoin price analysis

After finding support at the 20-day exponential moving average ($27,227) for the past two days, Bitcoin broke below the level on Oct. 11. This shows that the bears are trying to seize control.