Ethereum Looks for a Bottom at the $1,300 Level, ENS, HT, APE, Oct. 17

ETH

The Ethereum price was higher by 0.25% over the last week after a rally on Monday. Stock markets are showing signs of life at the start of the week and that will support cryptocurrencies.

Last week saw inflation dip on the month but it was still at decades highs. Traders are hoping that the peak is in for prices and that the aggressive rate hikes will start slowing down and reduce the price of the U.S. dollar.

Analysts at investment bank JP Morgan were bullish on ETH last week saying that markets have not priced in the benefits of the Merge upgrade.

The bank was concerned a few weeks ago saying that the forked chain could divide the Ethereum community. They also had concerns that the blockchain had become less decentralized as…

only a few entities command the majority share of staked ETH.

That was a statement echoed by Morgan Stanley, who said that the whole ecosystem was becoming less decentralized.

The crypto ecosystem is changing “with many applications, code, services and companies feeding into the underlying decentralized blockchains,” which is causing parts of the ecosystem to become less decentralized, the bank said.

They added that “centralization is a natural evolution of the financialization of cryptocurrency markets,” although it does bring new challenges.

Since the Ethereum upgrade to proof-of-stake (PoS) last month, a transition known as the Merge, transactions are now approved by validators and 60% of those are managed by only four companies. The Ethereum community is aware of this issue and is working on possible solutions.

The price of Ethereum was trading above the $1,300 level and will look for an opportunity to gain ground early in the week.

ENS

A rise in Ethereum Name Service saw the project creep into the top 100 coins.

ENS is a platform supporting decentralized naming for wallets, websites, and other assets. The project says:

No more copying and pasting long addresses. Use your ENS name to store all of your addresses and receive any cryptocurrency, token, or NFT.

ENS could change the way we interact with the crypto market and will also assist with decentralized website domain creation. The project is seeing large NFT sales and with around $10 million in sales over the last month, that is only 50% less that the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

The platform has created partnerships with some of the biggest names in the industry with Coinbase being a recent addition. True Names Ltd., the company behind ENS, successfully sued GoDaddy in September, alleging the domain provider had incorrectly told eth.link users that the address registration had expired and that GoDaddy had later sold the rights to the domain to a Web3 start-up.

The price of ENS rose 10% last week with a potential low in place. If the coin gets above the $25 resistance level then it could power higher.

HT

The Huobi Token was the market leader this week after fresh investment in the project.

Huobi’s founder Leon Li Lin has sold off his stake in the exchange to About Capital, a Hong Kong-based asset management firm, which promised further investment.

In a blog post, it was reported that Huobi will get a “sufficient” capital injection into its margin and risk provision fund, as well as a global strategic advisory board, including “leading industry figures.”

That could include Tron founder Justin Sun who said he had tens of millions of Huobi Tokens.

Sun said that he wanted to take the exchange global and maybe even back to China if the country eases its strict rules. The blog said:

Huobi Global will embrace a series of new international brand promotion and business expansion initiatives.

The price of Huobi’s HT token was $7.40 after the recent rally which has vaulted above some key resistance from a downtrend line. The next target is the $10-12 level.

APE

ApeCoin was in the news last week after it emerged the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was investigating its founders. The Yuga Labs design studio was the focus of the probe which was an extension of the regulator’s recent efforts against Ripple and Binance.

The SEC was looking at whether the XRP and BNB tokens were closer to securities such as stocks and should be regulated in the same way. After targeting the payments token, and a major exchange, the latest move on a blue-chip NFT project shows that they are investigating every corner of the market. The SEC was also said to be looking at how ApeCoins were distributed to holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club and other NFTs.

The SEC also cracked down on celebrity endorsements with a million-dollar settlement between the regulator and Kim Kardashian regarding an Instagram post in which she promoted an opaque crypto token. The SEC decided that Kardashian was promoting securities without proper disclosure as dictated by appropriate laws.

The price of ApeCoin lost almost 12% of its value on the news of the investigation and trades below $5.00.