This Week in Crypto: BTC and ETH Price Drops, Crypto.com’s Surge, and Farcaster’s Growth

This weekly series highlights some of the top charts from The Block’s Data Dashboard. This week's highlights include: BTC and ETH prices dropped over 14% and 18%, leading to $1B in liquidations; Crypto.com's market share increased, indicating a retail resurgence; Ethereum layer 2 rollups hit a yearly low in unique depositors; Farcaster saw record user engagement; and Bitcoin reached a two-month high in new addresses despite low transaction fees and activity.

Market Movements During the 4th of July

The 4th of July witnessed significant declines in BTC and ETH prices, dropping over 14% and 18% to lows of $53.5K and $2.8K, respectively. This sell-off resulted in over $416M in long liquidations on July 4th and an additional $320M the next day, totaling over $1B for the week. Despite these declines, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ ended the week positively, pushing BTC's correlation with them to -0.78 and -0.79. The sell-offs were driven by the German government selling seized BTC and Mt. Gox distributing $9B in BTC and BCH repayments.

Crypto.com’s Market Share Growth

Crypto.com has increased its market share in USD support exchange volume to 31% as of July 2024, up from 14%, indicating a resurgence of retail investors. Although its peak was 44% in April 2022, Crypto.com’s monthly trading volume remains steady at $30 billion. High-profile marketing initiatives have boosted its brand, yet Crypto.com's CRO coin is down 9.4% in 2024. Coinbase holds around 45% of the market share, while Kraken's share has declined from 20% to 17%.

Ethereum Layer 2 Rollups

Unique depositors into Ethereum layer 2 rollups, including optimistic and zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups, hit a yearly low of 34.92K last week, a 33% drop from the previous week and a stark decline from 250K in mid-April 2024. This marks a nearly two-year low, reflecting reduced user engagement and a corresponding 20% decline in total value locked (TVL) from $25.7B to $20.5B. Despite this, Layer 2 solutions' TVL has increased 74.77% this year, from $22.6B to $39.5B since January.

Farcaster’s User Engagement

Farcaster, a decentralized social media protocol, reached a record 73.7K unique casters last week. The platform now boasts 62.58M total casts, 280.12K users, 3.05K hubs, 190.54K connected addresses, and a network size of 142.83 GB, generating 611.03 ETH in revenue. The user surge may be linked to an upcoming tool for USDC in-app payments. Despite this growth, daily active users and average casts per day show a slight downtrend, though content sharing has increased, with peak activity during U.S. daytime hours.

Bitcoin Network Activity

Despite a market downturn, Bitcoin network new addresses reached a two-month high, with a 7-day moving average (7DMA) of 317,000 on July 5th, a 20% increase from 263,000 the previous week. However, average transaction fees dropped to $1.75, with total fees at $1M, just one-third of Ethereum's. More new addresses have not led to higher fees or increased on-chain activity.

Data & Insights is a weekly newsletter and article series by The Block Research Analysts Brandon Kae and Ivan Wu that highlights recent trends and top charts from The Block’s Data Dashboard. Sign-up to receive Data & Insights in your inbox every Monday for free. Previous articles in the series are available with a subscription to The Block Pro.