January has seen struggling financial markets, ominous FED reports and a relative continuation of the crypto dump. Many analysts are signalling this as a time to buy in and add to their portfolios, while others suggest there is a potential for further drop-offs with rumors of regulations, continued inflation and market uncertainties. In this article, we’ll cover the latest price predictions for the most essential coins, analyze whether this is another dip to buy in, and reveal our big-cap underdog pick for the month.
– Bitcoin since 2020 (block per day)
1. Bitcoin
January has been quite bearish for crypto as the slide that began back in November continued. Bitcoin (BTC) has now seemed to stabilize, having briefly touched below its $35,000 support level and flirted with plummeting even lower. This week has been complicated with all the noise from the FED report detailing their upcoming plans for raising rates, which usually have a negative effect on crypto. Usually, you will see crypto mirror trends on the stock market, and this week has more or less followed suit with that. However, for the moment, cryptocurrencies have seemed to rally back up and stabilize, with some analysts suggesting the dump is over.
The big question was whether BTC would drop to its next support level of around $30,000 that we saw in June last year, but as of right now, it doesn’t look like this will happen. Instead, it seems crypto is rising in tandem with levels of inflation; it’s popularly believed that this inflation hedge is why most people buy into Bitcoin, an interpretation that suggests BTC will continue to rally and lead the breakout of this three-month long dip.
2. Ethereum
Ethereum (ETH) has experienced a significant sell off over the past week. Some suggest this was due to capital being pumped into other Alt coins leaving the feeling that it is currently under-priced at $2500. It is hard to guess where ETH will go in the coming weeks; of course, it will follow in the footsteps of Bitcoin primarily, but Ethereum 2.0 is lingering in the background as potentially its biggest catalyst yet.
Many expect that this year will be the year that ETH 2 finally starts its rollout and when it does, prices have the potential to reach as high as $8,000.
Current predictions on the short-term are for ETH to stay around $2500.
3. Solana
Solana (SOL) has been in the news again recently, dropping a staggering 67% from previous highs. This is again due to performance issues related to the native platform itself, specifically the same DDOS (Denial-of-service attack) attacks they had problems with back in September and December of 2021. Due to the proof-of-history system Solana uses, it makes it vulnerable to situations where its servers can be overloaded.
On this occasion, it was market volatility that actually triggered a crash, and some users have been further frustrated by founder Anatoloy Yakovenko’s tweet of a screenshot showing a Solana node reporting 2.05 million duplicate data packets being submitted to the network, with the caption ‘lol’. We usually see Solana shake these events off— but not this time.
Solana now sits at around $90, which is the lowest it has been since its first big pump in August. Originally, it had sustained itself at $135 with the latest crash, but the collapse of the platform has led some to question its future and look into rivals like Avalanche.
– Solana since 2021 (block per day)
Our Monthly Underdog: Cardano
Cardano (ADA) has been one of the poorest performers over the recent bear market. Mostly, this was down to it delaying the release of its smart contract functionality— essentially because it was just more complex than the ADA team had envisaged.
Despite this, activity on Cardano has continued to grow with some of its most promising apps raising huge capital, some of which are paving the way for the successful integration of stable coins – a critical element of market success.
ADA enjoyed a short pump 10 days ago up to around $1.60, but has now returned to around $1.05, a level reflecting the general bearish market.
Price predictions for Cardano are bullish and could go as high as $2.20, especially when they roll out their smart contract compatibility.
