The market cap for stablecoins was just a little above $5 billion in January, it then hit the key milestone of $10 billion in May and has now topped $11 billion mark... Read today's CryptoCoffee:
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It is not the first time that Bitcoin has had trouble in continuing the upside momentum around the $9,000 level and history repeated itself yet again on Tuesday after Bitcoin failed to hold onto the best levels of the session and more importantly fell back below $9,000 level. Yet again, the bulls were forced to endure another grind higher and given the price action, there was a lot of indecision, with two-way flow dominating every step of the way. Still, by the closing of stages of trade, Bitcoin managed the recover much of the lost ground and the stage is set for yet another attempt to break towards better levels.

The market needs volume and conviction on the break of the upcoming resistance zone, otherwise the bulls will be forced to endure another climb higher up the ladder. The bullish case remains intact, in part supported by a strong showing by the hashrate and also Bitcoin’s mining difficulty was adjusted higher to 16.10 trillion (T) at 4:05 UTC, close to the network’s all-time high of 16.55 T recorded in March. The latest upward surge follows the second-largest decline in the network’s history in late-March. Of note, this was the final difficulty adjustment with the 12.5 BTC block subsidy. What is more interesting is that it is estimated that close to 30% of miners may be squeezed out post block reward halving considering that the first 1008 blocks will have the pre-halving difficulty but half the reward.

The hashrate suggests that miners are looking to capture the most of block subsidy before the halving. The problem with the aforementioned influx of activity is that this risks network clog up. In fact, data from Bitinfocharts shows that Bitcoin fees spiked to a high of $2.94 on April 30 - a level not observed since July 2019. What’s more is that mempool data from Blockchain.com shows a massive backlog of Bitcoin transactions awaiting confirmation. The mempool represents the amount of data (in the form of transactions) that still have to be confirmed and processed by Bitcoin’s miners. These mempool backlogs invariably result in higher transaction fees.

It isn’t just Bitcoin that may be suffering from its own success, but Ethereum too. On that note, it appears that Ethereum network is again beginning to suffer from its well-publicised demons. Ethereum gas usage is back to all-time highs whilst network utilisation is also close to full capacity at 90%. The average fee paid has increased significantly, from around $0.14 to $0.20, while median gas prices also increased significantly to 11.926 GWEI, from 8.494 GWEI.

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Last week saw both Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and BitcoinSV (BSV) undergo planned block reward halvings. However, the expected the subsequent adjustment by miners resulted in some degree of hashrate flippening. Furthermore, what is interesting is that BSV’s hashrate was able to make significant retrace from the initial move lower following the halving. The move is likely to be driven by BSV’s “friendly” mining entities in order to prevent any potential 51% attacks. Bitcoin is due to undergo its own block reward halving in mid-May and as it stands, 97.3% of the hashrate is dedicated to Bitcoin. As a result, the other chains have a lot of ground work to make up in order to survive after the aforementioned incentive halving. This is where utility of the network will really come into play. In the meantime, metrics such as mining difficulty and hashrate will come under even greater scrutiny. On that note, the next mining difficulty adjustment is expected to be a positive one to the tune of 6.87%

In other news, it is worth remembering that the Phoenix upgrade for Ethereum Classic (ETC), which was successfully activated on the Mordor TestNet last month, will be going live on the Kotti Testnet which in turn will lead to implementation on the MainNet in the first week of June. The upgrade, known more formally as upgrade ECIP-1088, is intended to increase the Ethereum Virtual Machine (E.VM) capabilities of Ethereum Classic. The EVM is what underpins the executions of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain (ETH). Phoenix will build upon the previous Atlantis and Agharta hard forks that have already improved the compatibility of ETC with ETH. Although originally pencilled in for a March 2020 release, Phoenix appears to have been slightly delayed to allow developers extra time to monitor the rollout in the TestNet phases. The ETC MainNet Phoenix activation will now take place on or around 5 June at block 10_500_839.

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