OVERVIEW

5 Altcoins Ready To Ignite 🔥 

Source: Tenor

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

Source: Santiment

And here’s a look at crypto’s total and altcoin market cap YTD:

Source: TradingView

New In Three Sentences
Crypto News 📰

💵 BlackRock Tokenizes Liquidity Fund on Avalanche

BlackRock’s USD Liquidity Fund (aka BUIDL) is now tokenized on Avalanche. Each token equals $1 (most of the time) and pays daily dividends, proving even TradFi wants a slice of DeFi pie. With $500M tokenized, BlackRock just made Avalanche a little more institutional. AVAX blog.

🔍 China Might Soften Crypto Stance Thanks to U.S. Policies

HashKey Group’s CEO believes Trump’s pro-crypto administration could push China to rethink its ban on digital assets. Rising geopolitical tensions and a need for alternative financial systems could accelerate this timeline. If crypto becomes China-friendly, Southeast Asia’s scam factories better watch their backs. Bitcoinist.

🌐 Alibaba Partners with MultiversX to Conquer Asian Markets

Alibaba Cloud announced a partnership with MultiversX (EGLD), supporting the blockchain’s expansion into Asia with hackathons and community events. This follows EGLD’s Upbit listing and a strong push into South Korea and other major markets. MultiversX’s plan to rival Ethereum just got a corporate-sized boost. Finbold.

🚨 U.S. Hacker Sentenced for Laundering $4.5 Billion in Stolen Bitcoin

Ilya Lichtenstein, infamous for the 2016 Bitfinex hack, will serve five years for laundering nearly 120,000 stolen BTC. His wife, Heather Morgan—better known as the worst god-damned rapper ever—is awaiting sentencing. The case included the largest financial seizure in DOJ history. BBC.

📉 SEC Crypto Cases Could Fade Under Trump, Says Consensys CEO

Consensys CEO Joe Lubin predicts the crypto industry will save “hundreds of millions” if Trump makes good on promises to fire Gary Gensler and appoint pro-crypto cabinet members. Trump’s reelection has sparked hope for dismissals or settlements in SEC cases against major players like Coinbase, Binance, and Ripple. Cointelegraph.

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News In Three Sentences
Altcoins Flashing Major Breakout Potential 🔦 

Don’t be intimidated by these charts—they use the Ichimoku Kinko Hyo system. However, you don’t need to know much about it except that the big blobs of green and red are called “The Cloud.” ☁️ 

So, why am I using Ichimoku charts? Because all the altcoins we’re examining today are at or near completing one of the most sought-after bullish confirmation signals within the Ichimoku system: the Ideal Bullish Ichimoku Breakout.

How powerful are these signals? Extremely. They become even more significant when the Chikou Span is also above the Cloud. This combination has only occurred three times for Bitcoin on its weekly chart. 📈 

Bitcoin

BTCUSD Weekly Chart – Click to enlarge.

Some altcoins are now exhibiting the same conditions that preceded Bitcoin’s major expansion phases.

Let’s take a look at some of them now. 👀 

Cardano

ADAUSD Weekly Chart – Click to enlarge.

Last week’s weekly candlestick confirmed an Ideal Bullish Ichimoku Breakout for Cardano. This is only the second time ADA has experienced this signal; the last occurrence was in the first week of July 2020.

XRP

XRPUSD Weekly Chart – Click to enlarge.

Like Cardano, XRP is on the verge of confirming an Ideal Bullish Ichimoku Breakout—the first since November 2020 and the third in its history.

Stellar

XLMUSD Weekly Chart – Click to enlarge.

XLM needs to close at or above $0.136 on the weekly chart to confirm an Ideal Bullish Ichimoku Breakout. Currently, it’s hovering right at this crucial price level. If the bulls can push XLM above the Cloud, it will mark the fourth time in Stellar’s history that this type of breakout has occurred on the weekly chart.

Sad Fact: Both XLM and XRP haven’t reached new all-time highs since January 2018.

Shiba Inu

SHIBUSD Weekly Chart – Click to enlarge.

SHIB is very, very close to confirming another Ideal Bullish Ichimoku Breakout. Despite the current weekly candle looking about as thrilling as a Christmas stocking full of rocks, the level it needs to close at to confirm an Ideal Bullish Ichimoku Breakout is clear: at or above $0.00002633.

Maybe not this week, but perhaps next—I’ll be keeping a close eye on it.

Fantom

FTMUSD Weekly Chart – Click to enlarge.

Similar to Shiba Inu’s chart, Fantom is awaiting a close above the Cloud to confirm an Ideal Bullish Ichimoku Breakout. FTM needs to close at or above $0.823. Achieving this would mark only the second time in Fantom’s history that this signal has occurred.

News In Three Sentences
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️

💎 PawNFT Brings NFT Lending to Radix

Fresh from the Scrypto Hackathon, PawNFT is turning JPEGs into collateral on Radix. Borrowers can pawn their NFTs, and lenders can either fund or claim defaulted assets—a win-win for everyone except those bad at deadlines. Radix blog.

🎮 Lumiterra’s Beta 2 Drops with LUA Tokens

The MMORPG Lumiterra is back with its second beta test, proving that crafting, survival, and farming still have fans. New dungeons, beginner tasks, and teleporting totems join the fun, alongside LUA tokens for in-game spending and LUAUSD for the DeFi geeks. Ronin blog.

💙 Team Liquid’s MyBlue Platform Debuts on Sui

Esports powerhouse Team Liquid has launched MyBlue, a platform for customizing their Blue mascot with blockchain swag. Fans can earn items by completing quests, which double as tickets to tournaments, merch, or awkward fan meet-ups. Built on Sui, it’s proof that even mascots can go Web3. Sui blog.

📚 GalaChain Tackles Audiobook Ownership

GalaChain wants to fix the audiobook “ownership” scam by tokenizing titles for resale, lending, or actual ownership rights. Goodbye Audible graveyard, hello NFT bookshelves. If only publishers didn’t hate the idea of readers owning anything digital. Gala Games blog.

News In Three Sentences
DeFi, DEX, and Lending Protocol News 🏦

🛡️ Google Cloud Joins ZetaChain as Validator

Google Cloud is now validating on ZetaChain, the “Universal Blockchain” trying to make crypto less fragmented. With a million ZETA tokens delegated, they’re helping secure cross-chain apps and adding another notch to Google’s blockchain belt. ZetaChain blog.

💼 Hex Trust Expands Injective Services

Hex Trust is now staking its claim in Injective, with 1.5 million INJ tokens and counting. They’re offering custody, staking, and OTC trading for institutions that can’t figure out Metamask. With over 2% of Injective’s voting power, they’ve practically become the bank of DeFi – well, a very small bank. Injective Protocol blog.

🏗️ ICON Revamps Validator Support

Starting Dec. 20, ICON will slash validator support funds and reroute them to ICX liquidity pools on Balanced. Validators will have lower bond requirements but lose rewards for “over-bonding”—whatever that means. ICON claims this boosts “network goals,” but I’m watching to see who actually benefits. ICON blog.

🚀 Stellar Makes Reingestion 9x Faster with CDP

Stellar’s Horizon reingestion process is now nine times faster, thanks to the Composable Data Platform. By swapping Captive Core for a data lake (fancy for “store stuff smarter”), they’re saving time, storage, and probably some sanity. Don’t get too excited—reingesting everything still needs 40TB of space. Stellar blog.

ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
Burnt Bag Briefing 🔥 

Want to know whether the bulls or bears are feeling the most pain today? Well, this is the place to look. 👀

24-Hour Liquidation Heat Map – Source: Coinglass – Click to enlarge.

In the past 24 hours, 152.613 traders were liquidated, with total liquidations reaching $4455.83 million.

The largest single liquidation occurred on Binance, a BTCUSDT pair valued at $5.93 million.

Longs lost $288.98 million, while shorts were hit for $156.86 million. 🤕 

SOCIAL ANALYTICS
What’s Trending 🥓

Most bullish/bearish symbols on Stocktwits at the close: 📈 $TIA, $WIF, $UNI, 📉 $XMR, $SUI, and $NEAR

$FLR, $ALGO, $ADA, Trending crypto tickers across social media: $XRP, $DOGE, $PEPE, $LTC, and $ADA

Top trending crypto buzzwords across social media: xrp, gensler, ripple, btc, ada, bitcoin, gray, statement, chair, breaking, sec, doge, rfk, buy, dan pepe, overreach, coinbase, health, trump, HHS, musk, usdt, doge, and time

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

🦑 Kraken Layer 2 Ink Launched Fault Proof and First Stage

☕️ Coffeezilla Probes MrBeast’s Role in Shady Crypto Deals

🧔‍♂️ 4‘Crypto Dad’ denies interest in becoming the next SEC chair

🪙 70% of Airdropped Tokens Fail to Deliver Profits, Here’s Why

🔼 Goldman Sachs Boosts Bitcoin ETF Holdings Amid Bullish Market Outlook

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in ADA, WMT, COPI, MIN, AGIX, ALGO, DOGE, ZEC, AVAX, XLM, XTZ, and NEAR. 📋