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Stacks (STX) pared a considerable portion of the gains it made on March 10 as the euphoria surrounding its $165 million pledge to support Bitcoin (BTC) projects showed signs of fading.
STX’s price dropped by over 30% to reach a level as low as $1.33 on Friday when measured from its week-to-date high of $1.94. The selloff, in part, appeared technical as the $1.94-top fell in the same range that served as solid support between October 2021 and January 2022, only to flip later to become a resistance area.
STX/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView
It also appears that traders spotted selling opportunities due to STX’s long wick candlestick on March 10. Stacks rallied by as much as 73% into the day while forming a disproportionally long bullish wick on the daily chart that hinted at upside exhaustion.
What pushed STX higher?
The rally in the STX market on March 10 coincided with the launch of “Bitcoin Odyssey,” a $165 million fund to develop Web3, decentralized finance (DeFi), and nonfungible token (NFT) projects on the Bitcoin blockchain by harnessing Stacks’ open-source network for Bitcoin-based smart contracts.
Notably, STX serves as a utility token inside the Stacks ecosystem to pay for network activity and contract execution. STX owners can also stake their holdings on the Stacks network via “Stacking” to support its blockchain’s consensus mechanism. In return, they earn BTC rewards.
It appears traders flocked to purchase STX en masse, anticipating a rise in its demand after the Bitcoin Odessey’s launch. For instance, cryptocurrency exchange OKcoin, the main backer behind the $160-million-fund, promoted the Stacks token for its bullish outlook, saying it is “not a bad time to get in on” Stacks.
All-time high ahead?
Interestingly, STX’s ongoing price rally appeared at a confluence of two key support levels, with at least one suggesting that the Stacks token is heading to a new all-time high next.
This confluence comprises an upward sloping trendline that has acted as an accumulation point for traders since early 2020 and the 0.5 Fib line (near $1.50) of the Fibonacci retracement graph made from $0.04-swing low to $2.82-swing high.
STX/USD weekly price chart. Source: TradingView
STX now looks to close above its two interim exponential moving averages (EMA) — the 20-week (green) and the 50-week (red) EMAs — following its rebound from the dual-support area. A successful breakout may have the Stacks token retest another upward sloping trendline that has served as a resistance level since 2020.
Conversely, a pullback from the 20-50 EMA resistances could have STX break below its ascending trendline support toward 0.786 Fib line near $0.63.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. As part of their compensation, certain CoinDesk employees, including editorial employees, may receive exposure to DCG equity in the form of stock appreciation rights, which vest over a multi-year period. CoinDesk journalists are not allowed to purchase stock outright in DCG.
The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. As part of their compensation, certain CoinDesk employees, including editorial employees, may receive exposure to DCG equity in the form of stock appreciation rights, which vest over a multi-year period. CoinDesk journalists are not allowed to purchase stock outright in DCG.
The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. As part of their compensation, certain CoinDesk employees, including editorial employees, may receive exposure to DCG equity in the form of stock appreciation rights, which vest over a multi-year period. CoinDesk journalists are not allowed to purchase stock outright in DCG.
Layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution Polygon has not produced a new block for over 11 hours, with developers attributing the issue to a technical upgrade on the network.
On March 10 at 4:20 pm UTC, Polygon (MATIC) network developers notified users on the project’s forum that there would likely be downtime starting at about 5:50 pm UTC due to maintenance required on one of the network’s three layers. A recent upgrade is thought to have caused an error in the network’s ability to achieve consensus.
“We suspect there may have been a bug in the upgrade which affected consensus and caused different Heimdall validators to be on different versions of the chain, thereby not reaching 2/3 consensus.”
As expected, the outage began at about 5:54 pm UTC.
The Polygon team issued an update at about 1:30 am UTC explaining that it was still working to fix the error and that a hotfix was deployed to help continue making blocks. That hotfix does not appear to have taken effect as of the time of writing.
The team also assured users that all funds and data on-chain are safe.
A network outage on Polygon has lasted for 11 hours.
Polygon users apparently understood the outage was expected, but by the sixth hour, rumblings began to appear among the community. Most users have pointed out concerns at the extended amount of time for the outage.
So uhhhhh…..Polygons been down for 6 hours and counting….
Others have noted that their profession or crypto business has been negatively affected by the outage. Twitter user @Miklos211 said:
“I’m literally unable to work thanks to that, could you please send us a time where we can expect the network to be back on?”
The Polygon network consists of three layers that each serves a unique role. Smart contracts run on the Ethereum (ETH) layer and the Bor layer helps produce blocks. The third Heimdall layer is where the problem lies.
Heimdall is a set of proof-of-stake (PoS) nodes that help the network reach consensus. With the Heimdall issue, Polygon cannot reach network consensus.
In related news, Polygon recently partnered with the multichain music nonfungible tokens (NFT) marketplace TokenTraxx to support the marketplace in the Polygon ecosystem. TokenTraxx will allow musicians to tokenize their work and sell it as NFTs.
The price of Brent crude, a key measure of global oil supply, was selling near $110 per barrel, well off its high of $130 earlier this week but well over its range just a month ago. In the U.S., inflation accelerated in February to a fresh four-decade high, signaling supply and demand imbalances were little improved amid soaring gas prices. The Consumer Price Index rose 7.9% over the past 12 months, the fastest since 1982, the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday.
At the point that OnlyFans made the 500 ETH donation, the DAO was stalled at about half of the 1,000 ETH reserve amount, a representative said. The OnlyFans donation pushed the amount over the top, and from that point on, more donations began to pile in.
In a letter to District Judge Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York, Buterin detailed his seven-year friendship with Griffith, who he met in 2013 and began collaborating with on research in 2016. In 2018, Griffith formally joined Ethereum as a developer after Buterin said he “convinced him to agree.”
The firm has also launched BessemerDAO, a Web 3 community for founders, creators and operators. BessemerDAO is meant to connect members of the crypto community for idea sharing, business development and tokenomics. The effort won’t be decentralized at first with Bessemer partners making decisions for the DAO, but the firm plans for the effort to become decentralized over time.
