Ethereum DeFi Coins, Polygon Lead Crypto Market Recovery

The crypto market has slowly begun to recover today after last week’s sharp decline as Bitcoin and other major coins start to see green again, according to analytics platform CoinGecko.

"The pick-up in markets this week is most likely driven by the month-end options closing this Friday on Deribit (4 pm Singapore time) and CME (4 pm London time)," Bobby Ong, the co-founder and COO of CoinGecko, shared with Decrypt. "Usually, in the week with month-end options ending, we will see a trend reversal, and for this month, we expect to see a recovery towards the max pain price points." 

In options trading, the "max pain price point" is the price point where an asset has the most open call and put options. It is at this price that investors also stand to lose the most money.

The price point for Bitcoin is $50,000 and $3,000 for Ethereum.

At press time, Bitcoin is closing in on $38,000, up around 14% on the day (but still down 17% over the past week). In its turn, Ethereum is climbing up a bit faster, trading at around $2,500 (+34% over the past 24 hours).

Notably, both coins lost up to 51% and 60%, respectively, from their all-time highs over the past week.

Meanwhile, two cryptos are performing much better than all the rest—Polygon (MATIC) and MakerDAO (MKR)—as their prices nearly doubled in 12 hours. Polygon rallied from $0.76 to a peak of $1.57 today. Before that, the token lost 72% in less than a week, trading at up to $2.68 on May 18.

MKR, the native governance token of popular decentralized finance (DeFi) platform MakerDAO, showed a similar pattern. Since Sunday, its price has surged from $1,835 to $3,631 today. Recently, MKR dropped by 71% from its all-time high in early May and was down 63% over the past week.

Other DeFi tokens, such as Aave and Uniswap, are also seeing huge gains within the last 24 hours: Aave is up 51%, while Uniswap jumped 53%.

In fact, altcoins in general, such as Helium (+46.4%), Harmony (+56.4%), THORChain (+42.5%), Fantom (+46.1%), IOTA (+28.9%), and OKB (+17.6%), are among the fastest-rising cryptocurrencies today.

At the same time, the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies has recovered by more than $300 billion, climbing back to over $1.625 trillion today. Bitcoin's rebound, in particular, has pushed the coin’s dominance index (essentially a measure of the coin’s market share relative to other crypto assets) back above 45%—after recently dropping to a multi-year low below 40%.

Blockchain analyst Willy Woo suggested on Twitter that despite last week’s trading carnage, “the bull market is very much intact” and “under this trend, we are just warming up.”

Woo based his conclusion on various on-chain data which implies that so-called “no-coiners”—users who previously owned no crypto—took advantage of the recent dip and began investing in digital assets.

“A key to reading this chart is to know that BTC user count has roughly doubled every year since inception a dozen years ago. So the 2021 peak is expected to end at levels MUCH higher than the 2017 peak. Under this trend, we are just warming up,” he argued.

But considering that most cryptocurrencies are still deep in the red zone over the past seven days, we may not be out of the woods yet.