Decentral Block Post

The S&P 500 Index (SPX) rose 2.49% last week, extending its string of weekly gains to seven weeks, the longest such winning streak since 2017. However, Bitcoin (BTC) could not maintain its momentum and succumbed to profit-booking by the bulls. Trading resource Material Indicators said in an X (formerly Twitter) post that “ year-end profit taking and tax loss harvesting” will prevail in the short term.  

However, a crash is unlikely because several analysts expect the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to approve one or more spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications in January. If that happens, it could prove to be a game-changer for the sector.

VanEck CEO Jan van Eck said in an interview with CNBC that Bitcoin is likely to hit a new all-time high in the next 12 months. He expects Bitcoin to become an accompaniment to gold.

What are the important levels that could arrest the fall in Bitcoin and altcoins? Let’s analyze the charts to find out.

S&P 500 Index price analysis

The S&P 500 Index witnessed a strong bull move in the past few days, which carried the price above the overhead resistance of 4,650 on Dec. 13.

Update December 18, 2023 10:09PM UTC: The Zilliqa mainnet has been restored and is now fully operational. 

The $383-million Zilliqa ecosystem is experiencing disruptions due to a “critical situation” impacting the network.

According to a Dec. 18 post by developers, the Zilliqa blockchain faces a “technical issue that has resulted in an interruption to block production.” Blockchain data shows that daily transactions on Zilliqa subsequently plunged by roughly 50% to 30,906, compared to an average of 61,000 in the past few days.

Activity has since paused, with the last transaction occurring at around 11 am UTC, with no new blocks being produced since then. “The team are working hard to recover the network,” wrote Matt Dyer, Zilliqa’s CEO, in a follow-up.

Related: Zilliqa teases Web3 gaming console, Funko teams up with Warner Bros

Irys, a prominent layer-2 network within the Arweave ecosystem, allegedly has plans to fork the Arweave network with the intent to “drop the dataset and reset the token supply,” according to a Dec. 17 post by Arweave founder Sam Williams.

He alleges that despite the existence of a safe upgrade mechanism with Arweave, Irys developers plan to proceed with a hard fork that “appears to be a play motivated by greed.” The Arweave founder wrote:

“Given this situation, Arweave intends to remove the Irys bundlers from the trusted set on the main Arweave gateways. This will lead to significant delays before user data is available.”

In a rebuttal post the same day, Irys developers stated, “Are we developing new provenance tech? You bet your ass we are,” accusing Arweave developers of “active censorship” in response to alleged efforts to “deplatform Irys from Arweave.” Developers added, “Stay tuned to this space; we have plenty of powerful new features we’re thinking through, and we can’t wait to share them.”

In the past two days, the Arweave token has lost over 20% of its value and is now trading at $8.90, partly due to the unveiling of the allegations. Irys is currently the largest layer-2 network on Arweave, accounting for over 90% of the blockchain’s 16 million daily transaction volume. However, the network’s volume has fallen by 31% since the allegations surfaced.