Decentral Block Post

Avalanche (AVAX) bulls snubbed the sensational claims made by a self-proclaimed whistleblower website that the project's parent firm, Ava Labs, paid lawyers to damage its competitors' reputation.

Avalanche price recovers from serious allegations

AVAX's price established an intraday high of $19.75 on Aug. 30, two days after bottoming out locally at $17.50, amounting to a 15% rise. The token's modest recovery followed selloffs incurred by a sensational CryptoLeaks report.

AVAX's price fell 3.5% on Aug. 26, the day on which CryptoLeaks released an unverified video showing Kyle Roche, the partner at Roche Freedman, saying that he could sue Solana, one of Avalanche's top rivals, on behalf of Ava Labs.

Related: Ava Labs CEO denies CryptoLeaks' claims as 'conspiracy theory nonsense'

The token fell by another 7.5% the next day after the whistleblower website released the full report, including another unverified video featuring Roche.

For nearly a year now, a mysterious Axie Infinity wallet has been quietly amassing billions of Smooth Love Potion (SLP), the in-game cryptocurrency powering one of the industry’s most popular play-to-earn (P2E) crypto games. 

Today, the anonymous whale wallet now holds a little over 22 billion SLP — more than 50% the total circulating supply of the token.

The problem? No one knows who it belongs to and what their intentions are.

The wallet in question was brought to Cointelegraph’s attention by Axie Infinity player and tech co-founder Michael Benko, who first caught wind of this mysterious wallet on Aug. 25.

Should we be worried?

Benko told Cointelegraph he became concerned about the wallet given the amount of SLP it had gathered in a relatively short amount of time, which could potentially wreak havoc on the game’s ecosystem.

Decentralized lending platform Compound has been plagued by a code bug in a recent governance proposal to update its price feeds. 

The code error has “temporarily frozen” the Compound ETH (cETH) market, causing cETH transactions to revert, but Compound Labs stated that despite the front end not working, “funds are not immediately at risk.”

Compound Labs announced on Aug. 31 that the code bug came from Proposal 117: Compound Oracle Upgrade v3, which was implemented a couple of hours ago to update the oracle contracts on the Compound protocol to a new version that uses Uniswap V3 instead of V2 for price feeds.

In response to the cETH market temporarily freezing, Compound Labs said it aimed to revert to the previous price feed via Proposal 119: Oracle Update. The new proposal was created less than one hour after Proposal 117 had been executed, however it now needs to go through  seven-day governance process before taking effect.

According to an update from Security Solutions Architect Michael Lewellen of OpenZeppelin, the code bug came from the “getUnderlyingPrice” function, which did not update the price of cETH tokens, which would return empty bytes and cause the call to be reverted.

On Aug. 30, global investment bank UBS increased its view on the risk of the United States entering a recession within one year to 60%, up from 40% in June. According to economist Pierre Lafourcade, the latest data showed a 94% chance of the economy contracting, but added that it "does not morph into a full-blown recession."

Partially explaining the difference is the "extremely low levels" of non-performing loans, or defaults exceeding 90 days from credit borrowers. According to Citigroup Chief Executive Jane Fraser, the institution "feels very good about" liquidity and credit quality. Furthermore, Reuters states that the financial industry wrote off merely 0.1% of its loans in the 2Q.

The problem is that even in the now-improbable scenario of avoiding a generalized recession, companies will face diminishing earnings as surging inflation limits consumption and Central Banks increase interest rates while winding down their balance sheets. Either way, the pressure on corporate profits is huge and this puts pressure on stock prices.

The valuation dynamics for cryptocurrencies vastly differ from equities, corporate debt, and stock markets. The truth is that there are no set metrics or indicators to guide token prices. Market participants have different perspectives on the protocols and their use cases.

On the other hand, the stock market has battle-tested valuation indicators that have been consistently used for decades, pounded by analysts, pundits and investors. For instance, the Price / Earnings multiple measures how many years would take a company to generate enough profit to cover its current market capitalization.

Ether (ETH) is the second largest crypto by market capitalization and the absolute leader in decentralized applications by deposits. Becoming a victim of its own success, the network experienced a fee hike in November 2021 when the average transaction costs surpassed $50. 

That's precisely why the Merge is a critical step to implementing a fully functional scaling solution. The confirmation of a transition to a proof of stake (PoS) consensus was the main driver for the rally toward $2,000 on Aug. 15.

Investors were partially excited about the reduced issuing schedule and likely a transition to a deflationary scenario, but there's also the expectation of upcoming forks. As a result, hardforked coins may be awarded to Ether holders on different blockchains, even though there's no guarantee those will find traction or sufficient liquidity.

From one side, there's the temptation of free money and even bonus non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as the forked chain will initiate with the same state of the original Ethereum network, meaning each address will hold the exact same contents in terms of tokens and transaction history.

On the other hand, there's also a sense of disappointment after Ether’s agonizing 29% correction that took place after the $2,000 resistance proved to be more challenging than expected. It’s possible that as investors realized that the practical utility of the forks would be much lower than anticipated, the exuberant expectation of free money dissipated, and reality kicked in.

Ether (ETH) is the second largest crypto by market capitalization and the absolute leader in decentralized applications by deposits. Becoming a victim of its own success, the network experienced a fee hike in November 2021 when the average transaction costs surpassed $50. 

That's precisely why the Merge is a critical step to implementing a fully functional scaling solution. The confirmation of a transition to a proof-ofstake (PoS) consensus was the main driver for the rally toward $2,000 on Aug. 15.

Investors were partially excited about the reduced issuing schedule and likely a transition to a deflationary scenario, but there's also the expectation of upcoming forks. As a result, hard-forked coins may be awarded to Ether holders on different blockchains, even though there's no guarantee those will find traction or sufficient liquidity.

From one side, there's the temptation of free money and even bonus non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as the forked chain will initiate with the same state of the original Ethereum network, meaning each address will hold the exact same contents in terms of tokens and transaction history.

On the other hand, there's also a sense of disappointment after Ether’s agonizing 29% correction that took place after the $2,000 resistance proved to be more challenging than expected. It’s possible that as investors realized that the practical utility of the forks would be much lower than anticipated, the exuberant expectation of free money dissipated, and reality kicked in.