Decentral Block Post

$20,000 is no longer support.

$100,000 didn’t happen.

The Bitcoin halving is 562 days away.

Bears simply refuse to release their vice grip on the market and the Federal Reserve’s policy of interest rate hikes and quantitative tightening is adding fuel to the fire.

Despite these challenges, in a Sept. 15 Twitter Space hosted by Cointelegraph, Capriole Fund founder Charles Edwards explained why he is still bullish on Bitcoin.

XRP pricewas wobbling between profits and losses on Sep. 19 despite hopes that Ripple would eventually win its long-running legal battle against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Fed spoils SEC vs. Ripple euphoria

The XRP/USD pair dropped by over 1% to $0.35 while forming extremely sharp bullish and bearish wicks on its Sep. 19 daily candlestick. In other words, its intraday performance hinted at a growing bias conflict among traders.

The indecisiveness could be due to XRP's exposure to catalysts other than the SEC vs. Ripple lawsuit. Namely, the Federal Reserve's potential to increase its benchmark interest rates by another 75 or 100 basis points in their policy meeting on Sep. 20.

As Cointelegraph reported, fears of aggressive rate hikes have pressured the crypto market lower throughout the year, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH). XRP is also not immune, given the token's consistently positive correlation with Bitcoin since October 2021.

For instance, XRP's daily correlation coefficient with Bitcoin on Sep. 19 was 0.47. A reading of 1 means that the two assets move in lockstep.  

Ripple (XRP) price was wobbling between profits and losses on Sept. 19 despite hopes that Ripple would eventually win its long-running legal battle against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Fed spoils SEC vs. Ripple euphoria

The XRP/USD pair dropped by over 1% to $0.35 while forming extremely sharp bullish and bearish wicks on its Sept. 19 daily candlestick. In other words, its intraday performance hinted at a growing bias conflict among traders.

The indecisiveness could be due to XRP's exposure to catalysts other than the SEC vs. Ripple lawsuit. Namely, the Federal Reserve's potential to increase its benchmark interest rates by another 75 or 100 basis points in their policy meeting on Sept. 20.

As Cointelegraph reported, fears of aggressive rate hikes have pressured the crypto market lower throughout the year, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH). XRP is also not immune, given the token's consistently positive correlation with Bitcoin since October 2021.

For instance, XRP's daily correlation coefficient with Bitcoin on Sep. 19 was 0.47. A reading of 1 means that the two assets move in lockstep.  

Major Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX has opted to delist the USD Coin (USDC) from its platform and convert the remaining balances into Binance-backed Binance USD (BUSD) stablecoin.

WazirX officially announced on Monday that it has stopped deposits of USDC alongside other stablecoins like Pax Dollar (USDP) and TrueUSD (TUSD).

According to the announcement, the platform will instead offer the BUSD stablecoin to enhance liquidity and capital efficiency for users. WazirX will implement BUSD auto-conversion for users' existing balances of USDC, USDP and TUSD at a 1:1 ratio on Oct. 5, the firm said.

“Users will be able to view their USDC, USDP and TUSD balances under the BUSD-denominated account balance when the conversion is complete,” the exchange noted. “WazirX may amend the list of stablecoins eligible for auto-conversion,” the announcement added.

Withdrawals of USDC, USDP, and TUSD will still be available on WazirX till Sept. 23. The platform then plans to delist the stablecoins from its spot trading pairs on Sept. 26.

Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum's native token, Ether (ETH), started the week on a depressive note as investors braced themselves for a flurry of rate hike decisions from central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of England.

Bitcoin price fails to hold $20,000

On Sep. 19, BTC's price has failed to regain the $20,000 psychological support zone. The BTC/USD pair slipped by 6.5% to around $18,250, while ETH dropped 4% to approximately $1,280.

Their gloomy performance came as a part of a broader decline that started in mid-August, wherein BTC and ETH wiped a total of 28% and 37% off their market valuation, respectively.

A 500 bps global rate hike ahead?

This week, the Fed and a number of its global peers will potentially attack rising inflation by further raising interest rates.

Data compiled by Bloomberg suggests that the U.S. central bank, alongside Sweden's Riksbank, the Swiss National Bank, Norway's Norges Bank, the Bank of England, and others, will raise lending rates by a combined 500 basis points, or 5%.

Post-Ethereum Merge proof-of-work (PoW) chain ETHW has moved to quell claims that it had suffered an on-chain replay attack over the weekend.

Smart contract auditing firm BlockSec flagged what it described as a replay attack that took place on Sept. 16, in which attackers harvested ETHW tokens by replaying the call data of Ethereum’s proof-of-stake (PoS) chain on the forked Ethereum PoW chain.

According to BlockSec, the root cause of the exploit was due to the fact that the Omni cross-chain bridge on the ETHW chain used old chainID and was not correctly verifying the correct chainID of the cross-chain message.

Ethereum’s Mainnet and test networks use two identifiers for different uses, namely, a network ID and a chain ID (chainID). Peer-to-peer messages between nodes make use of network ID, while transaction signatures make use of chainID. EIP-155 introduced chainID as a means to prevent replay attacks between the ETH and Ethereum Classic (ETC) blockchains.

BlockSec was the first analytics service to flag the replay attack and notified ETHW, which in turn quickly rebuffed initial claims that a replay attack had been carried out on-chain. ETHW made attempts to notify Omni Bridge of the exploit at the contract level:

The crypto market turmoil entered the third week of September as most of the cryptocurrencies started the week on a bearish note. The total crypto market cap dipped below $1 trillion again, with several cryptocurrencies recording a double-digit downfall over the past 24 hours.

The ongoing bearish turmoil has led to nearly half a billion in liquidations for the leverage crypto traders over the past 24 hours. Data from Coinglass highlight that 130,087 traders were liquidated with a total liquidations value of $431.51 million. Bitcoin (BTC) leverage traders lost $44.5 million, followed by Ether (ETH) traders with a total liquidation of $8.39 million.

Long traders made a significant chunk of losses on majority of the exchanges with the average difference between the amount of long and short liquidations being 10X.

The current market turmoil is being attributed to several macroeconomic factors, including the recently released consumer price index (CPI) data released on Sept. 13 that showed inflation is yet to cool off. BTC's price fell nearly $1,000 within minutes of the CPI data release. Since then, the market showed some will to move up over the weekend but saw another bloodbath earlier on Monday.

The higher CPI data is expected to be followed by a Fed rate hike in the upcoming meeting scheduled for Sept. 21. Market pundits have predicted that the rate hike could be the biggest in 40 years as a measure to control the soaring inflation.