Bitcoin Trump-Dumps to $10,500; MetaMask Hits 1 Million Users

Bitcoin was able to hit $10,800 Tuesday before falling on U.S. Pres. Donald Trump's stimulus tweet. Meanwhile, the DeFi ecosystem’s most popular wallet hit 1 million users.

Bitcoin’s price was able to climb to $10,800 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase Tuesday before falling to as low as $10,528 immediately after President Trump tweeted his rejection of opposition lawmakers’ most recent economic stimulus proposal. 

“One thing that is still hanging over this market is the stimulus,” said Andrew Tu, an executive at quant trading firm Efficient Frontier. “It may take until after the elections for them to reach an agreement, which would be really bad for a lot of Americans relying on government aid.”

Katie Stockton, an analyst at Fairlead Strategies, says bitcoin has been above the key $10,000 price point for some time, which she considers bullish. “Bitcoin has been consolidating within its uptrend since discovering support near $10,000 a month ago,” Stockton said. The last time bitcoin traded below $10,000 was on Sept. 9.

Daniel Koehler, liquidity manager at cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin, says the aftermath of the BitMEX news still has him optimistic. 

Read More: BitMEX Ether Futures Trading Contracts Fall by Half in Wake of US Charges

"It's bullish to see that bitcoin trading infrastructure is so strong given that the former largest bitcoin derivatives trading platform can lose 25% of [its] BTC open interest deposits overnight and the markets just shrug it off.” Koehler also noted that open interest in the bitcoin futures market overall is ticking up, hitting $3.8 billion on Monday.

One of the reasons for resilience may be bitcoin’s potential store-of-value properties, says Henrik Kugelberg, an over-the-counter trader based in Sweden, who is bullish bitcoin but bearish almost everything else. “To me there’s no doubt we will see a housing crash, a stock crash and quite possibly tough deflation in the near future,” he said.

To accomplish this, Kugelberg says U.S. debt, which is already over 100% gross domestic product, will have to increase in order to stave off a traditional market crash. ”Those things will drive the need to increase the debt at the same pace for another year or maybe more,” Kugelberg added. “To me it seems like a point where turning to bitcoin is a good idea.”

Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was down Tuesday, trading around $341 and slipping 3% in 24 hours as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET). 

The MetaMask wallet, a browser extension that allows users to interact with the Ethereum network and its multitude of smart contract-based decentralized finance, or DeFi, applications, has hit 1 million users. It’s a fourfold increase for the wallet since 2019, with the United States, India, Nigeria and the Philippines as the top countries with highest MetaMask usage, according to its software developer, Consensys.

Chasing juicy returns in the DeFi space, which can often provide double- or triple-digit returns for lending crypto, is one of the reasons for MetaMask’s growth, said John Willock, CEO of Tritium Digital Assets, a crypto liquidity provider. “I think we can all recognize that a lot of the adoption of MetaMask is through the recent DeFi craze and interest in short-term returns that have been perceived to be out there to chase.”  

Read More: MetaMask Gets Into the Decentralized Exchange Aggregation Business

However, that speculation is bringing real adoption, Willock added. “I look at the MetaMask numbers as the same sort of early adoption indicator the uptake of Netscape browser use was in the 1990s. It is exciting.”  

Digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly lower Tuesday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

Notable losers as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

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