In the Dec. 15 edition of "The Crypto Show" on Backstage Pass, Fool.com contributor Chris MacDonald and Fool.com editor Eric Bleeker discuss the value of Bitcoin (BTC 0.57%) relative to other high-powered cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (ETH 0.18%), Enjin Coin (ENJ 1.92%), and Decentraland (MANA -0.28%).
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Eric Bleeker: The past seven days we have Bitcoin off four percent, Ethereum 13 percent, Solana (SOL 1.83%) 14 percent, Enjin 15 percent, Decentraland 17 percent.
Partially, I bring this up to show something that I guess in crypto relative terms that has more stability like Bitcoin having on the lower end of gains.
Things that recently were a lot more narrative focused like Decentraland or Engine coin that are benefiting from the growth in metaverse, seeing the higher sell-offs, which once again fits this profile we've been talking about in general, de-risking that's occurring in the market right now.
Chris, let's just dive into some of the areas that you had talked about with leverage being employed. What are you seeing when you look at the crypto market right now?
Chris MacDonald: Yeah, I think that's a really good intro and a good way of looking at it. When you think about Enjin coin, Decentraland and Alien Worlds, some of the other metaverse plays, there's certain areas of the crypto market, just like certain areas of the tech market that are super high-growth and hyped up and have done extremely well.
Investors, I think, are looking to take that risk off the table right now. Solana has had its own issues with some slowdowns on their network, and Ethereum it seems the network has been plagued by higher gas fees lately.
Bitcoin seems to be holding up more as the "steady Eddy," like you mentioned, at least over the past week. Like you mentioned, it's hard to look at the crypto sector from a week-to-week basis. It's more of investors either take a super long-term view of it or they're looking to trade the sector.
For those traders who are moving money in and out with momentum and leverage, some of those names that get bid up on the way up can see more significant declines on the way down. I think that's what we're seeing right now.
Smaller moves into bigger cap cryptocurrencies are bleeding through to some pretty deeper or more significant moves in some of those smaller cap tokens.
Eric Bleeker: I thought it was interesting. We touched on this briefly on last week's show. The activities, it's always hard to correlate one-to-one, one specific action while prices rapidly decline. The sell-offs are often caused by much smaller moves than you might expect when you look at the headline of Bitcoin being a trillion dollar asset, correct?
Chris MacDonald: For sure. It's interesting that it doesn't take a lot necessarily to move some of the smaller cap cryptocurrencies a lot further, let's say than a Bitcoin or Ethereum based on some market narrative or sentiment. It seems like right now a lot of these moves are sentiment-driven and sentiment is just not strong in the market right now.
