The overall picture is still bearish.
According to the Blockchain analytics firm, Chainalysis, over 3 billion US dollars had been hacked from the crypto industry across 125 attacks in the first ten months of 2022, putting this year on track to be a record year for such exploits.
On the first day of December, Binance announced that hackers possibly targeted Ankr tokens. This attack occurred after the fall of the crypto exchange FTX and can hold the lack of trust in the cryptocurrency industry for longer. Ankr announced on Twitter that it is "committed to compensating affected users. The team at Ankr has assessed the damage, and it is a maximum of 5 [million US dollars] worth of BNB." Ankr told decentralized exchanges to block trading and said it would re-issue the tokens after assessing the situation.
On the other hand, while last week's published FOMC meeting minutes and this week's Fed Chair Powell increased the market sentiment with the idea that the central bank in the US will slow down the rate hikes, today's nonfarm payrolls changed everything.
The minutes of the latest FOMC meeting released last Wednesday confirmed that many FOMC officials favored slowing rate hikes soon. With slower inflation in the past three months, Market participants were expecting between a 50-bps and a 25-bps interest rate increase in December.
Today's published NFP numbers again confirmed that the US economy is strong enough to handle higher interest rates. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in November, nonfarm payrolls were up 263,000 through the middle of the month, ignoring the increasing signs of layoffs across the economy. It is much higher than the 200,000 consensuses forecast increased by 84,000 in October's number. On top of that, the average hourly earnings rose by 0.6% to push annual earnings growth back to 5.1%. Also, October's released data were revised from an initial estimate of 0.4% to 0.5%. The participation rate fell to 62.1% from 62.2%.
All these data mean that FOMC members can still emphasize the hawkish signs. Even though the rate hike pace could get slower, we will see signs of a long process with less interest in interest rate cuts next year. None of them are positive signals for the risky markets, including cryptocurrencies.
From the technical point of view, most crypto assets are still in an overall downtrend. Ethereum, as you can see in the below Daily chart, moves in a clear downtrend, incredibly, as long as it is trading under 1,620 USD. Only above this level can we count on bulls; otherwise, bears have complete control of the ETH chart.
