• Bitcoin continues to float around $29,000 with little volatility and seeking a catalyst for the next price rally.
• Curve Finance exploit has led to $40 million in losses as per initial estimates. CRV token price tanks by 17%.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) has entered a strong consolidation period and has been trading under $30,000 showing little to no volatility over the past few weeks. As of press time, the BTC price is trading at $29,386 with a market cap of $571 billion.

After the Fed commentary recently along with the interest rate hike, Bitcoin has shown little movement and is seeking a catalyst. Joe DiPasquale, the CEO of crypto fund manager BitBull Capital, added that there needs to be a “sustained sentiment shift” for any kind of upside in the market. Speaking to CoinDesk, he added:

“Notably, now that the Fed’s interest rate hike is also priced, the fact that Bitcoin and ETH have both maintained their price levels, should give bulls additional confidence”. He added that “increased, speculative price actions around coins on the Base network,”

Next week, the focus will be on the U.S. jobs data, which is crucial for investors. They are watching for any indications of a slower job market and whether it will help control inflation. If the employment data suggests that inflation is under control, it may influence the Federal Reserve’s decision to pause its interest rate hikes going ahead.

BitBull’s DiPasquale said that he isn’t expecting any overnight surge in the market while adding that the 2024 halving could lead to a next major rally. “Until then, bulls will do well to accumulate when opportune, and bears may want to practice vigilant risk management,” he wrote.

Altcoins Correct Following Curve Finance Exploit

Later on Sunday, July 30, altcoins faced some selling pressure amid the news of a major exploit in the decentralized finance (DeFi) exchange Curve Finance. ETH’s current price is $1,857, which is a 1.2% decrease from Sunday. It has been trading within a narrow range of $1,840 to $1,890 for the past week. SOL and MATIC, tokens of Solana and Polygon platforms, dropped 4.5% and 4.2% in the last 24 hours. The well-known memecoin DOGE also declined by 3.7%.

On Monday, the Ethereum-based DeFi exchange curve faced a major exploit as a result of the vulnerability in the programming language Vyper. A glitch in the version of Vyper, led to the exploit on the Curve platform. In its announcement on Twitter, Curve Finance noted:

A number of stablepools (alETH/msETH/pETH) using Vyper 0.2.15 have been exploited as a result of a malfunctioning reentrancy lock. We are assessing the situation and will update the community as things develop. Other pools are safe.

According to BlockSec, a company offering security audit services for crypto software, the hack resulted in losses of over $40 million. Tarun Chitra, the CEO and founder of Gauntlet, a crypto risk modeling firm, estimated that the exploiter managed to steal around $20 million worth of CRV and a version of Ether.

The heist destabilized trading markets for Curve DAO’s native CRV token, which was down 17% on the day at a price of $0.61 as of press time. That price action threatened to compound the chaos by potentially forcing a liquidation on the founder of Curve’s $70 million borrowing position on Aave.