CIRCA 1950: Still-life of a bowling ball striking pins on a bowling alley. (Photo by Camerique Archive/Getty Images)
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Programmable blockchain Solana’s SOL token and Web 3 focused Ontology blockchain’s ONT coin dipped the most as bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, erased the weekly gain with a drop under $30,000.
At 10:20 EST, ONT traded at $0.277, representing an 8% decline on a 24-hour basis. Solana’s SOL nursed a 5% loss and changed hands at $38.20, according to Forbes data.
Investors began selling SOL at around $45 on Wednesday after the Solana network suffered an outage, bringing all activity to a halt for almost five hours.
SOL’s hourly chart.
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Solana rose to prominence last year as a faster and cheaper alternative to Ethereum, the world’s biggest smart contract blockchain. However, its reputation has taken a hit due to several disruptions since the beginning of the year. Wednesday’s downtime was the second major outage in a month and the fifth this year. SOL peaked near $260 in November and has declined by over 70% in 2022.
Other major losers were Cardano’s ADA, decentralized exchange SushiSwap’s SUSHI token and Decred’s DCR coin. The winning side included bitcoin’s offshoot bitcoin SV (BSV), Stellar’s XLM token and Dfinity Foundation’s internet computer (ICP) token.
Bitcoin traded 3% lower at $29,400. The cryptocurrency tapped highs above $32,000 early this week, raising hopes for a notable market-wide bounce. However, the relief was short-lived, and the pullback from the weekly highs indicates a strong “sell on the rise mentality”.
The sentiment appears quite bearish, considering that the US data released early today showed slower wage growth in May. The US average hourly earnings advanced by only 0.3% month-on-month in May, missing the 0.4% projection, the Labor Department reported. The wage growth figure also missed estimates in April.
Wages feed into inflation. Therefore, slower salary increases mean elevated price pressures may not be as sticky as previously thought. That weakened the case for faster Fed tightening but failed to lift bitcoin.
Perhaps, markets are worried that the labor market, which is showing no signs of slowing down, will keep the Fed from slowing down the pace of monetary tightening. The central bank is expected to lift borrowing costs by 50 basis points at upcoming meetings, having hiked rates by 75 basis points so far this year.
The nonfarm payrolls number released early today showed the economy added 390,000 jobs in May, beating the estimate of 325,000 additions. Over the past three months, the payroll growth has averaged +408k per month. That’s a cracking pace in a rising rate environment.
