Cryptocurrencies have started the week in the red, amidst growing negative sentiments. A brewing faceoff between the CEOs of Binance and FTX have triggered a massive selloff in the crypto market. At the time of writing, the total crypto market cap fell about 1.46% to $1.04 trillion and its trading volume was down by 0.47% to $70.04 billion.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhou (CZ) announced that his company plans to liquidate all its substantial FTX token FTT holdings. This seemed to be a response to reports revealing that Alameda Research has significant exposure to unlocked FTT - Almeda research is owned by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the CEO of FTX. Following the news, $FTT is down by more than 10%. Here’s all you need to know on this rift.

Elsewhere, equity markets finished last week on a moderate upswing as the tech-heavy Nasdaq, S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed Friday up more than a percentage point. This was in sync with a 4.7% gain that day for bitcoin.

What you need to know

This coming week, crypto traders will be focused on Tuesday's midterm elections in the U.S., which might have major implications for regulatory policy or economic decisions. Then on Thursday, the U.S. Labor Department is due to report the latest reading of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), expected to show that the main inflation rate staying at 8% or higher in October – still not too far from a four-decade high, and indicating just how much work the Federal Reserve has to do to cool off the economy and bring the figure back down.

We also expect the crypto market correlation with the NASDAQ Composite Index to continue this week. In the absence of new macro indicators, the markets will be eyeing comments from FOMC members for clues on what to expect in December.

Today, the Crypto Fear & Greed Index stands at 33/100, firmly within the “fear” bracket.

Bitcoin (BTC) is trading for less than $21,000 after hitting a fresh seven-week high on Saturday. In the last 24 hours, Iis lowest intraday trading price was $20,860.64, while its volume was up by 4.7% at $37,600,687,071.

The largest cryptocurrency's recent gains have pushed it over key levels on price charts, potentially signalling a crucial shift toward a more bullish trend. Despite seeing highs of nearly $21,500 over the past week, there has yet to be a catalyst capable of breaking the market status quo, but the coming week has as good a chance as any of doing so.

What you should know

In a warning signal to bulls, Bitcoin funding rates are surging on derivatives exchanges. As noted by Maartunn, a contributor to on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant, funding rates are now at their highs in six months. Highly positive funding rates suggest that the market expects BTC/USD to go higher and traders are paying for the privilege to go increasingly long BTC.

Bitcoin’s network fundamentals remain in an interesting, if not wholly bullish state. The latest data from on-chain monitoring resource BTC.com confirms that network difficulty decreased by 0.2% - far less than previously estimated. The result has implications for miners, who have seen profits squeezed even as hash rate hits new all-time highs. This combination of high hash rate and low miner profitability is a potential cause for classifying Bitcoin as undervalued.

Ether (ETH) has lost around 2% in the last 24 hours to trade at $1,578. Its market capitalization sits at $193 billion, down from $197 billion yesterday.

During the weekend, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin introduced the Scourge, a new stage in a now expanded six-part technical roadmap. The updated technical roadmap now inserts the Scourge as the new third stage, which will then be followed by the previously-known stages — the Verge, the Purge and the Splurge.

According to the Ethereum roadmap, the goal of the Scourge is to “ensure reliable and credibly neutral transaction inclusion and to avoid centralization and other protocol risks from MEV.” Following Ethereum’s shift to a proof-of-stake (PoS) network on Sept. 15, Ethereum has been in the second stage — the Surge — with the goal of getting to 100,000 transactions per second through rollups.

What you should know

According to a tweet shared by Glassnode Alerts today, 35,185,071.976 Ethers (ETH) were moved between wallets 12 to 24 months ago. That said, they stayed dormant for at least one year. To some extent, this can be interpreted as a signal of confidence demonstrated by long-term holders of Ethereum (ETH) coins amid a bearish recession.

On Nov. 4-5, ETH’s price spiked to its highest levels in seven weeks. Its local top was registered over $1,660 on major spot exchanges. This spike can be attributed to the release of the updated post-Merge roadmap by Vitalik Buterin.

If ETH fails to climb above the $1,615 resistance, it could start another decline. The next major support is near the $1,550 level, below which ether’s price may perhaps gain bearish momentum.

Polygon continues to be one of the biggest winners of the crypto market. Despite massive volatility, $MATIC prices surged by 7% in the last hour. This brings Polygon’s weekly gain to 36%. Polygon prices are surging as Meta announced Polygon-based NFTs.

Litecoin is another winner which has surged by over 5% in the last 24 hours and by 32% in the last 7 days. LTC is currently trading at $72.45. Cronos also climbed 3.44% in the last 24 hours to trade at $0.12.

The rest of the altcoins faced major losses today due to market volatility. BNB and XRP both fell by 2.5% in the last 24 hours amid market speculation. BNB is trading at $341.10 while XRP is trading at $0.48. Dogecoin fell by 5% in the last 24 hours while Shiba Inu fell by 2.77%.

Solana was likely the biggest loser of the crypto market, despite its new partnership with Google. $SOL fell by 9% in the last 24 hours which erased all its weekly gains.