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Will Fed’s Jerome Powell steal friend.tech’s spotlight this week?

This week has two important aspects to focus on – friend.tech, a crypto project that started off small but it is grabbing all the attention, and the United States Federal Reserve’s next steps.

What’s happening with friend.tech?

With crypto markets reeling from August 17 losses, trading has taken a backseat, especially on centralized exchanges. As pointed out in the last two publications, on-chain trading concentrates all the hype. As a supplement to this frenzy is the recent success of the friend.tech platform. The project, built on Coinbase’s Layer 2 chain BASE, has received so much attention that it has overtaken big names like Tron, Uniswap, MetaMask and others in terms of 24-hour fees generated.

While friend.tech was initially focused on the crypto community, it is slowly starting to move to the mainstream, attracting popular internet celebrities. 

Read more about on-chain summer and friend.tech: 

On-chain degeneracy rages as Bitcoin fails to deliver: Part two

Coinbase Layer 2’s friend.tech overtakes Tron and Uniswap in 24-hour fees

Fed could trample on friend.tech’s fame

While many people criticize that the hype surrounding friend.tech could be short-lived, I think that the Fed’s announcements or statements on August 24 and 25 will be much more important. 

On August 24 and 25, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s speech and the Jackson Hole symposium will play a key role in understanding if the rate hikes so far have worked in favor of the Fed or not. These two days will set the tone for the upcoming weeks of 2023 and also potentially signal what’s in store for 2024. Suggestion of continued rate hikes could trigger a rally for the US dollar, which would, in turn, catalyze a selling spree for risk-on assets like stocks and Bitcoin.

In such a case, they friend.tech hype is likely to dissipate. 

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Author

Akash Girimath

Akash Girimath is a Mechanical Engineer interested in the chaos of the financial markets. Trying to make sense of this convoluted yet fascinating space, he switched his engineering job to become a crypto reporter and analyst.

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