Max Pain
After failing to stay above the $50k level, BTC has continued to decline, and some worrying signs are also starting to pop up. For example, there is now a distinct break below the previous bearish continuation pattern formed near the $49.2k support level.
Further, the on-chain price walls that were generated by whale inflow have also all been breached, with BTC now trading below both the $48k level as well as its 100-hourly moving average. If BTC fails to stay above the $47.2k level, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap could possibly even find itself dipping into the $45.5k support zone.
Additionally, more BTC price volatility is to be expected in the near term, as the market is gravitating towards “max pain” with regard to the December options expiry (that is worth more than $6 billion). The downside skew will also likely continue all the way to the end of January 2022, as a high volume of call premiums have already been sold within the past 24 hours.
Unfortunately, this means that other large cap cryptocurrencies will also take a hit, and most have indeed experienced losses of between 3–8% in the last 24 hours or so.
MASK Token Scam
It seems that crypto scammers are out in full force again. On Tuesday, a fake MetaMask token project managed to con around $1.8 million worth of ETH from the Twitter crypto community.
The scam was premised and played on the anticipation of many crypto enthusiasts with regard to MetaMask’s wallet token release, and involved the scammers tapping into a vulerability in DEXTools, a popular DeFi trading app, to falsify the project’s legitimacy. By inserting a section of code into DEXTools’s front-end library for the WETH/MASK pair, the scammers were able to activate a pop-up that verified the legitimacy of the fake MASK token.
These tokens are far from legitimate, however, as they cannot be sold. Unfortunately, this scam took plenty of victims, and the scammers have since managed to drain the liquidity pool and launder away the gains that they have made from their illicit venture.
