BTC enters November off the back of a particularly strong month for the token.

Cryptocurrency update

Bitcoin makes strides across October

Bitcoin celebrates a stonking month in as we say goodbye to October.

The world’s most popular crypto token made 40% gains across the month. It even struck an all-time high, reaching $66,975 at its highest, on a continued rally. Price action was buoyed by the intro of crypto ETFs on US stock exchanges for the first time.

Analysts predict monthly follow through into November could be strong too. It all depends on central bank action over the next month.

We’re due two potentially large central bank announcements at the start of the month from the Bank of England and US Federal Reserve. They could be taking action to tackle rising inflation across the British and US economy. The Fed is forecast to lower its quantitative easing programme, while the BoE may hike rates.

Essentially fears from Bitcoin bulls is that removal of US stimulus could pull the rug out from under their feet. They are waiting to see if the Fed does taper back financial support, and if there is a resulting drop in equities markets.

Some investors have been using Bitcoin to hedge against inflation. On the whole, the token seems to perform well when markets are up and especially hungry for growth-sensitive assets. On the flipside, they tend to get pulled back down when markets underperform too. How crypto and Bitcoin markets respond to the Fed’s tapering will be important for the token’s momentum.

$2.7bn worth of ETH burned on Ethereum network

You may recall about roughly three months ago the Ethereum blockchain network went through a period of adjustment. The London Hard Fork added a few essential upgrades to improve the network’s functionality. This included a switch to proof-of-stake consensus, introduced more affordable network fees, and taken steps to ensure the Ether token is deflationary.

In the 87 days since the London Hard Fork was introduced $2.7bn worth of ETH tokens have been burned on the network. That’s a total of over 700,000 individual Ether coins.

In order to use the Ethereum blockchain, developers and users must use ETH to pay small fees called “gas”. It’s a good example of how a cryptocurrency was initially supposed to be used.

The biggest ETH burner is Opensea, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens. Opensea has burned which has burned 91,171 ETH tokens since the London Hard Fork was implemented.

A mixture of everyday users and organisations took second place for the largest burner segment. Over 64,400 was burned by these clients. Decentralised exchange Uniswap is the third-largest burner, attributed to 51,217 transactions.

Unlike Bitcoin, which will only ever produce 21m coins, Ethereum has no upper limit. However, supplies are restricted to 18m tokens annually.

Binance disables withdrawals on busy backlog

A large backlog of orders caused Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, to halt withdrawals on Monday morning.

The network was clogged, showing the high popularity of crypto trading around the world. After fixing the problem for 25 minutes, withdrawals were halted once more, according to the exchange.

Normal service only resumed around 2pm London time on Monday afternoon.