Christmas has come early for the bank’s shareholders with the decision to slightly increase the 2024 dividend – despite a single-digit decline in the net profit and cash earnings.
Beating the market benchmark is never easy, with 72 per cent of Australian actively managed global equity general funds trailing the S&P World Index in the six months to June 30, 2024. Domestic equity funds performed slightly better, albeit against a significantly lower bar set by the S&P/ASX 200 Index.
Celsius Network freeze hits crypto investors hard
In case you missed it, the second crypto meltdown is underway a month after the implosion of the Terra stable coin, sent crypto markets tumbling. This crypto sell-off has claimed another casualty, ‘The Celsius Network’.
Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies went into freefall, signalling what share markets would call a ‘dead cat bounce’. For those that don’t know, a dead cat bounce is a temporary, short-term recovery in share prices or cryptocurrency prices from an extended fall or a bear market that is followed by the continuation of the downtrend. The original downtrend is interrupted by a small sucker’s ‘bounce’ and is then followed by a continuation of the downward price move.
Over the weekend one of the world’s largest lenders of cryptocurrency, The Celsius Network, froze all withdrawals due to the extreme volatility. The $5.3 billion Celsius Network has some 1.7 million customers. In order to stabilise liquidity and operations and to protect against assets, the network placed a temporarily halt on all withdrawals, crypto swaps and transfers between accounts.
The way the platform works is that bridges the CeFi (centralised) and DeFi (decentralised) worlds to help facilitate lending services using blockchain technology into the real world. Within CeFi, users can transfer crypto assets (BTC or ETH) to Celsius and earn yield on those assets of around 18%. These funds are then lent back out to borrowers to make a return. The undercollateralized crypto lending market will just in its infancy and is tipped to grow significantly.
The platform put a halt to withdrawals because of the volatile conditions. This triggered another round of panic selling. To make matters worse Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, has also suspended withdrawals on its bitcoin network for a few hours on Monday.
However, the decision was not related to The Celsius Network transaction freezing. It was a decision based on transactions that had become stuck and were creating a backlog. Nonetheless, with emotions running high, traders are nervous, and volatility is high.
- Bitcoin hit US$21,930.40 this morning down 15 percent in the last 24 hours, down 25 percent over the last 5 days and down 52 percent year to date.
- Ethereum flash crashed to US$950 but climbed its way back to US$1,214. It’s down 16.47 percent in the last 24 hours and is down 67.76 percent in the year to date.
The cryptocurrency market has taken a beating over the last month following a rise in inflation which triggered a rotation out of risk assets. Traders have ditched riskier investments such as cryptocurrencies and have moved to safer assets such as gold and value stocks.
The Celsius Network hasn’t said when it will be back allowing its customers to withdraw their deposits again. It will take time. In the background, Governments are watching closely how events unfold and what regulations are required going forward.
