HBAR has seen a notable rally recently, bringing the altcoin back into a key consolidation zone just under $0.20. Trading close to this critical level, HBAR is showing signs of strong momentum.
A successful breach of $0.20 could mark the beginning of further upside, provided bullish market conditions continue to support the move.
HBAR Traders Are Optimistic
The market sentiment around HBAR remains highly optimistic, as indicated by its funding rate, which has stayed positive for nearly two weeks. A positive funding rate suggests that traders are confident in the altcoin’s bullish trajectory and are positioning themselves to benefit from potential gains.
Additionally, the dominance of long contracts highlights the heightened bullishness among investors. Traders are betting heavily on HBAR’s price increase, reinforcing the view that the altcoin could soon breach its key resistance.
The broader macro momentum for HBAR is mixed, presenting both opportunity and risk. The liquidation map shows that about $42 million worth of long contracts are at risk if the HBAR price falls to $0.167. This exposure underlines the critical importance of the $0.200 resistance.
Given this setup, maintaining current price levels is crucial for HBAR. If the altcoin fails to sustain its upward momentum and investors lose confidence, the resulting liquidations could significantly impact its price trajectory.
HBAR is currently priced at $0.193, holding just under the critical $0.200 resistance. This level has remained unbroken for more than a month and a half. Historically, repeated failures to breach significant resistance levels have often led to declines, making the current situation pivotal for HBAR’s near-term direction.
If HBAR fails to break through $0.200, the altcoin could lose its $0.182 support and slip to $0.167. A fall to this level would trigger the liquidation of the $42 million worth of contracts mentioned earlier, likely intensifying the downward pressure and causing further market distress.
Conversely, if broader market conditions remain favorable and investors continue to support HBAR, the altcoin could successfully breach the $0.200 barrier. Achieving this would invalidate the bearish outlook and set HBAR on a course toward $0.222, opening the door for renewed bullish momentum.
The metrics used to measure outcomes can be misleading when evaluating blockchain performance. As more blockchain networks emerge, the public needs clear, efficiency-focused metrics, rather than exaggerated claims, to differentiate between them.
In a conversation with BeInCrypto, Taraxa Co-Founder Steven Pu explained that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to compare blockchain performance accurately because many reported metrics rely on overly optimistic assumptions rather than evidence-based results. To combat this wave of misrepresentation, Pu proposes a new metric, which he calls TPS/$.
Why Does the Industry Lack Reliable Benchmarks?
The need for clear differentiation is growing with the increasing number of Layer-1 blockchain networks. As various developers promote the speed and efficiency of their blockchains, relying on metrics that distinguish their performance becomes indispensable.
However, the industry still lacks reliable benchmarks for real-world efficiency, instead relying on sporadic sentimental waves of hype-driven popularity. According to Pu, misleading performance figures currently saturate the market, obscuring true capabilities.
“It’s easy for opportunists to take advantage by driving up over-simplified and exaggerated narratives to profit themselves. Every single conceivable technical concept and metric has at one time or another been used to hype up many projects that don’t really deserve them: TPS, finality latency, modularity, network node count, execution speed, parallelization, bandwidth utilization, EVM-compatibility, EVM-incompatibility, etc.,” Pu told BeInCrypto.
Pu focused on how some projects exploit TPS metrics, using them as marketing tactics to make blockchain performance sound more appealing than it might be under real-world conditions.
Examining the Misleading Nature of TPS
Transactions per second, more commonly known as TPS, is a metric that refers to the average or sustained number of transactions that a blockchain network can process and finalize per second under normal operating conditions.
However, it often misleadingly hypes projects, offering a skewed view of overall performance.
“Decentralized networks are complex systems that need to be considered as a whole, and in the context of their use cases. But the market has this horrible habit of over-simplifying and over-selling one specific metric or aspect of a project, while ignoring the whole. Perhaps a highly centralized, high-TPS network does have its uses in the right scenarios with specific trust models, but the market really has no appetite for such nuanced descriptions,” Pu explained.
Pu indicates that blockchain projects with extreme claims on single metrics like TPS may have compromised decentralization, security, and accuracy.
“Take TPS, for example. This one metric masks numerous other aspects of the network, for example, how was the TPS achieved? What was sacrificed in the process? If I have 1 node, running a WASM JIT VM, call that a network, that gets you a few hundred thousand TPS right off the bat. I then make 1000 copies of that machine and call it sharding, now you start to get into the hundreds of millions of ‘TPS’. Add in unrealistic assumptions such as non-conflict, and you assume you can parallelize all transactions, then you can get “TPS” into the billions. It’s not that TPS is a bad metric, you just can’t look at any metric in isolation because there’s so much hidden information behind the numbers,” he added.
The Taraxa Co-founder revealed the extent of these inflated metrics in a recent report.
The Significant Discrepancy Between Theoretical and Real-World TPS
Pu sought to prove his point by determining the difference between the maximum historical TPS realized on a blockchain’s mainnet and the maximum theoretical TPS.
Of the 22 permissionless and single-shard networks observed, Pu found that, on average, there was a 20-fold gap between theory and reality. In other words, the theoretical metric was 20 times higher than the maximum observed mainnet TPS.
Taraxa Co-founder finds 20x difference between the Theoretical TPS and the Max Observed Mainnet TPS. Source: Taraxa.
“Metric overestimations (such as in the case of TPS) are a response to the highly speculative and narrative-driven crypto market. Everyone wants to position their project and technologies in the best possible light, so they come up with theoretical estimates, or conduct tests with wildly unrealistic assumptions, to arrive at inflated metrics. It’s dishonest advertising. Nothing more, nothing less,” Pu told BeInCrypto.
Looking to counter these exaggerated metrics, Pu developed his own performance measure.
Introducing TPS/$: A More Balanced Metric?
Pu and his team developed the following: TPS realized on mainnet / monthly $ cost of a single validator node, or TPS/$ for short, to fulfill the need for better performance metrics.
This metric assesses performance based on verifiable TPS achieved on a network’s live mainnet while also considering hardware efficiency.
The significant 20-fold gap between theoretical and actual throughput convinced Pu to exclude metrics based solely on assumptions or lab conditions. He also aimed to illustrate how some blockchain projects inflate performance metrics by relying on costly infrastructure.
“Published network performance claims are often inflated by extremely expensive hardware. This is especially true for networks with highly centralized consensus mechanisms, where the throughput bottleneck shifts away from networking latency and into single-machine hardware performance. Requiring extremely expensive hardware for validators not only betrays a centralized consensus algorithm and inefficient engineering, it also prevents the vast majority of the world from potentially participating in consensus by pricing them out,” Pu explained.
Pu’s team located each network’s minimum validator hardware requirements to determine the cost per validator node. They later estimated their monthly cost, paying particular attention to their relative sizing when used to compute the TPS per dollar ratios.
“So the TPS/$ metric tries to correct two of the perhaps most egregious categories of misinformation, by forcing the TPS performance to be on mainnet, and revealing the inherent tradeoffs of extremely expensive hardware,” Pu added.
Pu stressed considering two simple, identifiable characteristics: whether a network is permissionless and single-sharded.
Permissioned vs. Permissionless Networks: Which Fosters Decentralization?
A blockchain’s degree of security can be unveiled by whether it operates under a permissioned or permissionless network.
Permissioned blockchains refer to closed networks where access and participation are restricted to a predefined group of users, requiring permission from a central authority or trusted group to join. In permissionless blockchains, anyone is allowed to participate.
According to Pu, the former model is at odds with the philosophy of decentralization.
“A permissioned network, where network validation membership is controlled by a single entity, or if there is just a single entity (every Layer-2s), is another excellent metric. This tells you whether or not the network is indeed decentralized. A hallmark of decentralization is its ability to bridge trust gaps. Take decentralization away, then the network is nothing more than a cloud service,” Pu told BeInCrypto.
Attention to these metrics will prove vital over time, as networks with centralized authorities tend to be more vulnerable to certain weaknesses.
“In the long term, what we really need is a battery of standardized attack vectors for L1 infrastructure that can help to reveal weaknesses and tradeoffs for any given architectural design. Much of the problems in today’s mainstream L1 are that they make unreasonable sacrifices in security and decentralization. These characteristics are invisible and extremely hard to observe, until a disaster strikes. My hope is that as the industry matures, such a battery of tests will begin to organically emerge into an industry-wide standard,” Pu added.
Meanwhile, understanding whether a network employs state-sharding versus maintaining a single, sharded state reveals how unified its data management is.
State-Sharding vs. Single-State: Understanding Data Unity
In blockchain performance, latency refers to the time delay between submitting a transaction to the network, confirming it, and including it in a block on the blockchain. It measures how long it takes for a transaction to be processed and become a permanent part of the distributed ledger.
Identifying whether a network employs state-sharding or a single-sharded state can reveal much about its latency efficiency.
State-sharded networks divide the blockchain’s data into multiple independent parts called shards. Each shard operates somewhat independently and doesn’t have direct, real-time access to the complete state of the entire network.
By contrast, a non-state-sharded network has a single, shared state across the entire network. All nodes can access and process the same complete data set in this case.
Pu noted that state-sharded networks aim to increase storage and transaction capacity. However, they often face longer finality latencies due to a need to process transactions across multiple independent shards.
He added that many projects adopting a sharding approach inflate throughput by simply replicating their network rather than building a truly integrated and scalable architecture.
“A state-sharded network that doesn’t share state, is simply making unconnected copies of a network. If I take a L1 network and just make 1000 copies of it running independently, it’s clearly dishonest to claim that I can add up all the throughput across the copies together and represent it as a single network. There are architectures that actually synchronize the states as well as shuffle the validators across shards, but more often than not, projects making outlandish claims on throughput are just making independent copies,” Pu said.
Based on his research into the efficiency of blockchain metrics, Pu highlighted the need for fundamental shifts in how projects are evaluated, funded, and ultimately succeed.
What Fundamental Shifts Does Blockchain Evaluation Need?
Pu’s insights present a notable alternative in a Layer-1 blockchain space where misleading performance metrics increasingly compete for attention. Reliable and effective benchmarks are essential to counter these false representations.
“You only know what you can measure, and right now in crypto, the numbers look more like hype-narratives than objective measurements. Having standardized, transparent measurements allows simple comparisons across product options so developers and users understand what it is they’re using, and what tradeoffs they’re making. This is a hallmark of any mature industry, and we still have a long way to go in crypto,” Pu concluded.
Adopting standardized and transparent benchmarks will foster informed decision-making and drive genuine progress beyond merely promotional claims as the industry matures.
Ethereum is set to undergo its highly anticipated Pectra upgrade tomorrow, and on-chain data suggests that validators are preparing to weather any market volatility.
Despite ETH’s lackluster price performance over the past week, the drop in validator exit points to a sense of confidence among network participants.
Ethereum Validators Hold Firm Ahead of Pectra
According to Glassnode, Ethereum’s validator voluntary exit count has declined noticeably since May 1, signaling a drop in the number of validators choosing to leave the network. On May 5, only 238 validators exited the network — the lowest daily count of validator exits from Ethereum since April 5.
This trend indicates that more validators are opting to stay put rather than liquidate their staked ETH, a sign of long-term confidence in the network and its coin.
With fewer exits, Ethereum validators appear optimistic about the network’s near-term outlook and the potential impact of the Pectra upgrade. Such sentiment, if sustained, could help lay the foundation for a post-upgrade ETH rally.
Moreover, the coin’s persistently positive funding rate reinforces the bullish sentiment surrounding ETH. At press time, ETH’s funding rate is 0.0027%, indicating that traders are still willing to pay a premium to maintain long positions.
A positive funding rate suggests bullish sentiment dominates the futures market, as long-position holders pay short sellers to keep their trades open. This dynamic reflects traders’ expectations of upward price movement.
Despite ETH’s continued struggle to break decisively above the $2,000 level, futures traders remain optimistic, consistently placing leveraged bets in anticipation of a price surge.
Bullish Setup Meets “Sell-the-News” Fears
As the countdown to Pectra ticks down, the fall in validator exit from Ethereum could tighten ETH’s circulating supply, contributing to a bullish breakout post-upgrade. If bullish sentiment persists, ETH’s price could rally to $2,027.
However, the risk of a “sell-the-news” event remains.
If the upgrade fails to meet market expectations or triggers profit-taking, ETH could experience downside pressure despite the optimistic signals from validator behavior. In this scenario, its price could fall to $1,744.
US President Donald Trump is reportedly launching a new crypto wallet in partnership with Magic Eden. Apparently, users will also be eligible to partake in a $1 million airdrop of TRUMP tokens.
There aren’t many specific details about this project available, but Magic Eden confirmed its involvement. Trump has a long-running interest in the NFT market, launching new ones last month, which could explain this choice.
Trump recently included NFT rewards in his Gala Dinner package, potentially explaining Magic Eden’s help making the wallet.
Unfortunately, we don’t have even the most basic information about the TRUMP wallet yet, including topics like KYC information, security, custody structure, etc. For now, interested users can join the waitlist in the hope of future developments.
The waitlist doesn’t have a clear end date, but it encourages users to buy TRUMP tokens. The meme coin has seen increased sell-offs since the dinner concluded a few weeks ago. Yet, today’s wallet announcement brought a brief spike.
The latest crypto wallet will likely bring more political scrutiny, specifically from the Democrats. Yet, the US president seems committed to furthering his meme coin venture.
(@MagicEden) 