BTC is currently trading around $67,600 and ETH around $3,450. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are CKB, ENA, and TAO. The global crypto market cap is $2.65T, down 4.9% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$102b and BTC dominance is around 54%.
US markets opened sharply lower while rates have jumped after inflation came in higher than estimated. Specifically, headline CPI increased 3.5% year-over-year in March, 0.3 percentage points higher than the prior month and 0.1 p.p. above estimates. Excluding volatile food and energy components, core CPI increased 3.8% over the last year, the same pace as the prior month but again 0.1 p.p. above expectations. The Fed has stated it must gain more confidence that inflation is moving towards its 2% target before it can begin to lower rates. Investors will now turn their attention towards the FOMC minutes due out this afternoon as well as tomorrow’s ECB meeting.
Meanwhile in crypto, EigenLayer, one of the biggest innovations in blockchain in years, launched on mainnet yesterday. EigenLayer is a security-as-a-service protocol and allows users to restake their staked ETH to provide security for arbitrary programs beyond Ethereum dapps such as bridges, oracles, and sidechains. Restakers earn additional yield in exchange for taking on increased slashing conditions, while the arbitrary programs, referred to as Actively Validated Services, can simply rent economic security from restakers rather than having to build their own blockchain, procure a validator network, and offer high inflation staking rewards. While the initial launch has just one live AVS in EigenDA and does not include payments from AVSs to operators or operator slashing to limit risk, EigenLayer may act as an enormous positive catalyst for ETH over time, as it significantly expands Ethereum’s settlement/security TAM beyond the blockchain itself and increases the notion of ETH as money.
Notable news includes: news outlets reported that Hong Kong will greenlight spot Bitcoin ETFs in the upcoming week, potentially paving the way for them to go live as early as this month; the CEO of VanEck stated he expects the VanEck Ethereum ETF to be rejected in May; Circle extended its Web3 Services and Tools suit to Solana; Solana validators passed the Timely Vote Credits governance proposal though it’s unclear how much faster this will make confirmations; a16z released zkVM Jolt; Dfinity launched a decentralized, onchain web3 accelerator on Internet Computer; Google Cloud and Coinbase joined EigenLayer as operators; and, friend.tech is seeing renewed activity ahead of its v2 and potential airdrop.
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Author:
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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