Daily Market Update: April 17, 2024

April 17, 2024

BTC is currently trading around $61,200 and ETH around $3,000.  Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are SUI, KAS, and BGB.  The global crypto market cap is $2.34T, down 1.5% over the last day.  DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$86b and BTC dominance is around 56%.

Despite the coming halving, crypto prices are struggling to regain their footing amidst worries of pushed out Fed rate cuts, turmoil in the Middle East, and subdued inflows into the spot Bitcoin ETFs that were negative in each of the last three trading days.  Regarding monetary policy, Fed Chair Powell stated yesterday that recent data shows “…a lack of further progress so far this year on returning to our 2% inflation goal” suggesting the Fed may not lower rates anytime soon.  Positively, however, ECB President Lagarde stated that the ECB remains on track to cut interest rates in the near-term as long as there isn’t an unexpected, major shock.

Notable news includes: Canada introduced increased disclosure obligations for crypto firms; the Bank of Israel announced it will launch a sandbox for testing CBDC use cases; US Senators Lummis and Gillibrand introduced a new bill to regulate stablecoins; Grayscale’s GBTC now holds half the bitcoin it did prior to its conversion to a spot ETF; crypto investment platform Abra unveiled new private client and prime brokerage services; accounting firm E&Y launched an Ethereum-based blockchain solution to help businesses execute complex agreements; BytePlus, the enterprise technology arm of TikTok parent ByteDance, announced a strategic partnership with Sui blockchain’s Mysten Labs to use its AI and data warehousing to empower the Sui ecosystem; Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer removed caps on all ETH liquid staking tokens and unpaused restaking deposits; web3 AI model creation platform FLock partnered with DePIN network io.net for decentralized compute power; tokenization platform Huma Finance merged with liquidity platform Arf; and, Umoja and Merlin Chain introduced the Bitcoin-based USDb stablecoin.

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Author:
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | TwitterTelegramLinkedIn

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