BTC is currently trading around $21,800 and ETH around $1,550. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are MINA, HBAR, and RPL. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.06T, down ~4.4% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$47b and BTC dominance is around 43%.
Equities are broadly lower, U.S. rates are largely unchanged, and oil is higher behind production cuts from Russia. The Japanese yen and JGB yields are moving higher as Japan’s Prime Minister nominated a seemingly more hawkish Kazuo Ueda to succeed Governor Kuroda at the helm of the BoJ beginning in April. The nomination was a surprise as the market-anticipated front-runner, Deputy Governor Masayoshi Amamiya, reportedly declined the position.
Crypto losses accelerated yesterday afternoon as markets grappled with the U.S.’s increasingly hostile regulatory backdrop. The concerns depicted in Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s mid-week Twitter thread came to fruition, as it was revealed that Kraken would pay a $30m fine and immediately terminate its staking operations in the U.S. to settle SEC charges that it offered unregistered securities. The impact on other centralized U.S.-based staking providers, like Coinbase, remains to be seen, but markets are clearly favoring more decentralized alternatives at this time, with tokens like Lido and Rocket Pool jumping meaningfully on the announcement. In other crypto regulatory news, the NYDFS is reportedly investigating Paxos, although the scope remains unclear.
Notable news includes: Optimism’s OP token fell after announcing a surprise airdrop; the Mississippi Senate passed a bill to protect cryptocurrency miners from discrimination; CleanSpark revealed its intent to acquire 50-75 MW of new mining capacity by year-end; web3 music startup anotherblock listed a Rihanna song as an NFT with partial royalty claims; OnChain Monkey NFTs doubled after the creator expanded to Bitcoin via Ordinals; BNY Mellon indicated that ~90% of its institutional clients remain interested in digital assets; and, the disgraced Three Arrows Capital co-founder Su Zhu unveiled a waitlist for his new crypto marketplace to trade claims of failed exchanges.
Authors:
Matt Kunke, Junior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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