BTC is currently trading around $28,000 and ETH around $1,750. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are CFX, STX, and SNX. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.21T, up ~0.4% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$49b and BTC dominance is around 48%.
Risk assets are up modestly following another weekend of material market developments. Credit Suisse fell more than 50% from Friday’s close after the Swiss government brokered a deal for UBS to acquire the troubled bank for ~$3.2b. The Swiss National Bank (SNB) is extending ~$110b in liquidity to aid the acquisition, and the Swiss government will back ~$10b of UBS losses stemming from Credit Suisse beyond the first ~$5.5b of losses that UBS assumes from the deal. Additionally, the Fed and several other global central banks coordinated Sunday evening to improve U.S. dollar liquidity and ease strain in global funding markets. The central banks, including the Fed, ECB, BoE, BoJ, SNB, and BoC, agreed to increase the frequency of 7-day maturity U.S. dollar swap lines from weekly to daily starting today.
Monetary policy considerations and the ongoing banking crisis will continue to command the majority of investor mindshare this week, with the Fed’s interest rate decision being the week’s most prominent release. Consensus still calls for a 25 bp hike on Wednesday, but Fed Funds futures imply a ~30% chance of a pause, and those odds are likely to increase should banking developments worsen over the coming days. The SNB similarly has an interest rate decision and press conference on Thursday that will likely garner more attention than usual, given UBS’s headline acquisition of Credit Suisse. We will also receive U.K. CPI on Wednesday, with a BoE interest rate decision, BoE meeting minutes, and a BoE inflation letter later on Thursday. Lastly, there are several speeches from ECB President Lagarde over the next three days.
Notable news includes: The FDIC sold most of Signature Bank’s deposits to Flagstar, but Signature’s crypto deposits were notably excluded from the deal as earlier reports suggested; a coalition of midsized banks in the U.S. has reportedly asked federal regulators to extend insurance on all deposits for a temporary two year period; Protego’s conditional national bank status expired without approval; Microsoft is reportedly developing a new Ethereum wallet embedded in its Edge browser; Coinbase is reportedly exploring the launch an offshore exchange that would enable perp trading; Polygon partnered with Salesforce for an NFT-based loyalty program; an internal war broke out at DeFi Llama with the blockchain data platform forking over an internal disagreement on plans to launch a token; open interest in Bitcoin futures hit a yearly high; Arbitrum’s weekly DEX volume reached an all-time high; DWF Labs invested $20m in DeFi protocol Synthetix; Bithumb executives are suspected of taking bribes in exchange for token listings; and, the Euler exploiter has begun returning stolen ETH to Euler (still only ~2.5% of the heist), and onchain sleuth ZachXBT called the earlier payment to Lazarus a ‘troll’ transaction.
Authors:
Matt Kunke, Junior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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