Daily Market Update: Mar 3, 2023

March 3, 2023

BTC is currently trading around $22,400 and ETH around $1,550. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are IMX, CSPR, and EOS. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.08T, down ~3.1% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$49b and BTC dominance is around 44%.

There’s been a notable divergence between crypto performance and broader risk assets to close the week. Concerns related to Silvergate, a key banking service provider enabling capital to flow seamlessly through the fragmented crypto ecosystem, likely contributed to the downward divergence. Silvergate traded down ~58% yesterday amidst concerns about its solvency, and numerous prominent industry players, including Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Circle, and many others, began publicly distancing themselves from Silvergate. Additionally, there was a sharp deleveraging in crypto yesterday evening, with more than $210m of longs liquidated. BTC and ETH fell more than 5% over just a few minutes.

Notable news includes: An updated financial snapshot of FTX indicated an ~$8.7b deficit based on current crypto prices; BIS’s latest BASEL III Monitoring report indicated that the crypto exposure at banks comprises less than 0.02% of their total exposure; withdrawals were enabled for Celsius Custody customers 263 days after being frozen; Jack Dorsey’s Block launched a new business entity aiming to improve liquidity/routing on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network; Binance USD market cap fell below $10b; Ethereum developers confirmed Shanghai would be pushed to April; bitcoin bridged to Avalanche breached a daily record north of 2k BTC; Uniswap formed a six-member crypto bridge assessment committee; Aave began a governance discussion to deploy on Polygon’s upcoming zkEVM mainnet; decentralized music platform Audius named a Sirius XM/Pandora executive as its chief business officer; and, 401(k) provider ForUsAll revealed it would allow employees to invest directly in the 28 constituents of the CoinDesk Market Select Index.

Authors:
Matt Kunke, Junior Strategist | TwitterTelegramLinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | TwitterTelegramLinkedIn

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