BTC is currently trading around $66,600 and ETH around $3,550. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are BONK, XEC, and SHIB. The global crypto market cap is $2.57T, up 4.0% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$92b and BTC dominance is around 55%.
Global equity markets are little changed to start the week as investors wait for key macro updates including: euro zone retail sales and Fed Chair Powell’s congressional testimony on Wednesday, the ECB monetary policy statement / press conference on Thursday, and euro zone GDP and US employment data on Friday. Meanwhile, crypto continues to rally with Bitcoin up 6% over the last 24 hours as crypto investment products saw $1.8b of inflows last week, per CoinShares. While the strong flows are a positive fundamental sign, exuberance may also be setting in, as evidenced by the Crypto Fear & Greed Index hitting its highest level since November 2021 and by the recent rally in memecoins that has seen PEPE, FLOKI, BONK, WIF, and SHIB all rally by 200-400% over the last seven days.
Notable news includes: China’s state-run media cautioned against crypto investments; Hungry issued a draft law allowing banks to offer crypto services; Taiwan’s FSC announced it will propose new draft digital asset regulations in September; a US court ruled that secondary token sales were securities for an ex-Coinbase employee accused of insider trading, though legal experts stated the ruling is not so dire for the industry as it was a default judgement with the defendant appearing to have fled the country; the US government agreed to stop its emergency survey on Bitcoin miner energy use, though it will issue a notice proposing a new survey with a 60-day period for public feedback; Nigeria asked Binance CEO Richard Teng to appear before a financial crimes committee; Robinhood chose Arbitrum One for its upcoming cross-chain swaps feature; Prometheum hired a CFO from Morgan Stanley; Bitcoin made a new all-time high against the euro and pound; Bitcoin futures open interest hit an all-time high; nearly $2b in BTC was withdrawn from exchanges on March 1st alone, per Glassnode; Tether’s USDT surpassed $100b market cap; Yuga Labs demoed its BAYC-themed Otherside metaverse for select users to mixed reviews; the second most expensive CryptoPunk ever sold for 4,500 ETH, or more than $16m; Bitcoin Ordinals project Runestones is airdropping over 112,000 runestones to wallets that hold three or more inscriptions; and, liquid restaking protocol ether.fi pledged $600m of staked ETH to help secure interoperability chain Omni.
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Author:
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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