Daily Market Update: October 16, 2023

October 16, 2023

BTC is currently trading around $28,200 and ETH around $1,600. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are BSV, RLB, and BCH. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.13T, up 3.5% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$38b and BTC dominance is around 52%.

Equities and bonds are moving higher as earnings begin to heat up with Tesla, TSMC, and AmEx reporting this week. Notable economic releases include, US retail sales and Chinese GDP tomorrow, and UK and EU CPI on Wednesday. Lastly, a Thursday speech from Fed Chair Powell ahead of the Fed’s blackout period will round out this week’s scheduling of notable events.

While crypto markets are still higher on the day, its been a hectic morning as a false rumor about SEC approval of the iShares Bitcoin ETF quickly spread around 9:25 am and sparked a sharp rally. Bitcoin’s price rallied from ~$28k to ~29.5k in 10 minutes before returning back to ~$28k just 15-minutes later as the rumor was discredited.

Notable news includes: GBTC’s discount narrowed after the SEC decided against appealing the court’s decision, and the court will issue its final mandate within the next week; MetaMask was briefly removed from the AppStore by Apple over the weekend before being restored; Uniswap v4’s ability to use hooks for KYC sparked community controversy; a bill being dubbed California’s ‘BitLicense’ was signed and is set to take effect in mid-2025; Australia proposed a new licensing regime for crypto exchanges with draft legislation expected next year; the US government is among the largest holders of BTC (~$5.3b) according to data from 21Shares; ConsenSys acquired Special Mechanism Group (SMG), a blockchain microstructure research firm; Stride temporarily shelved its plans to convert STRD to ATOM; Real-world asset protocol Goldfinch wrote-off a $7m portion of its $20m loan to Stratos; Ferrari will start accepting crypto as payment for its cars in the US, with plans to extend the program to Europe shortly thereafter; BitPay is enabling Swifties to buy Taylor Swift’s movie premier tickets with crypto; Binance burned $450m BNB in its quarterly burn; demand for ETH staking has finally normalized since the introduction of withdrawals; crypto yield platform Haru Invest revealed plans to suspend its servers for a few months to minimize fixed cost expenses; Decrypt retracted an article on Solana’s “kill switch” that doesn’t actually exist but went viral over a sly joke on Twitter; and, SBF’s defense requested the trial be temporarily adjourned if SBF does not receive his requested adderall dosage “to meaningfully participate in the presentation of the defense case.”

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Authors:
Matt Kunke, Research Analyst | TwitterTelegramLinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | TwitterTelegramLinkedIn

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