Mon Apr 03 2023
BTC is trading sideways, opening at $28.4k. The global market cap has been stable at $1.15 billion over the weekend. Thin liquidity in order books is leading to significant slippage. ETH, which is opening at $1.8k, has outperformed BTC for the week. XRP (7%) , ADA (12%), and XLM (17%) are the winners for the week. After Friday’s expiry of options, April 04 and June 30 stand out in OI, with $25k as the most popular strike price. Last month US government sold 9860 bitcoins that it confiscated from James Zhong’s Silk Road. Its still has four times this size remaining.
https://mrktkap.substack.com/p/mon-apr-03-2023?sd=pf
ARB is having a DAO moment: 750 million ARB tokens are being transferred to the Administrative Budget Wallet, which will, among other things, make special grants. The Arbitrum Foundation has three directors and will control the wallet. The tokens are being taken from the Treasury, which should have been controlled by the DAO. As of the latest update, this will now be subject to a standalone vote.
UBS might see massive (30% reduction) job cuts. McDonalds is preparing its employees for restructuring in the U.S. A US judge has put on hold Binance.US bid to buy Voyager’s assets, observing that the government has a “substantial case of merit”. Bittrex is going to cease its US operations this month, citing a lack of regulatory clarity. March saw a 20% MoM drop in publicly announced VC funding. The ETPs also saw a decrease in trading volumes with a small inflow.
NFT Lending Protocols crossed a billion dollars in volume recently. Although the number of users is not impressive, NFTfi and BendDAO are leading the pack based on cumulative volumes. President Trump’s NFTs have soared in value ($1.7k) and volume after his indictment.
The miner community has earned a new high since March last year. TeraWulf saw a 150% increase in revenue between the last two quarters. The hashrate, a metric of the computing power deployed by miners, is also at ATH.
Bank deposits continue to be withdrawn and put into money market funds. OPEC+ surprised the markets with a production cut amounting to more than 1 million barrels a day. Last week, we saw that consumer spending moderated (0.2%), personal incomes rose by 0.3%, and the core PCE rose less than expected (0.3%) . This move in oil today will have inflationary consequences and also marks a failure of ‘fist bump’ policy.
Lookout for this week:
Monday : ISM
Tuesday : JOLTS
Friday : Unemployment and Non Farm
The much-anticipated Ethereum Shanghai hard fork on April 12, is getting closer.
PCE 101
The Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index is published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on a monthly basis. Since 2012 FOMC has adopted PCE as its primary measure of inflation. PCE is based on reports from businesses on what they sell. This differs from the Consumer Price Index, which is based on a survey of consumers. PCE takes into account any substitution effect as well as expenses paid by others for the consumers ( eg employer paid medical ). The goods and services in the basket are classified as durable ( >3 years) , non-durable, and services. The core PCE excludes food and energy, which are considered volatile. The relative weights used in the PCE index are derived from business surveys — for example, the Census Bureau’s annual and monthly retail trade surveys, the Service Annual Survey, and the Quarterly Services Survey. Also, the PCE Index can be revised for the past few months.
