Thu Mar 30 2023
BTC briefly crossed $29k before retrenching to $28.5k. Low liquidity is definitely helping the price movement. The altcoin season, which usually follows a BTC pump, is still not on the horizon. The bitcoin hashrate has also climbed to an ATH of 330 TH/s, showing some stabilization among the miner community. XRP settled down a little bit to open at $0.54 (short liquidations are a factor). It is up almost 50% for the month, and the futures OI is up almost 90%. This is all in anticipation of the SEC case. The BTC skew, after turning negative mid-month, is again positive since the last week. March 31 is the highest OI option expiry date for BTC. The funding rate remains positive as sentiment is mostly bullish.
https://mrktkap.substack.com/p/thu-mar-30-2023
Binance is busy defending (or rather, denying) its China links. It is also busy with the CFTC’s legal challenge for violating federal laws and not registering as an exchange. Binance also has to answer the question of insider accounts trading against customer positions. OKX will turn over $157 million worth of assets to FTX in bankruptcy receivership. The Euler Hacker (‘Jacob’) has returned $170 million out of nearly $200 million, with the promise to return more. Gemini has plans to launch overseas derivatives operations.
Hardware maker Ledger has already raised most of its $109 million goal. Fetch.ai, which uses AI to help people automate tasks on the blockchain, raised another $10 million.
There have been numerous developments on the Defi front. Aave has launched Collateral Swaps, allowing users to switch collateral. Magic Eden has launched a beta version of an Ethereum NFT marketplace. It launched the same for Bitcoin’s Ordinals a week ago. Uniswap has voted to be deployed on Polygon zkEVM while Balancer is still live with voting. MakerDAO has approved USCDC as its primary reserve asset.
The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the Core Personal Consumption Expenditure, will be released tomorrow. Today, US applications for jobless benefits rose a little from last week but still reflect a strong labor market. Equity markets continue their surge (first quarter rebalancing?) with Nasdaq leading the pack.
