Tue Mar 21 2023
BTC opened at $28.2k in an early morning push from $27.2k overnight. ETH soon followed and traded at $1.8k. The CEXs have seen the trade volumes balloon up last week ($45 billion), but are still below the $80 billion during the FTX collapse. Also, the liquidity on exchanges is shallow, helping the price action. Alts have underperformed in the recent rally, lending credence to BTC as the safest asset among digital assets. BTC funding rate is turning negative in some exchanges.
Mastercard is moving ahead with settling stablecoin wallet transactions in the APAC region. HFT shop Auros is out of FTX induced liquidation as it raised new liquidity ($17 million) — a testament to a positive change in the funding world. The Euler Hacker has sent a message saying “No intention of keeping what is not ours” and has started returning ETH on a case-by-case basis. A few wallets have been hacked as a prelude to the ARB airdrop. On the NFT front, OpenSea, which has seen its piece of the pie shrink after Blur’s launch, is the chosen platform for the new series of K-Pop NFT. By the way, KRW is the second most used fiat currency on CEX after USD, which accounts for 47% of all fiat.
FTX is suing to gain custody of assets from the Bahamian ‘FTX Digital Market’ which it argues has ownership of only the shell company and will defraud investors. Coinbase is busy on two legal fronts: it has asked the SEC to declassify staking as a security, and it is also a party to a crypto related case in the US Supreme Court. Aave Governance is proposing to de-board v1 and upgrade to v3. GMX governance is discussing the deployment to the Coinbase’s Base layer.
The FOMC decision is tomorrow. Inflation is still high ( ECB, for instance), but the banking crisis might slow down the Fed’s pace. The market is pricing in a 25% chance of no action and a 75% chance of a 25 bps hike.
