Chain Reactions: Bitcoin nails strong weekly close; BlackRock CEO talks up BTC and tokenisation
Coinhead
Coinhead
We’re finishing the first working day of the week here in Oz, while the crypto market only just reached its weekly close a handful of hours ago.
If only we were so far ahead down here we could actually see the future. Then we could be just like Biff Tannen in Back To The Future Part II.
But a very decent weekly crypto close it was. The best in nine months, in fact.
With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.21 trillion, down a tad since earlier today, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.
Bitcoin surged past US$28k for a handful of hours earlier. It’s since dipped about US$550 or so, but is still looking in decent shape for the moment.
What it has done, though, is close out the week strongly and well above target areas various analysts were hoping for – chiefly the US$26,000 level and, just as positive, soaring above the 200-week moving average line at roughly US$25,200. As analyst/YouTuber Lark Davis points out here…
If we can get a weekly close above $26,000 for #bitcoin then it is a bigly huge thing!
Reclaim of the 200 week MA (blue line) and crushes key resistance at $25,200 (orange line). pic.twitter.com/LbsrEsqbXL
— Lark Davis (@TheCryptoLark) March 17, 2023
Flipping that level to support (if it comes back down for a retest and bounce) will be a big deal for many a Crypto Twitter-housed chart obsessor.
What’s more, it’s now officially broken the “macro downtrend” that Rekt Capital’s been on about quite a bit just lately.
#BTC has broken the Macro Downtrend
History has repeated itself$BTC #Crypto #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/EageQxQ72m
— Rekt Capital (@rektcapital) March 19, 2023
Dutch analyst Michaël van de Poppe, though, thinks the current BTC price action might be a little “exhausted”, so perhaps it won’t be a surprise to wake up tomorrow and see the OG crypto has corrected somewhat.
#Bitcoin went to $28,300, but seems a bit exhausted.
Didn´t hold above $27,700, which is now crucial if we´d like to see $30K this week.
Rejecting there and we'll be seeing a deeper correction to $25K, most likely. pic.twitter.com/fm9fpwHed1
— Michaël van de Poppe (@CryptoMichNL) March 20, 2023
Either way, it shapes as a big week ahead with the Fed’s March FOMC meeting later this week set to determine the fate of short-to-midterm price movements in risk markets. Yep, heard that one before. But this time, because of the Fed’s response to the banking crisis… it really might be different. Or not.
The CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has sent out his latest letter to investors, indicating that “music plays a big role in my life” and that he used to dig buying vinyl records.
While that bit wasn’t very interesting, he also noted that BlackRock is still backing the nascent crypto industry to succeed and that the financial titan is staying the course on offering its investors a way to gain exposure to the space.
He specifically mentioned Bitcoin, naturally, and its potential to boost financial inclusion. But he also clearly likes the crypto narratives based around the tokenisation of real-world assets as well as crypto being a payments option in emerging markets.
JUST IN – BlackRock: "Very interesting developments" are happening in #Bitcoin and crypto – SEC filing
In emerging markets it's "bringing down costs and advancing financial inclusion." 🙌 pic.twitter.com/fxdjF0uOm0
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) March 15, 2023
“For the asset management industry, we believe the operational potential of some of the underlying technologies in the digital assets space could have exciting applications,” noted Fink.
“In particular, the tokenization of asset classes offers the prospect of driving efficiencies in capital markets, shortening value chains, and improving cost and access for investors.
“In many emerging markets – like India, Brazil and parts of Africa – we are witnessing dramatic advances in digital payments, bringing down costs and advancing financial inclusion,” he added.
“By contrast, many developed markets, including the US, are lagging behind in innovation, leaving the cost of payments much higher.”
Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$8.6 billion to about US$430 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)
PUMPERS
• Conflux (CFX), (market cap: US$933 million) +12%
• NEO (NEO), (mc: US$912 million) +7%
• Loopring (LRC), (mc: US$461 million) +5%
• VeChain (VET), (mc: US$1.76 billion) +4%
• Tezos (XTZ), (mc: US$1.14 billion) +2%
SLUMPERS
• Mask Network (MASK), (market cap: US$433 million) -11%
• Frax Share (FXS), (mc: US$616 million) -6%
• SingularityNET (AGIX), (mc: US$600 million) -6%
• Axie Infinity (AXS), (mc: US$1.04 billion) -5%
• The Graph (GRT), (mc: US$1.34 billion) -4%
Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our afternoon moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.
Don’t sleep on Bitcoin. pic.twitter.com/6Q4f3hJaTW
— Dan Held (@danheld) March 19, 2023
#Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/EvN6LuciP5
— naiive (@naiivememe) March 19, 2023
#Bitcoin pumping on a flight to safety, hard money narrative is much healthier (long term), than a knee-jerk CPI pump.
Every time $BTC responds positively to financial turmoil, it gains legitimacy as a decentralised store of value.
This effect compounds over time.
— Miles Deutscher (@milesdeutscher) March 20, 2023
Remember 10 days ago when people said I was crazy to think it was a central bank crisis?
Well, it's a central bank crisis.
This had nothing to do with tech.
Fed mismanagement crashed the system.
And now they're going to print trillions.
A stealth devaluation of the dollar. https://t.co/8YJOK4ih3z— Balaji (@balajis) March 20, 2023
WORLD WAKING UP to the fact that a bank deposit is an unsecured loan to a leveraged counterparty, that the FDIC insurance fund only has $128bn, that total deposits in US commercial banks=$17.6 trn, &…here's the big one: that money itself is a confidence game (always has been)🤔 pic.twitter.com/HVvHQkeZD8
— Caitlin Long 🔑⚡️🟠 (@CaitlinLong_) March 19, 2023
How it feels watching the banking system rn
pic.twitter.com/KFjP6DbfIs— CMS intern (@cmsintern) March 19, 2023