It’s a sea of red today in the crypto market, with major digital assets kicking off the week with a dump and Bitcoin heading further towards US$40k.

A discouraging weekly close for BTC below US$43.1k support foreshadowed today’s price action. And with various macroeconomic and geopolitical factors at play right now, there’s certainly a lot about to fuel bearish sentiment.

What’s largely keeping the market subdued and suppressed in the short term, though, is concern about the next US Consumer Price Index inflation-data reveal (happening Tuesday – expected to be high, of course). That, and the US Federal Reserve’s increasingly “hawkish” economy-tightening tapering rhetoric that will no doubt soon follow.

And this is despite potentially positive market-moving events including:

• Terra’s Luna Foundation Guard buying another 4,130 Bitcoin on the weekend to add to its UST stablecoin reserve.

• Ethereum’s keenly anticipated “Merge” to proof-of-stake, which has now completed testnets, albeit with an actual launch date still to be determined.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at about US$1.97 trillion, down about 5% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Meanwhile, former CEO of BitMEX, Arthur Hayes, is also spreading the short-to-midterm highly bearish view today, which seems to be grabbing a fair amount of attention.

In a blog post today, Hayes wrote that he thinks a continued dip in the Nasdaq 100 is the likely course, along with “crypto carnage” including a correlated Bitcoin slump to about US$30k before the end of June and a US$2.5k ETH.

Not everyone’s in the mood to listen to Arthur Hayes, though…

And do take anything Hayes says with a grain of salt. It probably shouldn’t be forgotten he was sentenced in May to two years’ probation with six months’ home detention after pleading guilty to a lack of anti-money laundering compliance at BitMEX.

One thing’s for sure, no one can really say with any level of certainty what’s going to happen next in the crypto market. In it for the long haul? Good, us, too.

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$19.6 billion to about US$1 billion in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time.

DAILY PUMPERS

• STEPN (GMT), (market cap: US$1.44 billion) 8%

• Zilliqa (ZIL), (mc: US$1.74 billion) +1.5%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• Humans.ai (HEART), (mc: US$1.3 billion) -17%

• THORChain (RUNE), (mc: US$2.4 billion) -14%

• Theta Network (THETA), (mc: US$3 billion) -14%

• Frax Share (FXS), (mc: US$1.5 billion) -14%

• Mina Protocol (MINA), (market cap: US$1.2 billion) -13%

 

Uppers and downers: lower caps

Moving below the crypto unicorns (in some cases well below), here’s just a selection catching our eye…

DAILY PUMPERS

• PLEX (PLEX), (market cap: US$486 million) +60%

• Meter Governance (MTRG), (mc: US$35m) +51%

• PAID Network (PAID), (mc: US$38m) +30%

• ShapeShift (FOX), (mc: US$118m) +24%

• PARSIQ (PRQ), (mc: US$45m) +11%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• ICHI (ICHI), (mc: US$284m) -53%

• Silo Finance (SILO), (mc: US$51m) -36%

• TitanSwap (TITAN), (mc: US$337m) -23%

• Cult DAO (CULT), (mc: US$125m) -23%

• Wrapped Nexus Mutual (WNXM), (mc: US$71m) -21%

 

Around the blocks

Here’s some more news amid the wrap-up of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, which ended on the weekend. Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood has revealed she’s now sold out of the firm’s PayPal position completely, instead favouring Block’s Bitcoin-payments-enabling Cash App.

“We tend to put our bets with who we believe will be the winners,” Wood said to CNBC. “As we consolidated our portfolios during a risk-off period, we chose Block over PayPal.”

 

Meanwhile, even as the market dips further as we type this, here’s some hopium for you – a tweet from the popular BTCfuel account, proving there are about 100 different ways to look at the charts…

And for Merge-frothing Ethereum fans, a “DeFi educator” who goes by the handle “korpi” gives a highly detailed breakdown of why he thinks the proof-of-stake transition is going to be a major catalyst for ETH moving up and to the right this year…

Oh, and finally, in vaguely related crypto news you might have heard by now, it seems Elon Musk has opted out of becoming a Twitter board director.

Some are theorising that by keeping his distance from board meetings, the tech billionaire may actually have more influence on the direction of Twitter as simply its largest shareholder. More “noise” on it all likely to follow, then.

 

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