Inflation in the US might be showing signs of turning a corner and the US Dollar Index has been selling off. The crypto market? Bitcoin, Ethereum and others have had a little bounce.

Little being the operative word, but we’ll take it. These are macro-related conditions that crypto chart watchers have been sweating on for months, and ordinarily the market might’ve seen a bit more of a boost – perhaps more like the Nasdaq 100 (+8.2% over the past five days) and the S&P 500 (+4.7%).

But, of course, the market has FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried and cronies to thank for an anaemic push, which otherwise might’ve been something closer to a classic crypto moon mission.

 

FTX crypto contagion – BlockFi going bankrupt?

BlockFi, one of the industry’s most prominent lenders (in the same vein as the crumbled Celsius and Voyager enterprises), is preparing a potential bankruptcy filing after halting withdrawals of customer deposits, according to reports including the Wall Street Journal.

The firm has cited its “significant exposure” to the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, according to the report.

BlockFi paused withdrawals from its platform late last week, expressing it was “shocked and dismayed” by the FTX bed-crapping turn of events.

The firm’s exposure to FTX might seem obvious in hindsight, however, given the fact it received a US$400 million revolving credit deal from Sam Bankman-Fried’s company earlier in the year when BlockFi had run into liquidity problems after the Terra Luna collapse.

Implosion begets implosion in the world of crypto blow-ups.

 

Liquid Global and SALT lending platform halt withdrawals

And so the crypto contagion continues to spread. Two more crypto firms have now told their customers they’ve paused withdrawals, citing FTX exposure.

Liquid Group was acquired by FTX Trading Ltd last May plus all of the company’s subsidiaries, which includes a company called Quoine, which has been no stranger to controversy in the past.

Who’s next in without a helmet or box, then? It’s another crypto lender – SALT.

“The collapse of FTX has impacted our business,” SALT CEO Shawn Owen said in a message sent to consumers. “Until we are able to determine the extent of this impact with specific details that we feel confident are factually accurate, we have paused deposits and withdrawals on the SALT platform effective immediately.”

Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried has concluded his bizarre Twitter thread that began with “What HAPPENED” across nine separate tweets, finishing with the following:

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$883 billion, up 2% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Bitcoin was trading back above US$17k a bit earlier, as at least some semblance of confidence appeared to return to the global macro outlook on the back of lower-than-anticipated producer price index (PPI) figures in the US and the cooling of the US dollar.

Ethereum, too, had spiked up on the good vibes from the inflation-related data – a little closer to US$1,300.

XRP is still up a decent amount over the past 24 hours, which probably has something to do with a potentially front run announcement (by Fox Business yesterday) of a settlement in the SEC vs Ripple lawsuit.

We say potentially. It might just have been a simple error, of course.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$6.93 billion to about US$322 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.)

DAILY PUMPERS

• Stacks (STX), (market cap: US$338 million) +12%

• Chiliz (CHZ), (mc: US$1.19 billion) +11%

• Quant (QNT), (mc: US$1.17 billion) +9%

• Algorand (ALGO), (mc: US$2 billion) +8%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: US$910 million) +7%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Trust Wallet (TWT), (market cap: US$814 million) -10%

• Tokenize Xchange (TKX), (mc: US$698 million) -6%

• Chain (XCN), (mc: US$1.01 million) -5%

• Klaytn (KLAY), (mc: US$518 million) -4%

• Synthetix Network (SNX), (mc: US$431 million) -4%

 

Around the blocks

A selection of rumour, gossip, randomness and pertinence that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse…

Read MoreBitcoinCryptocurrencyEthereum

You might be interested in