Mooners and Shakers is sponsored by Dacxi, the world’s first purpose-built Crypto Wealth platform.

 

While the goblintown.wtf lot are dishing out their burgers at NFT.NYC, Bitcoin’s sub-$20k demons are being kept at bay… for the moment. Meanwhile Polygon (MATIC) has been crushing it.

We’ll look at some of the latest price action in a minute, but first some news bites…

 

Crypto news: Yet more China FUD; but BoE is positive

• The South China Morning Post, an official Chinese national news media outlet, yesterday reported that Bitcoin could “go to zero”.

“Bitcoin is nothing more than a string of digital codes, and its returns mainly come from buying low and selling high,” said the outlet.

Righto, thanks, noted… (Grabs Ledger from back of sock drawer, buys dip. Types “not financial advice”.)

• Meanwhile, the Bank of England’s deputy guv’nor Jon Cunliffe has instead been talking up the potential of crypto, positing that projects that can survive the crash could become the “next Amazons and eBays”.

• Is another domino falling? Perhaps not quite yet, but crypto-brokerage firm Voyager Digital seems to be the latest large entity caught in the crypto contagion effect brought about by the Terra LUNA implosion. And that’s a sh*tstorm that’s so far spread to CeFi lending protocol Celsius, hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC)… and a few others, if rumours are true.

The brokerage firm has disclosed that the potentially insolvent 3AC owes it 15,250 Bitcoin (BTC) and 350 million USD Coin (USDC) – worth about US$660 million.

Voyager has given 3AC until June 27 to pay full the amount before the loan will be considered in default.

• Yeahhh, good luck with that… In the meantime, the Sam Bankman-Fried-led Alameda Research has provided a US$200m and 15,000 BTC “revolving loan” plan to help out the struggling Voyager brokerage. Fingers and toes are crossed, although perhaps some crypto Darwinism needs to play out, as the SEC’s Hester Peirce alluded yesterday.

• New York-based multinational financial services giant Citibank revealed on Wednesday that it’s hired Switzerland-headquartered crypto-custody firm Metaco to establish a digital-asset custody platform.

Yup. Major institutional exploration of crypto – it’s still a thing. Reckon they’ve got their eyes on some tasty dips?

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at roughly US$941 billion, down 0.1% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

It’s all quiet on the northern-most crypto front… for the most part… with top-of-tablers largely chilling out at the time of writing (although Solana’s having a bit of a minor frisson to the upside).

Bitcoin (BTC) holding US$20k and Ethereum (ETH) consolidating around US$1,100? Hell, guess we’ll take it for the moment. That said, it seems plenty of analysts are eyeing some potential incoming volatility…

Number go up or down (but probably not sideways) in the short term? Correct. Here’s what some fulltime chart watchers are saying…

Nick Mancini’s spotting inverse head and shoulders (supposedly bullish) AND head and shoulders (supposedly bearish). Probably not overly helpful, really…

Whereas Roman Trading is half expecting another small bounce on the back of Bitcoin dominance breaking down a bit over the past couple of days… but not for long…

 

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100: MATIC surges on Polygon ID news

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$8.3 billion to about US$392 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time.

DAILY PUMPERS

Evmos (EVMOS), (market cap: US$428 million) +23%

Polygon (MATIC), (mc: US$3.94 billion) +20%

• Cosmos Hub (ATOM), (mc: US$2.28 billion) +11%

• Tenset (10SET), (mc: US$672 million) +8%

THORChain (RUNE), (mc: US$581 million) +7%

 

The MATIC token appears to be moving on the strength of a new product just launched by the Polygon development team – one that enables more private voting in decentralised autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Instead of storing user data on a centralised database or server, Polygon ID uses zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs to avoid relaying all user information. ZK proofs is a cryptographic method that seems set to receive plenty of buzz in the crypto world.

Very basically, it’s technology that can be used to protect data privacy in a wide variety of use cases.

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• Synthetix Network (SNX), (market cap: US$678 million) -8%

• Celsius Network (CEL), (mc: US$394 million) -7%

Radix (XRD), (mc: US$639 million) -6%

• Waves (WAVES), (mc: US$600 million) -5%

• FLEX Coin (FLEX), (mc: US$425 billion) -5%

 

Around the blocks

To finish, a selection of randomness that stuck with us on our daily journey through the Crypto Twitterverse.

Jim Cramer, an outspoken American financial analyst on CNBC’s Mad Money program, has become kinda known for his less-than-accurate calls of late…

Meanwhile, Bloomberg Senior Commodities Strategist Mike McGlone is another US analyst who’s been regularly including Bitcoin (and Ethereum) in his outlook… He’s certainly spotting a “steep discount” at these levels.

Moving on, after a quiet first day on the market, the ProShares “short” Bitcoin ETF has been seeing some action today, apparently. And the Grayscale Investments CEO Michael Sonnenshein is determined to see that as a positive…

And move over Matt Damon… look who else just jumped onto the big crypto-exchange-shilling bandwagon…