Welcome to another week in mildly obsessive crypto price and chart watching. It was a wonky old end to the week on Friday for crypto, even as the US stock market got a nice pump. But Bitcoin and pals managed to stabilise on the weekend.
And the main reason the crypto market didn’t follow suit with the Nasdaq and S&P’s late-week rally? That’d be the ongoing FTX contagion fear that’s still spreading and lingering – this time via the Silvergate “crypto bank” saga.
The crypto-friendly bank has had collaborative ties to big crypto firms including Coinbase, Circle, Gemini, Galaxy Digital and plenty more. Revelations that it’s on the brink of crumbling, as those firms make move to distance themselves from it, have stalled overall bullish market momentum, bringing the bears further into play.
How’s the crypto market sentiment faring, then? Let’s turn to one of the industry’s leading trackers for that. Alternative.me’s Fear & Greed Index shows it’s ticked down again from the “Greed” that materialised in January and February.
And that probably aligns with the Silvergate concerns, along with the broader climate of regulatory crackdowns on the crypto industry, spearheaded by Gary “The Destroyer” Gensler over at the US securities regulator, the SEC.
Last month, stablecoin issuer Paxos was served with a Wells Notice from the SEC, with the charge of operating the Binance-linked BUSD stablecoin as an unregistered security. And before that, the US-headquartered crypto exchange Kraken agreed to shut down its staking service in a US$30 million settlement with the SEC.
Add to that, Ripple Labs’ ongoing battle with the regulator, plus further rumours of more Wells Notices being thrown at various DeFi projects, and you can see why some investors might be pretty jittery at present.
Bankless podcaster spreads Lido DAO, SEC-related fear
Those DeFi project rumours were spread over the weekend, by the way, by Bankless crypto podcaster David Hoffman, who specifically mentioned the Lido DAO liquid staking protocol (LDO). Having originally described the rumour as a “Wells Notice Carpet Bombing” of the crypto industry by the SEC, Hoffman has since backtracked, at least on the strength of some of his wording.
“While there is at least one confirmed Wells Notice that has gone out recently, that isn’t known to the public, the idea of a mass recent carpet bomb isn’t correct,” he tweeted.
Moving on, then, to some of the latest price action.
Top 10 overview
With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.08 trillion, down about 0.5% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.
As reported late last week, the overall crypto market took quite a dive from where it’d been sitting at our last morning roundup, which was Friday AM. In fact, it’s managed to liquidate about US$40 billion from its overall market cap since that time.
Nevertheless, there was something of a consolidation over the weekend, which some observers, such as Scott Melker, aka “The Wolf of All Streets” have found to be a little strange…
Meanwhile, fellow US trader/analyst Justin Bennett, who we mentioned in our recent Crypto Twitter alpha article (and we probs should’ve put Melker on there, too, to be fair), believes US$23,130 is the very specific price level that BTC watchers should be keeping in view.
A failure to capture that pretty damn soon, and Bitcoin could be trending lower, tweeted Bennett.
Dutchman Michaël van de Poppe is also prepared for things to dip (the $21.3K area is “crucial to hold”) , but seems more confident of a Bitcoin surge at some stage this year.
Uppers and downers: 11–100
Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$8.94 billion to about US$437 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
• Maker (MKR), (market cap: US$855 million) +11%
• Synthetix Network (SNX), (mc: US$971 million) +8%
• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: US$891 million) +6%
• Filecoin (FIL), (mc: US$2.4 billion) +4%
• GMX (GMX), (mc: US$578 million) +3%
Maker (MKR) has been in good price-action form just lately, partly due to news circulating in the market that MakerDAO might allow its users to borrow DAI stablecoin against its MKR governance token.
MakerDAO enables the generation of DAI, which is the market’s leading decentralised stablecoin.
DAILY SLUMPERS
• Trust Wallet (TWT), (market cap: US$544 million) -4%
• Dash (DASH), (mc: US$727 million) -3%
• Theta Network (THETA), (mc: US$995 million) -3%
• SingularityNET (AGIX), (mc: US$559 million) -2%
• Casper Network (CSPR), (mc: US$437 million) -2%
Around the blocks
Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.
Incidentally, we noted many of the following in our Crypto Twitter alpha accounts article, which we think is a pretty decent start for anyone building an info-packed crypto-themed feed…