Well, that was THE single most important set of US CPI inflation data. Until the next lot, next month. And how did it affect Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market? Things went up. In particular, AI coins. Again.

America’s latest bunch of Consumer Price Index data actually came in pretty tepid, pretty flat – even very fractionally worse than market expectations. The best thing about them was, however, that they weren’t actually any worse than last month’s.

In fact, at a 6.4% inflation climb, the level is slightly down from December’s figure (6.5%). Overall, it’s the seventh straight month of inflation easing in the US. That sounds okay, and there are some crypto market heads who are starting to feel pretty bullish again, it seems.

eToro’s US investment analyst Callie Cox, though, shared some thoughts with us this morning that focused on caution for investors:

“Inflation slowed again, but the details show the Fed’s fight is far from over,” said the analyst, who did, however, concede that: “If you look at context outside this report, it’s still fair to believe that the Fed is effectively pulling off a soft landing.”

“I’m just not sure the market is appropriately positioned for persistently high inflation, or persistently high rates,” Cox continued. “Right now, that’s the story inflation data is telling us… Investors need to be careful here. The inflation crisis isn’t over yet, and as we’ve seen recently, it’s easy for markets to get carried away. We may not see new highs until inflation is fully under control.”

Hmm… fair enough. Jurrien Timmer, a macro-watching guy over at Fidelity is also treading a cautious line about any supposed bull market return…

But let’s see what some Cryptoverse analysts are saying. Dutchman Michaël van de Poppe thinks it’s “just a matter of time” before the market really pops up again…

Meanwhile, American chart watcher Justin Bennett thinks there’s a “bull flag” forming for the S&P 500, which would also be good for crypto.

And South African crypto identity and podcaster Ran Neuner is definitely bullish. Because he says as much, and has some figures…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.08 trillion, up about 3% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin has recaptured the US$22k level, while layer 1s Ethereum and Cardano are performing well, along with ETH’s layer 2 scaling network Polygon.

Even Binance Coin (BNB) is doing okay today, which really didn’t have the best of times yesterday on the back of the Gary Gensler-led SEC posse enforcement on the stablecoin BUSD and its issuer Paxos.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$10.3 billion to about US$457 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

• SingularityNET (AGIX), (market cap: US$548 million) +25%

• Fetch.ai (FET), (mc: US$474 million) +19%

• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: US$902 million) +18%

• Render (RNDR), (mc: US$518 million) +18%

• The Graph (GRT), (mc: US$1.5 billion) +15%

When the crypto-investing/speculating space has its mind set on a narrative, you can’t keep it down for too long it seems. Leading AI coins (including SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, The Graph) are surging again today on the back of the post CPI-data market climb.

One thing to bear in mind, though, these tokens were bleeding out quite noticeably when Gary Gensler and co were sending shudders through the market late last week with their Kraken staking crackdown – and just yesterday, amid the Paxos/BUSD targeting.

Not that the AI trend has anything directly to do with that, mind. It’s just that, after crypto narratives pump, related coins are often among the biggest dumpers when negative news for the entire market materialises.

Yep, it’s a roller coaster, and that’s likely a “narrative” that won’t be changing any time this year.

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Maker (MKR), (market cap: US$665 million) -3%

• LEO Token (LEO), (mc: US$3.1 billion) -1%

• Convex Finance (CVX), (mc: US$458 million) -1%

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

 

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