The Fed’s FOMC meeting went basically to script, albeit a pretty unexciting one, and consequently Bitcoin and pals (although not Sui) have perked up a little bit.

That said, don’t dust off the astronaut suit just yet – it’s not as if the US Federal Reserve has given investors the signal to go absolutely nuts aping in to every memecoin with the numbers 69 and 420 in its total supply. Oh wait, that’s already been happening.

But here, in some sort of a nutshell, is what the Fed and its tight-lipped, mealy mouthed boss Jerome Powell has done and basically said this time around:

• 25bps rate hike? Check. And that makes the 10th consecutive interest rate hike from the central bank.

• Talk of “work to do”? Check. Talk of the likelihood of a “mild recession”? Check.

• Further vague language that essentially lies somewhere in the middle on the scale of two extreme possibilities? Check. With pivoting to a pause or rate cuts at one happy-investing end, and continued rate hiking for the forseeable at the other.

In other words, it’s still a bet each way. But hope/hopium is still on the menu, hence the little rise after the initial little dip post FOMC meeting.

Do you want some JPow quotes? You don’t? Fair enough, but he did at least hint at the possibility of a pause in the Fed’s streak of rate hiking, noted Eddy Sunarto in this morning’s highly informative Market Highlights.  Although he did also say this:

Got to hand it to him, though (Powell, not Eddy or Benjamin Cowen) – he’s possibly the best deadpan comedian we’ve seen since Steven Wright, or that Elliott Goblet bloke…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.23 trillion, up about 0.8% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

There you have it. Bitcoin has just breached the US$29k level again, but for how long this time?

So, no it’s not a spectacular boost for the crypto majors but it’s better than a kick in the Tether region. (Fully aware how terrible that joke is and yet we’ve left it in here anyway, unless the editor has better ideas. We’ve got our coat handy and will be out of here presently.)

(Ed: Rob Badman, ladies and gentlemen!)

Before we do that, let’s take a look at further down the charts…

 

Uppers and downers

Some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

PUMPERS (11-100 market cap position)

• Render (RNDR), (market cap: US$828 million) +11%

• WOO Network (WOO), (market cap: US$477 million) +9%

• Curve DAO (CRV), (market cap: US$785 million) +7%

• Rocket Pool (RPL), (market cap: US$1 billion) +7%

• Stacks (STX), (market cap: US$1.08 billion) +7%

 

PUMPERS (lower, lower caps)

• IDEX (IDEX), (market cap: US$85 million) +18%

• Orion Protocol (ORN), (market cap: US$35 million) +13%

 

SLUMPERS

• Sui (SUI), (market cap: US$766 million) -33%

• Pepe (PEPE), (mc: US$453 million) -4%

• Toncoin (TON), (mc: US$3.01 billion) -3%

• Radix (XRD), (mc: US$908 million) -3%

• Huobi (HT), (mc: US$530 million) -2%

 

SLUMPERS (lower, lower caps)

• Wojak (WOJAK), (market cap: US$46 million) -28%

• Cult DAO (CULT), (market cap: US$20 million) -26%

 

The reasonably hyped new layer 1 blockchain (yep, another one) Sui (SUI) has landed on major exchanges, and it’s had a pretty swift dump.

And that’s very likely due to the ye olde practice of whitelisted tokens bought at a fraction of the market-launch price immediately dumping for a 45x gain. The lucky sods.

A reminder, I guess, that it can pay to keep the ear to the ground on potentially top projects (such as Aptos late last year) whitelisting and doing your best to try to get involved at a pre-market stage.

Is SUI a “buy” now that it’s immediately dumped 33%? Hmm, not so sure. As savvy young Aussie crypto analyst Miles Deutscher points out, it has a helluva token release schedule coming up. Potentially inflationary token environments are something to obviously be aware of when looking at individual crypto investments.

 

Around the blocks

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

Backing up some other recent commentary, outspoken presidential candidate (which is probably tautological) Robert F. Kennedy Jr has gone into bat for crypto, on Twitter, again. Here he is talking it up, while the Biden admin attempts to instil a crippling 30% tax measure on crypto mining…