Mooners and Shakers: MicroStrategy buys more Bitcoin… annnnd price of BTC stumbles a bit

Every time MicroStrategy buys Bitcoin, the price of the leading crypto asset seems to take a bit of a hit. It just happened again.

It’s not a drastic fall but BTC did threaten to lose the US$30k mark overnight. (It’s currently clinging on at about $30,170.)

Maybe it’s just coincidence. In any case, the Michael Saylor-founded business intelligence software firm (does anyone really care what it does at this point, other than hold Bitcoin?) continues to display immense, and single-minded buying power.

It’s in the black, too, on its BTC purchases, holding a whopping 152,333 of them, worth a total of almost US$4.6 billion – which is roughly the GDP of Barbados. It just bought another 12,333 BTC.

@saylor and all the big institutions won’t get my #Bitcoin! 😉 HODL ⚡️

— Natalie Brunell ⚡️ (@natbrunell) June 28, 2023

Microstrategy has bought another 12,000 $BTC.

Time to go down again.

Impressive buying power still.

— Michaël van de Poppe (@CryptoMichNL) June 28, 2023

Of course, there may be other things at play causing Bitcoin to hit a wall over night. Wall Street, too. And yep, one of those “things” is Jerome Powell.

The Fed boss pulled on his Hawkeye mask and shot some arrows (perhaps just suction-cap ones) into the mainstream financial media, such as this, regarding the US central banks’s rate hiking for the rest of the year:

“Really, policy hasn’t been restricted for very long.”

And this…

“We started at negative real interest rates; we’ve since moved up to where we are actually in restrictive territory, but we haven’t been there very long, so we believe there’s more restriction coming.”

Yippee. Ah well, hardly unexpected, that, is it? Then again, some observers, including Sven “Northman Trader” Henrich and indeed Bloomberg seem to think Powell’s rhetoric was fairly tepid.

Fighting inflation with easing financial conditions:

Stock Bulls Are Now Free to Fight the Federal Reserve

“Chair Jerome Powell had the opportunity to put the market in its place. His demurral may just signal an all-clear for equities.”

https://t.co/CsWwWgD5dj

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) June 28, 2023

How’d the S&P 500 and Nasdaq and Dow go on the news? It was a mixed bag, reports Gregor over at the Market Highlights “desk” this morning, which we understand is his lap in his bed.

“The not-great news is that it’s looking unlikely that we’ll be cheering on another fantastic day, after a mixed result on Wall Street left the Dow lower by 0.22%, the S&P flat and the Nasdaq slightly higher on +0.27%,” he writes.

Let’s see how the crypto market goes with its historically tight Wall Street correlation. There have been signs of a diversion from that plotline just lately. Certainly, the instutional-narrative-watching Bitcoin bulls are feeling toey for a crypto bull run.

Wouldn’t be counting on that till at least the end of the year, maybe next, but we know more than a few crypto investors keeping some powder dry in the meantime, just in case.

(And, as always, just a reminder that nothing presented in Coinhead should be construed as financial advice. Unless we’re financial advisers. Which, unsurprisingly, we’re not.)

TRON… look, no offence, but you’re a whitepaper-copying Ethereum wannabe. And we’re going to keep calling you out till you drop back out of the top 10 again.

Meanwhile, XRP, Cardano and Dogecoin are the worst affected in the crypto majors today. Perhaps they all need a fresh spark in their narrative…

Such as: 1) Ripple court case chatter…

This is exactly what the Judge in the @Ripple case was alluding to when she said SEC lawyers were not maintaining a faithful allegiance to the law. You’re supposed to have a good faith basis to being a case, meaning you believe you can win by applying the law. You don’t wait… https://t.co/l8IeBkL3Iu

— John E Deaton (@JohnEDeaton1) June 28, 2023

2) Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson saying something:

Lots of noise in crypto. Look for the signal. Cardano is getting real adoption and growing as an ecosystem under the harshest conditions our industry knows. Like Bitcoin, this is being done in a completely decentralized way. https://t.co/t5T0QgDjdW

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) June 28, 2023

And 3) Elon Musk banging on about DOGE (nothing just lately)…

"Dogecoin is fundamentally better than anything else I’ve seen"

— Elon Musk

pic.twitter.com/oeTt5F6yA2

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) June 23, 2023

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)

• BitDAO (BIT), (market cap: US$565 million) +7%

• BitGet Token (BGB), (market cap: US$692 million) +3%

• Leo Token (LEO), (market cap: US$3.7 billion) +2%

SLUMPERS

• Radix (XRD), (market cap: US$622 million) -27%

• Conflux (CFX), (market cap: US$425 million) -11%

• Pepe (PEPE), (market cap: US$599 million) -9%

• Gala (GALA), (market cap: US$568 million) -7%

• Aave (AAVE), (market cap: US$859 million) -7%

• Uniswap (UNI), (market cap: US$3.64 billion) -7%

Geez, why is Radix dramatically dumping all of a sudden? It’s this: its development team has delayed/postponed (till September 27) a hyped upgrade of the Radix tech/blockchain, called Babaylon.

Babylon Upgrade Announcement

Radix Publishing, acting on the recommendation of RDX Works, has decided to postpone the Babylon upgrade.
The rescheduled date for the Babylon network upgrade is September 27th, 2023.

Further information can be found here: https://t.co/WyiKp6Shov

— Radix – Radically Different DeFi (@radixdlt) June 28, 2023

Around the blocks

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

'Crypto is a technology, not just an asset class.' Edward Woodford @ZeroHashX 💡 #BW2023 pic.twitter.com/X7v90cfwVt

— Digital Economy Council of Australia (@DECAustralia) June 29, 2023

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 North Carolina House passes bill directing state treasury to study the process of buying and holding #Bitcoin

The bill now goes to the senate. pic.twitter.com/JCuwfHADxA

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) June 28, 2023

News just in: Putin is losing the war… in, erm, Iraq, reckons Joe “Hey, Have You Heard that Great New Band The Eagles?” Biden…

Biden was asked: "To what extent has Vladimir Putin been weakened by recent events?"

Biden: "It's hard to tell, but he is clearly losing the war in Iraq. He is losing war at home." pic.twitter.com/JXnaEwerda

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) June 28, 2023

#Bitcoin https://t.co/Ssc9ovlKv3

— naiive (@naiivememe) June 28, 2023