BTC is currently trading around $29,000 and ETH around $1,900. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are EGLD, BGB, and OSMO. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.25T, down ~2.6% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$49b and BTC dominance is around 48%.
It’s been an eventful 24 hours for markets, and crypto is still recovering from an intense bout of volatility yesterday afternoon, but equities are back in the green thanks to the continued strength of tech earnings. Yesterday’s crypto selloff was initially believed to have been driven by a @tier10k tweet that Mt Gox and other U.S. government wallets were selling bitcoin, sourcing Arkham data. Onchain data quickly revealed this wasn’t the case, and it was subsequently determined that the error was caused by multiple factors, including improper alert programming by @tier10k and a bug fix by Arkham that caused them to no longer under-send programmed alerts. More importantly, however, this context is provided to highlight the speed at which misstatements can spread in markets during today’s social media era. It wasn’t until hours later that the masses realized that the timing of events was misaligned, and the crypto selloff started an hour earlier. Many assumed this was due to Arkham’s alert being sent to various accounts before @tier10k tweeted it, but this clearly wasn’t true, given it was an improperly programmed alert on @tier10k’s side, according to Arkham. The catalyst sparking yesterday’s sharp liquidation is not entirely clear, it very well could have been leveraged longs monetizing gains after spot moved ~10% higher, causing others to follow suit and liquidations to ensue. Regardless of the cause, yesterday’s move washed out a lot of leverage; in just one hour, ~$150m of longs were liquidated, and perp open interest fell by ~12%.
Notable news includes: Hong Kong’s crypto licensing regime is expected launch in May with retail access following later in June; South Korean legislators passed the first phase of review for its proposed crypto regulation bill; Circle introduced a cross-chain USDC transfer protocol; Grayscale said it expects a court decision on its ETF application case versus the SEC by the end of Q3; a technical glitch on Bitrue caused mass XRP liquidations; a clip from one of Gary Gensler’s old MIT lectures went viral as he said 3/4ths of the U.S. crypto market is not securities – heavily contradicting the commissions current regulatory stance; the queue to begin staking ETH now exceeds the queue for validator exits; Helium’s IOT token surged ~370% after its Solana migration; Zodia Custody raised $36m; DEX Merlin and CertiK plan to provide $2m in compensation to exploit victims; and, one ‘dodgy’ crypto wallet launched 114 meme tokens over two months.
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Authors:
Matt Kunke, Research Analyst | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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