BTC is currently trading around $25,800 and ETH around $1,750. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are SUI, APT, and ATOM. The global crypto market cap is $1.09T, down 0.1% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$43b and BTC dominance is around 49%.
Global markets are muted ahead of a busy week, but not before an action packed and volatile weekend in crypto. Indeed, the crypto market is down 4.7% from this time on Friday, with many altcoins falling 20%+ Friday evening prior to partially recovering. The sharp sell off appears to be due to trading app Robinhood’s announcement to delist MATIC, ADA, and SOL after the SEC alleged that the tokens are unregistered securities in its actions against Binance and Coinbase earlier in the week. For MATIC specifically, onchain sleuths revealed that 22.5m MATIC were transferred from a Robinhood address that ultimately ended up on centralized exchanges. Additionally, Crypto.com’s suspension of its institutional investment services in the US may have added to the risk-off sentiment, while some on Twitter even hypothesized that a crypto hedge fund may have been liquidated given the size of the move. All in, $350m of longs were liquidated on Friday, BTC and ETH have been relatively resilient, and many top altcoins remain down significantly over the last week despite bouncing off their late Friday lows.
It was also a busy Friday/weekend for important news, including: OokiDAO was ordered to shut down by a US court in a precedent-setting case that concluded that a DAO is a person; the SEC asked a court for permission to freeze the assets of Binance.US; MATIC’s Polygon Labs, ADA’s Input Output Global, and SOL’s Solana Foundation all pushed back on the SEC’s security labels; SEC Chair Gensler stated that the crypto industry is teeming with “hucksters, fraudsters, scam artists, [and] ponzi schemes”; The US DOJ charged two Russian nationals for allegedly conspiring to launder hundreds of thousands of bitcoin from the Mt. Gox hack; a court ruled that crypto-friendly bank Custodia’s challenge of the Fed’s decision to deny it access to Fed banking services can continue; the European Union’s MiCA legislation was published in the Official Journal of the European Union, triggering the countdown for the law to come into effect; stablecoin TrueUSD came under temporary modest pressure after it paused the minting of TUSD via Prime Trust; crypto venture capital firm a16z announced plans to expand to the UK; Binance was ordered to cease operations in Nigeria; crypto tax service provider TaxBit cut staff by 40%; and, Terra founder Do Kwon allegedly moved $29m in crypto from the Luna Foundation Guard after his arrest.
Finally, the week ahead is a busy one for investors. First up is tomorrow’s US inflation report, where market participants expect headline inflation to have increased 4.2% year-over-year in May, down from +4.9% the month prior. The Fed concludes its policy meeting on Wednesday, where markets are assigning a 76% chance of a pause (24% chance of a 25 bp hike). The ECB follows with its meeting on Thursday, while Friday will see a BOJ interest rate decision and Eurozone consumer prices. And within crypto, a court will hear the SEC’s request to freeze the assets of Binance.US and the SEC must respond whether it has decided to deny Coinbase’s petition for rulemaking on Tuesday, while many continue to watch a $150m BNB-backed loan on Venus Protocol that is on the brink of liquidation.
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Authors:
Matt Kunke, Research Analyst | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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