BTC is currently trading around $67,600 and ETH around $3,550. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are FLOKI, KAS, and CFX. The global crypto market cap is $2.67T, up 6.6% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$96b and BTC dominance is around 54%.
Equity markets are higher and bond yields are lower after the Fed’s dovish meeting yesterday. Indeed, while the Fed held rates steady as expected and reiterated its recent message that it must gain more confidence that inflation is headed towards its 2% target before it can begin to ease monetary policy, it also surprised markets by maintaining expectations for three rate cuts this year despite recent persistent inflation readings. Risk assets reacted positively in response, and Bitcoin, despite having its third consecutive day of spot ETF outflows, is up 5% since the Fed’s announcement.
Elsewhere, Fortune reported that the SEC is waging a “legal campaign to classify Ethereum…as a security”. The SEC allegedly began investigating the Ethereum Foundation in September 2022 after Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake, “providing the SEC with a new pretext to attempt to define Ethereum as a security”. While its hard to pinpoint all the far-reaching consequences should the SEC be successful in its alleged quest, many pointed to even greater diminished hopes for spot Ethereum ETF approvals in May. The Grayscale Ethereum Trust’s discount to NAV now stands at ~20% after hitting just 8% roughly two weeks ago.
Notable news includes: The CFTC approved Coinbase Derivatives Exchange’s application to list futures contracts tied to DOGE, BCH, and LTC; advisors of defunct centralized borrow/lend Celsius are demanding that customers return over $2b of withdrawals made in the 90 days prior to bankruptcy; a group of core devs launched a campaign to raise Ethereum’s gas limit to reduce transaction fees by 15-33%; Polygon instituted its Napoli upgrade, which included the first Rollup Improvement Proposal improving the interoperability of rollups with mainstream tech; an alien CryptoPunk sold for $16.4m, the second highest sale ever; decentralized cloud GPU provider Aethir sold $60m of its network nodes in less than 30 minutes; and, Do Kwon’s appeal of his extradition to South Korea was denied by a Montenegro court.
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Author:
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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