3 weeks ago
By Francisco Rodrigues (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)
While bitcoin (BTC) is small changed implicit the past 24 hours, down conscionable 0.7%, the broader marketplace is successful a bearish temper pursuing the Libra token debacle, which has led to accusations of fraud and calls for the impeachment of Argentina's President Javier Milei.
The CoinDesk 20 Index is down astir 2.3% implicit the past day, and the near- to medium-term marketplace question astir apt hinges connected however the U.S.-Russia negotiations successful Riyadh go. The talks are focusing not lone connected ending the struggle successful Ukraine, but besides connected “normalization” of ties betwixt the countries.
An further furniture of uncertainty comes from FTX Digital Markets, the Bahamas-based subsidiary of FTX, which starts repaying creditors today. In total, FTX’s repayment programme volition beryllium astir $16 billion.
The liquidity injection volition travel successful the signifier of stablecoins. First up are creditors with claims nether $50,000, who volition person astir 119% of their adjudicated assertion value, with 9% yearly involvement accrued since November 2022.
The effect the repayments volition have is unclear. While immoderate analysts accidental the magnitude being repaid present is “too tiny to determination the needle,” others suggest that FTX’s historical involvement successful the Solana ecosystem means immoderate of these funds volition travel toward it.
Investors person precocious turned their attraction to ether. U.S.-listed spot ETFs offering vulnerability to the second-largest cryptocurrency by marketplace capitalization are seeing a cumulative nett inflow of $393 cardinal this month. That compares with a nett outflow of $376 cardinal for spot bitcoin ETFs.
These inflows travel up of Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade entering its investigating signifier connected the Holesky testnet. Pectra should bring a fig of improvements to scalability and information and volition fto users wage for state fees with tokens different than ether.
Elsewhere, idiosyncratic investors are bearish amid trade-war threats, reduced interest-rate chopped expectations, and accordant inflationary surprises. A survey from the American Association of Individual Investors recovered that bearishness among investors is astatine a two-year high, the Wall Street Journal reports.
This pessimism, however, is often a contrarian indicator. Institutional investors’ hazard appetite has besides dropped this period implicit the imaginable effects of a imaginable commercialized warfare amid the lowering likelihood of a Fed complaint cut. Stay alert!
What to Watch
Crypto:
Feb. 18, 10:00 a.m.: FTX Digital Markets, the Bahamas-based subsidiary of FTX, will commencement reimbursing creditors.
Feb. 19: High-performance blockchain Monad’s nationalist testnet starts up.
Feb. 19, 11:00 a.m.: The archetypal authoritative State of Sei (SEI) livestream.
Feb. 19, 1:00 p.m.: Hedera (HBAR) mainnet upgrade to v0.58.
Feb. 21: TON (The Open Network) becomes the exclusive blockchain infrastructure for messaging level Telegram’s Mini App ecosystem.
Feb. 24: At epoch 115968, investigating of Ethereum’s Pecta upgrade connected the Holesky testnet starts.
Macro
Feb. 18, 10:20 a.m.: San Francisco Fed President and CEO Mary C. Daly delivers a code successful Phoenix. Livestream link.
Feb. 18, 1:00 p.m.: The Fed’s Michael S. Barr took, vice seat for supervision, gives a code titled "Artificial Intelligence successful the Economy and Financial Stability" successful New York. Livestream link.
Feb. 19, 2:00 p.m.: The Fed releases minutes of the Jan. 28-29 FOMC Meeting.
Earnings
Feb. 18: CoinShares International (CS), pre-market
Feb. 18: Semler Scientific (SMLR), post-market
Feb. 20: Block (XYZ), post-market, $0.88
Feb. 24: Riot Platforms (RIOT), post-market, $-0.18
Feb. 25: Bitdeer Technologies Group (BTDR), pre-market, $-0.53
Feb. 25: Cipher Mining (CIFR), pre-market, $-0.09
Feb. 26: MARA Holdings (MARA), post-market, $-0.13
Token Events
Governance
Compound DAO is discussing evolving Compound Sandbox into Compound V4 to present streamlined governance, dynamic marketplace parameters, heighten the liquidation mechanism, and amended cross-chain reward distribution.
Aave DAO is discussing expanding the AAVE governance token integration connected the level by adding AAVE collateral enactment to Base.
Uniswap DAO is discussing backing liquidity incentives for Uniswap V4 on the Unichain web to pull liquidity providers and traders to the protocol.
Unlocks
Feb. 21: Fast Token (FTN) to unlock 4.66% of circulating proviso worthy $78.6 million.
Feb. 28: Optimism (OP) to unlock 1.92% of circulating proviso worthy $34.23 million.
Token Launches
Feb. 18: Ethena (ENA) to beryllium listed connected Arkham.
Feb. 18: Ronin (RON) to beryllium listed connected KuCoin
Conferences:
CoinDesk's Consensus to instrumentality spot in Hong Kong connected Feb. 18-20 and in Toronto connected May 14-16. Use codification DAYBOOK and prevention 15% connected passes.
Day 1 of 3: Consensus Hong Kong
Feb. 23-March 2: ETHDenver 2025 (Denver)
Feb. 24: RWA London Summit 2025
Feb. 25: HederaCon 2025 (Denver)
March 2-3: Crypto Expo Europe (Bucharest, Romania)
March 8: Bitcoin Alive (Sydney, Australia)
Token Talk
By Francisco Rodrigues
Donald Trump supporters are acceptable to person astir $50 worthy of the authoritative TRUMP tokens if they bought merchandise from the websites associated with the U.S. president.
The token was unveiled conscionable days earlier Trump took bureau and person mislaid much than 70% of their worth since then.
Solana-based decentralized speech Jupiter has started accumulating USDC utilizing 50% of the collected protocol fees to bargain backmost JUP tokens. The buybacks haven’t yet started.
JUP’s terms is down much than 12% implicit the past 24 hours implicit the protocol’s evident engagement successful the LIBRA cryptocurrency debacle.
Derivatives Positioning
SOL's terms whitethorn proceed to fall, seeing that perpetual futures unfastened involvement has risen by 5% successful the past 24 hours, accompanied by a antagonistic cumulative measurement delta (CVD). This operation indicates nett selling unit successful the market.
The CVD for astir large tokens is negative, indicating a bearish sentiment.
BTC and ETH front-dated oregon short-term puts proceed to beryllium pricier than calls connected Deribit. The sentiment is bullish aft February expiry.
Block flows featured an April expiry bitcoin bull enactment spread, involving strikes $85K and $100K and outright longs successful puts astatine $94K and $90K strikes. Ether bull telephone spreads crossed the portion arsenic well.
Market Movements:
BTC is down 0.69% from 4 p.m. ET Monday to $95,802.76 (24hrs: -0.57%)
ETH is down 2.88% astatine $2,698.31 (24hrs: -1.89%)
CoinDesk 20 is down 2.23% to 3,161.95 (24hrs: -3.03%)
Ether CESR Composite Staking Rate is up 27 bps to 3.18%
BTC backing complaint is astatine 0.0078% (8.5541% annualized) connected Binance
DXY is up 0.36% astatine 106.94
Gold is up 0.97% astatine $2,922.9/oz
Silver is up 0.70% to $32.99/oz
Nikkei 225 closed 0.25% astatine 39,270.4
Hang Seng closed +1.59% astatine 22,976.81
FTSE is up 0.18% astatine 8,783.43
Euro Stoxx 50 is unchanged astatine 5,520.7
DJIA closed Friday -0.37% astatine 44,546.08
S&P 500 closed unchanged astatine 6,114.63
Nasdaq closed +0.41% astatine 20,026.77
S&P/TSX Composite Index closed -0.84% astatine 25,483.2
S&P 40 Latin America closed +2.12% astatine 2,490.30
U.S. 10-year Treasury complaint was up 3 bps astatine 4.51%
E-mini S&P 500 futures are up 0.1% to 6,151.5
E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures are up 0.21% astatine 22,282
E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average Index futures are down 0.15% to 44,676
Bitcoin Stats:
BTC Dominance: 61.17 (0.85%)
Ethereum to bitcoin ratio: 0.02813 (-1.71%)
Hashrate (seven-day moving average): 790 EH/s
Hashprice (spot): $53.47
Total Fees: 6.93 BTC / $663,706
CME Futures Open Interest: 174,200 BTC
BTC priced successful gold: 32.8 oz
BTC vs golden marketplace cap: 9.31%
Technical Analysis
The illustration shows the marketplace dominance of Tether's USDT, the largest dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Its dominance complaint seems to person bounced disconnected the March 2024 low, teasing a bullish treble bottommost pattern.
In different words, USDT could go much dominant, which usually happens during market-wide terms corrections.
Crypto Equities
MicroStrategy (MSTR): closed connected Friday astatine $337.73 (+3.94%), down 0.6% astatine $335.76 successful pre-market.
Coinbase Global (COIN): closed astatine $274.31 (-7.98%)
Galaxy Digital Holdings (GLXY): closed astatine C$27.65 (-2.54%)
MARA Holdings (MARA): closed astatine $16.90 (-0.06%)
Riot Platforms (RIOT): closed astatine $12.27 (+0.33%)
Core Scientific (CORZ): closed astatine $12.51 (-0.24%)
CleanSpark (CLSK): closed astatine $10.50 (-1.59%)
CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI): closed astatine $23.40 (+0.52%)
Semler Scientific (SMLR): closed astatine $49.67 (+0.44%)
Exodus Movement (EXOD): closed astatine $50.00 (unchanged)
ETF Flows
The information beneath is arsenic of Feb. 14. U.S. markets were closed connected Feb. 17.
Spot BTC ETFs:
Daily nett flow: $70.6 million
Cumulative nett flows: $40.12 billion
Total BTC holdings ~ 1.180 million.
Spot ETH ETFs
Daily nett flow: $11.7 million
Cumulative nett flows: $3.15 billion
Total ETH holdings ~ 3.791 million.
Source: Farside Investors
Overnight Flows
Chart of the Day
While bitcoin remains listless beneath $100,000, Wall Street's tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 has jumped adjacent to grounds highs.
If BTC's humanities affirmative correlation with the tech banal is immoderate guide, BTC could soon prime up a beardown bid.
While You Were Sleeping
Bitcoin Is Coiled Like a Spring, a Breakout of This Range Is Coming: Van Straten (CoinDesk): Bitcoin has traded successful the $91K–$109K scope since precocious November. According to Glassnode, BTC's 2-week realized volatility has fallen to conscionable 32% connected an yearly basis.
Ether ETFs Register $393M successful Inflows This Month arsenic Crypto Investors Turn Their Back connected Bitcoin (CoinDesk): Data connected U.S. spot ETFs shows investors pivoting their attraction to ether from bitcoin. Analysts accidental they expect ETH to emergence arsenic Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade draws closer.
Milei Denies Wrongdoing successful His First Defense of Crypto Debacle (Bloomberg): Argentina's President Javier Milei defended his promotion of a memecoin called libra — which spiked earlier crashing — arsenic an effort to enactment economical growth.
Investors Haven’t Been This Pessimistic About Stocks Since 2023 (The Wall Street Journal): A survey shows 47.3% of U.S. investors expect banal terms declines implicit six months — the astir bearish sentiment since November — amid commercialized warfare and ostentation concerns.
U.S. and Russia Meet for Talks connected Ukraine War (Reuters): On Tuesday, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio successful Saudi Arabia to sermon ending the warfare successful Ukraine and restoring relations betwixt the 2 superpowers.
Australia Cuts Interest Rates for First Time successful More Than 4 Years (Financial Times): Australia's cardinal slope chopped its currency complaint by 0.25 percent points to 4.10%, providing owe alleviation portion signaling caution astir aboriginal complaint cuts amidst economical uncertainty.
In the Ether
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