1. Market Wrap: Bitcoin Drops to $29.9K While DeFi Hits Record $29B Locked
Spot prices in bitcoin are sliding as investors get distracted by other market opportunities. Those include in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, which hit a record level of value locked on Tuesday.
Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $31,600 as of 21:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 1.2% over the previous 24 hours.
Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $29,298-$32,939
BTC above the 10-hour but below the 50-hour moving averages on the hourly chart, a sideways signal for market technicians.
2. Wall Street, Big Tech Clamp Down on GameStop-Style Pumps; Biden Admin ‘Monitoring’ Situation
Wall Street wants to stop stocks from trading like cryptocurrencies.
An active Reddit-based trading community is causing more equities to behave like characteristically volatile cryptocurrencies amid an ongoing campaign of monstrous short squeezes. In response to abnormal market behavior, brokers and other financial service providers are threatening to cut off trading access to “limit risk.”
Self-described as “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,” the Wall Street Bets (WSB) trading community on Reddit wreaked chaos in traditional markets after pumping GameStop (GME) nearly 900% in five days to around $380 Wednesday morning. And the mayhem is spreading.
3. DeFi’s UNI Token Jumps 92% in One Week, Passes $15
Decentralized finance (DeFi) exchange Uniswap’s native token uni (UNI) broke $15 per token on Coinbase Wednesday morning. It’s up more than 92% in one week and up 1,300% since the token debuted in September 2020, according to CoinGecko at press time.
Valued at $4.2 billion, Uniswap’s UNI has the highest market cap of any DeFi token on the market, according to research firm Messari.
The governance token has been caught up in bitcoin’s 2020–21 bull run along with other DeFi tokens. At $25.1 billion, DeFi Pulse’s Total Value Locked (TVL) metric — similar to assets under management (AUM) — is up nearly $10 billion from Jan. 1. TokenSets’ DeFi Pulse Index, which measures a suite of DeFi token prices, is also up 136% on the year.
4. Blockstream Buys $25M Worth of Bitcoin Mining Machines From MicroBT
Bitcoin technology company Blockstream said it bought $25 million worth of mining machines from MicroBT to expand its mining operations.
The machines are to be deployed through Blockstream’s facilities in Canada and the US. When the company expects to receive its ASICs was not specified.
In 2019, Blockstream launched Blockstream Pool and announced that it had been previously mining for a select few high-profile clients like Fidelity.
Blockstream has over 300 megawatts in mining capacity available, said CEO Adam Back in a statement. “We’ll continue to grow aggressively throughout the year,” he said.
5. Fed Chair Powell: ‘We’d Welcome Higher Inflation’
U.S. Federal Reserve officials voted Wednesday to keep monetary conditions at historically loose levels while waiting for the economy to heal.
Chairman Jerome Powell said he doesn’t want to put a timeline on tapering the U.S. central bank’s $120 billion-a-month in asset purchases.
“In terms of tapering it’s just premature,” Powell said. “We said we’d want to see substantial, further progress towards our goals before we modify our asset purchase guidance. It’s just too early to be talking about dates. We need to see actual progress.”
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January 28, 2021
