1. Market Wrap: Bitcoin Ranges Around $55K While Altcoin Theta Saw Price Spike
“The market is not as confident anymore,” say Arcane Research. “More traders are positioned short.”
Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $55,066.05 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 1.5% over the previous 24 hours.
Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $$53,031.33-$56,143.09
BTC trades between its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a sideways signal for market technicians.
Bitcoin was ranging between $54,000 and $56,000 after Monday’s big drop amid signs market sentiment might be continuing bearish.
The largest cryptocurrency appeared to stabilize after Monday’s 5.8% drop, the biggest single-day decline in almost a month, but some analysts said it would be hard to rule out a fresh turn downward.
“The market is not as confident anymore,” the Norwegian blockchain analytics firm Arcane Research wrote in its weekly newsletter on Tuesday. “More traders are positioned short.”
2. Bitcoin Transfer Worth $806M Might Reveal Big Institutional Purchase
“My speculative guess is that institutions are buying bitcoin’s price dip,” one analyst said.
Digital-asset traders and analysts were scrambling Tuesday to assess a fresh data point extracted from the Bitcoin blockchain: Some $806 million worth of the cryptocurrency apparently transferred earlier in the day off of the Coinbase exchange’s institution-focused unit, Coinbase Pro.
The jury is out on what it means. It could be that a large investor or several just completed a fresh round of buying and now are taking the bounty off the exchange for long-term holding or other purposes. Or it might be something else more innocuous, such as an internal transfer.
According to data provided by the blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant, some 14,666 BTC were moved off the exchange during the early U.S. hours in a small number of transactions.
3. Uniswap Unveils Version 3 in Bid to Stay DeFi’s Top Dog
V3 of the automated market maker is penciled in for an Ethereum mainnet launch on May 5.
Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ethereum and a centerpiece of the $42 billion decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, is releasing its third iteration.
In a Tuesday blog post, the firm behind the platform said its aim is to make Uniswap “the most flexible and efficient [automated market maker] ever designed.” AMMs — once nearly solely the domain of Uniswap — have grown in stature along with DeFi’s emergence last year. Rivals like SushiSwap, 1inch and others have also made the exchange of Ethereum-based assets easy for many crypto natives.
Uniswap v3 is expected to launch on mainnet on May 5, the firm wrote. Notably, Uniswap is eyeing an integration “soon after” with Ethereum throughput booster Optimism.
4. Ex-Tether Exec Quigley Disappointed in Current Management, Urges Audits
Tether is its “own worst enemy” and needs to be audited, according to co-founder William Quigley.
A co-founder of Tether, the $41 billion company behind the tether (USDT, -0.07%) stablecoin, said the company and its reserves should be audited at least quarterly, and maybe even monthly.
“Every time you print a tether, you should have a dollar being added to that cash pool,” said William Quigley, who left the project in 2015 and now runs the non-fungible token (NFT) exchange WAX. “Audited once a month, once a quarter.”
The comments on CoinDesk TV come after Tether last month agreed to a $18.5 million settlement with the New York Attorney General on charges of an alleged attempt to hide financial losses. The company admitted to no wrongdoing while agreeing to provide quarterly reports on the composition of its reserves.
5. Ripple Touts Role for XRP in Central Bank Digital Currency White Paper
The crypto asset could be used as a “neutral bridge” between different currencies, Ripple says.
Ripple has pitched the XRP (-7.8%) cryptocurrency as a way to link different central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in a new white paper.
XRP, which is used in some of the company’s payment products and Ripple helps develop, could be a “neutral bridge” between different currencies, bringing speed and efficiency to the process, according to the document titled, “The Future of CBDCs.”
The white paper, published this week, identifies cross-border payments with CBDCs as receiving little attention from central banks, which largely target domestic use cases.
That’s a “short-sighted” stance, according to Ripple, which says interoperable CBDCs could bring nations a competitive advantage, allowing commercial entities to make international trades.
“Supporting immediate real-time foreign exchanges, as opposed to the current 3–5 day process will likely still require the need for prefunded currency accounts,” the paper states.
A neutral bridge currency would then be needed to support liquidity markets to allow for effective movement of value between different CBDCs.
Ripple looks to be pitching itself to central banks researching and developing CBDCs amid its ongoing lawsuit with the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) over its allegedly illegal sales of XRP.
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March 24, 2021
