Bitcoin is dropping to its lowest level in nearly a month.
Good morning, Asia. Here’s what’s happening in the markets.
US Central Bank President Jerome spoke forcefully for the second day in a row. Banking giant JPMorgan has ended its relationship with crypto exchange Gemini, CoinDesk’s Ian Allison first reported. Crypto-friendly Silvergate Bank will shut down operations.
Bitcoin sucked it all in and then fell to its lowest level in nearly a month. The largest cryptocurrency by market cap recently traded around $21,750, down more than 2% over the past 24 hours. Bitcoin price fell below $21,600 at one point after swinging over $22,000 for most of this month. Investors have been grappling with troubling jobs and price data that has Powell and the Fed governors reviving their monetary aggressiveness as a recipe for inflation.
The odds of a 50bp rate hike now hold around 70% after a strong preference for a more pessimistic 25bp increase in the previous weeks.
“After celebrating growth opportunities in inflation rates over the last couple of months, the Fed had to resume its hawkish stance by talking tough about raising interest rates, and I think it’s interesting to note that they were viewing their hikes as having a significant impact on inflation, and then it became clear Inflation is proving more stubborn than anticipated.”A 50 basis point rate hike is basically inevitable,” Quinn Thompson, head of growth and capital markets at blockchain-powered capital markets platform Maple, wrote to CoinDesk in an email. now”.
Thompson added that “barring a systemic malfunction, such as a credit event of some sort, it seems increasingly likely that there won’t be any rate cuts until next year.”
Ether performed similarly to bitcoin and also fell by 2% to trade just above $1,530. This level was far from the late February highs above $1,700. Most other major cryptocurrencies were in the red with SOL, the Solana blockchain token down over 9% and APT, the native cryptocurrency of Aptos Labs blockchain’s tier one cryptocurrency down over 6%. The CoinDesk Market Index, a measure of the performance of the broader crypto market, is down nearly 3%.
The Nikkei was up about 0.5% as Asian stock markets opened. US indices were flat with the tech-heavy Nasdaq and S&P 500, which has a tech-heavy component, up slightly while the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was down a few percentage points.
IMaple’s Thompson was concerned about the prospects for cryptocurrencies amid the Fed’s apparent hawkishness, which has historically led to lower prices for cryptocurrencies and other riskier assets.
“I suspect we can again test the lows reached last year as a result of higher interest rates, but also due to the Fed’s ongoing monetary tightening regime draining liquidity from the markets,” he wrote. “A lot of this monetary tightening is being priced into fixed income markets. But risky assets still need to price in the potential for negative spillovers, and that could spell trouble for stocks and cryptocurrencies.”
Conic Finance’s Big Promise, But Will It Live Up To It?
An earlier version of this story Back Separately on the CoinDesk website.
A new tool for generating revenue from the prominent stablecoin swap service Curve has attracted more than $60 million from depositors just over a week after its launch.
Launched on March 1, Conic Finance allows users to deposit tokens into its comprehensive tools, a new product that diversifies exposure across the Curve ecosystem with increased rewards.
Each comprehensive tool allocates the liquidity of a single asset into different curve combinations. All Liquidity Provider (LP) tokens in the curve are superimposed on a Curve Enhancement Convex (CRV) that rewards profits. Convex (CNX), another Curve ecosystem token, is also rewarded, as is Conic (CNC), the original Conic token.
Conic users can earn up to 21% annual returns on the three omnipools of dai (DAI), frax (FRAX) and USDC. The USDC pool has attracted over $50 million in liquidity alone, with Conic currently offering one of the highest returns available in the USDC cryptocurrency market. Deposits for Forex and Dai are much less than $7 million and $5 million respectively.
Owners can lock their CNC tokens to vlCNC to participate in Conic management and direct control over how liquidity is allocated across Curve pools by participating in Conic’s Liquidity Allocation Votes (LAV) – which determines the share of omnipool liquidity that the Curve pool can receive.
In the coming weeks, Conic’s demand among traders for its yield-generating products may eventually generate value for its CNC token.
As such, the CNC token is currently trading at $8, losing 4% in the last 24 hours with a market cap of $32 million.
To be sure, not all DeFit watchers fully embrace Conic’s approach. Colin Johnson, CEO and co-founder of tech token investment platform Freeport, called Konik “an interesting new avenue for yield access within the Curve ecosystem,” but added cautiously that “we’ve historically seen what happens with promised returns of 20% or more (Terra).” “.
“Either it wears off quickly — which is probably what’s happening here — or it builds up an amount of pressure the system can’t handle, and we implode,” Johnson wrote. “Users should always be careful when the payout is delivered in a token that represents the system they are interacting with. When that token loses, its price tends to go down.”
Curve uses smart contracts to offer an efficient way to exchange stablecoins while maintaining low fees and low slippage, according to the developer documentation. Depositors on Curve earn annual returns of up to 4% from one of the many pools on the platform, which locks over $5 billion in Ethereum-based tokens on its platform.
Curve Tokens (CRV) are issued as rewards for growing the crop to liquidity providers on Curve Finance, and can be converted into a Verified Credit CRV (veCRV). The veCRV contract allows users to participate in platform management, earn rewards and higher fees and receive airdrops.
The tokens are time-locked, which means that users are incentivized to lock their CRV for an extended period of time to receive more veCRV and platform rewards. However, this mechanism effectively locks in liquidity, creating opportunity costs for users.
This is where protocols like Conic come into play, allowing users to gain exposure or provide liquidity to the Curve ecosystem to get rewarded while not having to lock in their tokens for long periods by depositing to Curve directly.
Bitcoin fell to a three-week low after US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s congressional testimony encouraged traders to price in a higher “final price.” Martha Reyes, member of the Advisory Board of the Digital Economy Initiative, participated. Additionally, NEAR Foundation CEO Marek Flament discussed her outlook on Web3 and women’s leadership in cryptography on International Women’s Day. Also joining the conversation are Grayscale Investments Legal Director Craig Salem, MenaPay CEO Çağla Gül Şenkardeş, and WomenInDeFi Brand Strategist Umeh Chinonye. Grayscale and CoinDesk are both owned by the Digital Currency Group (DCG).
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