BTC, alts, mostly everything, living large

Everybody watched Bitcoin make an assault on $50K assuming a successful outcome. At last check, Tuesday, 8 a.m. (EST), per CoinGecko, BTC was $50,250 and climbing. New key-level markers ($52K-$54K) are being bandied about.

And then there is PlanB's S2F supply-centric model sticking by its forecast that $100K could happen as soon as April.

Before BTC can convert "halfway-to-six-figures" into a phrase no one will ever remember, there was the business of unquestionably breaching the coveted threshold. Early on Mardi Gras Tuesday (EST), BTC did it, briefly reaching $50K, before easing back, Decrypt said.

The reversal of the reversal of fortune for XRP in recent weeks has been swift and surprising but has stalled out.

Yesterday wasn’t the best day for the digital asset that is closely associated with payments player Ripple, and which has rallied after getting hammered earlier in 2021 after rallying in 2020.

XRP fell nearly 4% on Monday. By the time the day was over came news that Ripple and the SEC do not believe there is a prospect for settlement as their legal battle proceeds into the discovery phase.

The SEC brought a case against Ripple alleging unlawful sales of XRP to retail investors; Ripple has vowed to fight. And lawyers for both parties, in a discovery letter addressed to Federal Judge Analisa Torres at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said that having previously discussed the matter they don’t envision settling.

 XRP on Tuesday as of 8:30 a.m. (EST) was $0.54, down 5% over a 24-hour period.

Crypto markets got roughed up Monday but the Asian session set off what indeed looks to be Fat Tuesday.

Fresh off Lunar New Year break, traders waved bye-bye to the Rat year and paid homage to the Ox by of course turning bullish – helping to drive the global market cap of crypto above $1.5 trillion. Much of that has come in just the past few months.

Whether BTC would reach $50K was never really in question. But could Cardano stay ahead of Polkadot?

No: DOT is now the fourth-largest crypto by market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.

How big can "DeFi" get? Uniswap is celebrating trade volumes crossing $100 billion. The largest decentralized exchange (DEX), Uniswap is the first of them to hit that mark. During the first month of 2021, total DEX volumes surpassed $50 billion. Just in one day yesterday, underdog project Pancakeswap, a DEX running on Binance Smart Chain, saw $400 million in trading volume (Decrypt).

Verge (XVG) suffered an attempted 51% attack. However, the privacy coin project's team has said the attempt failed and that funds are safe. A "block reorganization" attack occurs when miners collude to remove already-confirmed blocks from the chain. This reorg effectively erased 200 days worth of transactions on Verge (CryptoPotato).

BTC Investors Buy Low, Sell High: Nir Kaissar, a former Ernst & Young consultant and a Bloomberg columnist, studied Bitcoin’s extreme volatility and how investors handle it: extremely well, as it turns out. Kaissar found evidence that investors have been buying when its prices fall and selling “on the way up.”