Yearn Finance soars

At a time when the so-called "Dogecoin killer" SHIB token is storming China by way of a microscopic price of $0.00003, there’s also right now a killer DeFi token, Yearn Finance's YFI, setting record highs near $70,000.

YFI rose 23% in the past 24 hours as of 7 a.m. Tuesday morning (EST).

Traders around the world have flocked into YFI, impressively building up its keep-contributors-happy infrastructure, and with upside opportunities in other major tokens leveling off (Cointelegraph).

Chinese traders, meanwhile, are piling into the meme crypto connected with the experimental Shiba Inu network. Like DOGE, SHIB is an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token.

CoinGecko pegs SHIB's total market capitalization as “?”

YFI's market cap, per CoinGecko, is $2.5 billion, making it the 63rd-largest coin. The maximum supply of YFI is only 36,666, why it’s priced so loftily.

SHIB is said to have a maximum token supply of 1 quadrillion.

Bitcoin's long, hard road continues to unfurl on the horizon, less of a gold-plated skyway and more of a steep, crater-pocked, haunted mountain pass leading to, for now, only a dark cave marked "$60K, do not enter."

BTC fell 5% to $55,155 in the 24-hour period ending today at 8:30 a.m. (EST). It has declined about 14% since hitting an all-time high of $64,800 in mid-April.

A momentary shift into meme coins is hampering BTC's trajectory, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju tweeted.

With DOGE mania only mildly abating, numerous imitators have now emerged to latch on to the tailwinds – coins that seemingly have no value, grabbing attention with the promise of multi-digit returns (CryptoPotato).

An obscure meme-coin, SHIB, stealing DOGE’s thunder, has gained tenfold with Chinese traders taking flyers in droves.

In China, “there is a mood that people believe its price would go up,” Colin Wu, a popular crypto blogger there, told CoinDesk. SHIB’s sudden surge appears to have been spurred in part by social-media influencers on popular Chinese platforms, including Weibo and WeChat.

Another impactful crypto influencer: the Chinese government. China has shuttered mining operations, declared coin offerings illegal, cut off access to exchanges and prohibited financial institutions from handling Bitcoin transactions – but it's not like the world's second-largest economy is inclined to totally ban crypto, is it?

The answer seems to be, lately, no, China will not be as ironfisted as once feared. For one thing, China is close to rolling out one of the world’s first major central bank digital currencies at scale and therefore can’t really afford to stamp out a wider crypto ecosystem, as Cointelegraph Magazine has pointed out.

According to Lennix Lai, director of financial markets, OKEx, there was recently a remarkable step for BTC acceptance in China.

It happened during a panel discussion at the Boao Forum for Asia held last month in Boao, in the southern province of Hainan. At that event, Li Bo, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, said: “We regard Bitcoin and stablecoin as crypto assets … these are investment alternatives.” This simple utterance represented “a significant shift" in the country’s position on crypto, said Michael Peshkam, executive in residence at the European business school INSEAD.

The Li Bo statement continues to reverberate around the world which is 70% covered by water and why we were not at all surprised to learn that debris from the out-of-control Chinese rocket had crashed into the Indian Ocean.