DOGE goes on a ride

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Bitcoin was back snugly above $40,000 on Tuesday morning on a 24-hour gain of 4% as of about 8 a.m. (EST).

"Continued support here and BTC will revisit $43,100 resistance,” Rekt Capital said.

The total crypto market cap just in the past 24 hours increased by roughly $100 billion to $1.873 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Seekers of signs that it's safe to switch back to risk-on mode could derive comfort in equities having rebounded Monday, but stock futures were slightly dipping as of this morning.

Markets indeed were riveted by Monday's announcement from Twitter’s board that it had accepted Elon Musk's cash offer to buy the 16-year-old social media company for $54.20 per share ($44 billion) and take it private.

Twitter shares closed at $51.70, rising 5.64% for the day. It has gained 38% since just before Musk revealed he was amassing a stake. TWTR was trading in the range of $70 at this time last year.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement.

Musk frequently tweeting about Dogecoin in the past (and allowing its use in Tesla's online merch shop) has stoked optimism for DOGE to perhaps fully transcend meme status in a world in which Twitter is controlled by Musk.

On-chain DOGE activity is surging. IntoTheBlock, per U.Today, has tracked a 404% increase in "whale" transactions (those buys/sells exceeding $100,000) with DOGE spiking by as much as 25% following confirmation of Musk's Twitter takeover.

With majors and meme coins shooting higher Tuesday following a bruising stretch, we checked in on the best-known decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, some of which are turning green. Darling of the collateral-optimization-steeped "DeFi 2.0" sector, Convex Finance (CVX) has popped by 7% in the past 24 hours, although it is down 6% in the past month.

Pioneer decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap (UNI) had a 4% gain since this time yesterday. Over 30 days, however, UNI is down 18%. And it is 80% off its all-time of near $45 reached roughly 51 weeks ago.

Rival Sushi (SUSHI) got above $23 in March 2021 but it has shed 86% of its value since. It's up today, flat on the week and down on the month.

PancakeSwap (CAKE) is up on the month (+12%) but down (-9%) over the past 24 hours.

CAKE (56th-largest digital asset) is actually one of the few Top 100 coins right now in the red.

A couple of Ethereum challengers are at a crossroads but scream upside potential, per the widely followed crypto analyst Michaël van de Poppe, according to The DailyHodl.

Interoperability-focused Polkadot (DOT) has fallen 60% to about $18 in the past six months.

Its immediate resistance: $20.

DOT somehow besting that mark would put the 11th-largest coin on a path to a 35% near-term gain, said van de Poppe.

Meanwhile, scalability-steeped Near Protocol began the year just above $20 (an all-time high) but has had trouble of late staying above $13. If NEAR can pull it off, there's a shot for a return to $20 glory, the analyst said. NEAR, as of 7:52 a.m. (EST), was $14.78, having gained 6.3% over the prior 24 hours.

The DOGE rally from fourteen cents to sixteen cents seems to confirm that traders considered Musk’s take-private of Twitter to be a bullish event (Cointelegraph).

Musk, a long-time DOGE enthusiast, is said to have recently advised the Twitter board that they should start accepting the memecoin for Twitter Blue, their first-ever subscription service. Musk’s 100% ownership of the company could spell the creation of future pay walls – and a DOGE payment option. Crypto and Twitter are as intertwined as the prizefighting and newspaper scribes circa the 1920s. Still, whether a crypto-friendly subscription-based model would appease the crypto community or drive users to seek alternatives remains to be seen (Blockworks).

Musk's tweets about crypto, particularly DOGE, but also BTC, do seem to markedly sway prices. His appearance last May on "Saturday Night Live" was criticized for helping inflate a crypto bubble. Around that same time, last spring, Musk tweeted that Tesla would accept BTC for payment and then, two months later, citing environmental concerns, he changed his mind. Along for the ride, BTC rallied and plunged as if a mere puppet on a string.

"Tesla shareholders can’t be happy that Musk will have to divert even more attention away from winning the EV race," Edward Moya, an analyst at currency broker OANDA, told clients. It doesn’t seem like the company was going to make major changes anytime soon, Moya added.

Musk said he wants to make Twitter's algorithms open source to increase trust. He has also prioritized defeating the spam bots. "Twitter has tremendous potential," Musk said. "I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

It’s unclear who will lead the company, CNBC pointed out. Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal told employees during a town hall style address on Monday that the future of the social media firm is uncertain. “Once the deal closes, we don’t know which direction the platform will go,” Agrawal said.

The Twitter transaction was approved by the company's board and is now subject to a shareholder vote. Analysts told Reuters no regulatory hurdles are expected.