BTC, ETH creep up

Volatility is back. And it's a familiar tune for snappy Bitcoin – be-bopping and ska-diddling with the flair of a hip cat jazz crooner – but ultimately the largest crypto remains squarely in the range of "about $30,000."

BTC and Ethereum each rose 3% since this time yesterday. Stock futures right now are looking grim, though. Close is the correlation between stocks and crypto. Tandem movements continue unabated as risk assessor-types grapple with inflation data and scenarios in which monetary policy outlooks change course if, say, a recession manifests in GDP data.

Cardano (ADA) leads Big Ten coins today. It surged 10% in 24 hours as of 8:35 a.m. (EST). Among larger-cap altcoins, Chainlink (LINK), which is the 22nd-largest digital asset in terms of total market capitalization, is clamoring for attention with a 24-hour gain of 13%.

LINK's price hike follows release of its updated roadmap, outlining the implementation of staking, giving node operators and other various community members the ability to increase the security guarantees of oracle services by backing them with staked LINK (Decrypt).

Litecoin (LTC) lost some ground last night, tumbling from $65 to $62 in a few hours. The slide came as news broke that a slew of exchanges in South Korea have delisted it, citing concerns over the coin's enhanced privacy elements not jibing with local prohibitions on anonymous transactions.

One of the country’s biggest exchanges, Upbit, in explaining why it was nixing LTC, pointed to a local law, the Act on the Reporting and Use of Specific Financial Transaction Information.

LTC's privacy-focused upgrade, MimbleWimble, dropped earlier this year. Upbit reportedly did a thorough review of the changes and new wrinkles in an effort to understand which transactional identifiers are hidden, and to what extent, but in the end concluded it could no longer support LTC.

As of 8:15 a.m. (EST), LTC had actually turned flat over 24 hours. It's down 34% over the past month.

Meanwhile, Osmosis called time out on its network following the flag-up of an exploit that possibly led to $5 million being drained from a liquidity pool at an Osmosis-run decentralized exchange (DEX). Native token OSMO, which ranks as CoinGecko's 110th-largest digital asset, stumbled through the dead of night, slipping from well over $1 to possibly being nearly less than $1, but look there now it is rebounding. As of 8:30 a.m. (EST), OSMO was flat over 24 hours.

“Liquidity pools were not completely drained," the Osmosis team said, per The Block. "Devs are fixing the bug."

Whale watchers have the life. Out at sea, ensconced in foamy brine, awash in marine life, without a care in the world save for keeping their binoculars dry. Oh, right, not those whale watchers.

Turns out, Bitcoin's local tops and bottoms have coincided with areas of heightened whale activity, or when BTC’s largest wallet entities decide to buy or sell, according to Whalemap, an on-chain analytics firm (Cointelegraph).

“Can it get easier than this?” Whalemap asks, charting timeframes of large wallet inflows alongside a look back at optimal trading entries/exits.

The buys and sells of one Binance whale in particular appear to have been contributing to BTC's ultra-narrow trading range.

“This whale has marked every local top/bottom for the last two weeks,” Credible Crypto tweeted.

BTC's ongoing correlation with macro-forces-roiled stock markets has snuffed optimism and sparked frustration at a time when crypto seems to be missing the perfect opportunity to demonstrate its forgotten role as a hedge against inflation.

As monetary tightening accelerates around the world, stocks, in the short run, are still vulnerable to lower lows, pundit Bob Loukas said, noting telltale signs of a cyclical bear market.

"Still don't see macro catalyst for bottom in equities," he said. "Been underweight a while, happy to be wrong. Won't FOMO a ripping rally."