Anxiety creeps up
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 6th February 2024.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
Don’t invest in crypto unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.
What’s up
Shifting Macro Winds, Solana Technical Difficulties, Elevate Blood Pressure
Chinese stocks rebounded after Monday's sell-off. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng rose 3.3%.
Meanwhile, U.S. investors are suddenly nervous the Federal Reserve might push off rate cuts.
Crypto seems a little shaky. Bitcoin clung to $42,300 as Monday gave way to Tuesday. As of 7:15 a.m. (EST), BTC was advancing toward $42,800, shading green over the prior hour. The biggest digital asset is down 1% on the week.
Rattling digital markets as the sun came up was the Solana network which went down.
Between about 5 a.m. (EST) and 7 a.m. (EST), the situation unfolded via social media posts and various community-provided updates chronicling revelations that there was an outage, and that the chain was malfunctioning but that a fix was in the works.
What's down
Ethereum Rivals Stumble About
While Solana's engineers spent the morning scrambling to restart the chain, the platform’s native token SOL shaved and showered. SOL at $99, its usage spiking, was a neat story writing itself last night (could SOL get back over $100 and was $120 the next stop?); however, after pre-dawn rumors of the outage spread across the crypto realm, the fifth-largest token quickly sank to $93, only to refresh in a lather to $95.
Even as their network functionalities hummed along undisturbed, Solana’s primary foes Avalanche and Cardano also saw their native tokens tumble.
Although, the leader of the losers on this uneasy Tuesday is privacy-focused Monero (XMR) which plunged 19% after Binance publicly declared it intends to delist it later this month.
What's next
China's Risk-Takers Broaden Their Horizons
Fed Chair Jerome Powell suggested on "60 Minutes" Sunday night that rate cuts could still be some ways off, wet-blanketing risk markets.
As for yesterday's equities sell-off in China – the CSI 1000 at one tense juncture dropped by as much as 9% – it is said to owe to a host of unique factors, including a government crackdown on the financial sector amidst the Evergrande real estate debt crisis. Another sell-pressure factor heading into Chinese New Year is the seeming deterioration of Sino-American diplomatic relations, with the superpowers butting heads over Taiwan, and semiconductors.
Anxious Chinese investors have poured money into overseas equities, according to DLNews, citing Noelle Acheson, a former Genesis and CoinDesk research chief and who now pens a macro-centric crypto newsletter.
Continued unrest could lead to more money flowing into Bitcoin, she said. “It’s not so much that Chinese investors don’t want to invest; it’s that they don’t have a lot of confidence in the Chinese stock market, despite official assurances,” Acheson said. “Foreign stock exposure is one avenue. Gambling is another. Crypto markets, on the other hand, could deliver the benefits of both.”
