Bullish indicator beckons
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. 12th April 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
Bitcoin Decoupling From The S&P 500? That's A Pretty Positive Sign
Bitcoin stayed green, held $70K and continued to display a curious ambivalence toward the undulations of U.S. stocks. If the seemingly weakening correlation trend holds, said Santiment, then everybody watch out – because the largest crypto could be about to make history.
For the past two years, the correlation between cryptocurrencies (BTC being proxy-in-chief) and equities (represented by the S&P 500) has been tight.
The first hint of a divergence came in late March. That’s when BTC fell and the S&P 500 stayed flat. Earlier this week, amidst investors' digestion of government CPI data showing lingering inflation, the famous stock market index fell and it was BTC that remained impressively level, even climbing.
These episodes, taken together, according to Brian Quinlivan, Santiment’s marketing chief, could indicate BTC may be diverging from the S&P 500, historically bullish (The Daily Hodl).
“After the bad news about inflation, this could be a sign that cryptos are carving their own path," Quinlivan said. "And in most extended bull runs throughout the history of crypto, for 15-plus years, we have seen that they most often occur when there is little to no correlation with the S&P."
If a sustained decoupling ensues in the months ahead, BTC could top six figures, Quinlivan added.
What's down
PUPS Rocket Loses Power, Begins Descent
For sheer, comet-streaking, vertigo-inducing rocketship heaven, probe no further than PUPS.
On Friday at about 7:30 a.m. (EST), PUPS was running roughshod over the rest of the pack. It hit a high near $84, soaring 77% in 24 hours. The PUPS token is a staggering +1,300% over the past seven days.
PUPS is the 150th-largest digital asset. It’s sometimes described as a Bitcoin-adjacent memecoin. At the moment, PUPS exists as an Ordinals token but it’s set to migrate to the coming Runes protocol that has been hyped as possibly another Solana in terms of a burgeoning ecosystem brimming with frenzied memecoin action.
Ordinals and Runes are both projects overseen by a veteran Bitcoin developer, Casey Rodarmor.
Ordinals facilitate the embedding of data into the Bitcoin blockchain via “inscriptions,” or a kind of digital imagery point of reference that gets time-stamped on even the smallest Bitcoin-based transactions.
The Runes project is said to be able to push the concept further using an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) protocol to generate transactions, allowing for a ramped-up, soup-to-nuts tokenization ecosystem all contained within the Bitcoin network. (CoinDesk)
When we re-checked PUPS at 9 a.m. (EST), it finally seemed to be slowing, having slipped 11% from its ATH.
What's next
DeFi Sector Possibly About To Take Its Lumps
Uniswap's UNI held $9 after tumbling precipitously in the wake of revelations that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is possibly preparing some kind of enforcement action against the pioneer DEX.
"We don’t know the nature of the potential charges," said CoinDesk's Daniel Kuhn. "But the news raises the threat of legal jeopardy for decentralized finance."
The SEC previously has gone after centralized exchanges. The regulator, you’ll recall, sent Coinbase a "Wells Notice," similar to the one Uniswap Labs received, prior to slapping the publicly traded exchange with a landmark lawsuit. But now it’s the DeFi world potentially about to be rocked.
Kuhn, in an opinion essay, labeled the SEC's move as a "serious escalation" in the agency's "anti-crypto legal barrage."
Here is what Uniswap's official blog had to say about the matter: “Taking into account the SEC’s ongoing lawsuits against Coinbase and others, as well as their complete unwillingness to provide clarity or a path to registration to those operating lawfully within the U.S., we can only conclude that this is the latest political effort to target even the best actors building technology on blockchains.”
No one knows yet what specific bone the SEC is potentially picking here, but it’s entirely possible that the UNI governance token could be marrow for the soup. Such a bent would tie into to preceding cases in which the regulator deemed a slew of digital assets as unlawfully issued securities.
Bill Hughes, director of global regulatory matters at blockchain software company Consensys, said that, whatever the case, the SEC most likely will follow a familiar path: take a big swing against the DeFi industry – and then move on to some other crypto sub-category.
"We'll see if they sue other decentralized exchanges,” he said.
