Marketplace seems haunted

A giant chunk of the largest crypto was on the move overnight and market participants are watching the situation cautiously.

For the first time in five years, cold wallets connected with the long-defunct Mt. Gox exchange put coins into play, transferring $9 billion worth of BTC to a single address, most likely as part of a plan to repay creditors, creating the possibility of sell pressure as well as rising levels of consternation among investors.

BTC crested to as high as $70.5K on a holiday Monday but has since skidded to $68.3K as of Tuesday at 8:52 a.m. (EST).

This past September, a trustee, appointed by a court in Japan, announced that creditors would be repaid by October 31, 2024.

Tokyo-based Mt. Gox at one point, circa 2013, stood apart as the largest Bitcoin exchange, handling more than two-thirds of all BTC trades worldwide. In early 2014, the platform halted withdrawals, and it eventually filed for bankruptcy, after revelations that more than 800,000 coins had vanished, suspiciously.

The official Rehabilitation Trustee, a lawyer, just issued a mostly vague statement that said, in part, yes he’s currently managing BTC in a secure manner, and yes he is proceeding with the preparation for repayments, and also to please be patient.

Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles weighed in to reassure creditors that today’s BTC movement was indeed part of the distribution process, according to The Block.

Meanwhile, in other news of cryptos on the move, there was, over the past day or so, a Chainlink spurt tied to general positive vibes stoked by Ethereum ETF expectations, and also to some specific Chainlink-related news.

An Ethereum-run DeFi project for abetting smart contract deployment, Chainlink saw its native LINK surge more than 10% yesterday after it was revealed that this week's Consensys conference in Austin, Texas, would feature a joint presentation from Chainlink and Swift, the international payments platform, about how they are working together on tokenization.

As of 8 a.m. (EST), LINK, now the 14th-largest digital asset, stood near $18.20, up 5% in the past 24 hours, per CoinGecko.

Among Big Ten coins, Solana was the only one even mildly green, gaining 1% despite rumblings about tokenomics possibly being upended by a new policy that in the name of security puts some extra SOL tokens in the pockets of validators, as opposed to burning them as an anti-inflation measure. Some critics have argued that removing the burn mechanism could increase SOL’s inflation rate (Unchained Crypto).

Checking in on memecoins, always stirring to some degree, we see Dogwifhat (WIF) spiked by 14%, possibly in connection with a fresh bout of meme fever in equities, specifically, a noticeable jump by GameStop (GME) in pre-market trading today.

Turbo, a memecoin community galvanized by a Pepe-like toad image, AI and artistry, saw its native TURBO reach yet another new high earlier today as part of a week-long romp up a staggering 650%.

Additionally, there's a coin called Book of Meme (BOME) that gained 8% in the past day, vaulting it to a market capitalization of $1 billion, enough for inclusion in the CoinGecko Top 100, at least for a fleeting moment this morning.

Notcoin (NOT) could change this fluid picture as the Telegram-tied gaming token has soared 36% in 24 hours, darting into the No. 104 slot.

A "social clicker" play-to-earn game, Notcoin enables users to earn its in-game token by clicking on a gold coin displayed on-screen, with additional rewards recently made available for completing earnings missions (Decrypt).

Internet chatter concerning Ethereum entering a bull market for the ages keeps growing louder by the day as the SEC edges closer to approving spot Ether ETF products, and with an extended period of token accumulation seemingly having abruptly concluded.

Thus, ETH’s spot price is ready to enter the “stratosphere,” predicted the crypto analyst known as Jelle.

Michaël van de Poppe, analyst and founder of MN Capital, citing weekly relative strength index (RSI) read-outs, says he has spied the start of capital rotation from BTC to ETH (and other alternatives).

“The chances are significant that the bear market is finally over for Ethereum,” he said.

And yet, as of 8:38 a.m. (EST), per CoinGecko, ETH has barely budged, hovering at $3,900 over the past 24 hours.

Yesterday, with BTC crossing into seventy-grand territory, it seemed likely that the second-largest crypto would surpass $4,000. ETH got to about $3,970 around mid-day on Monday but slipped by the late afternoon.

Late last year, Argentina welcomed a new crypto-friendly president promising bold steps toward integrating digital currency into daily life in a country so ravaged by runaway inflation the government recently was forced to print 10,000 peso notes. (They're worth about $9 in the black market).

Recently, Roberto Silva, president of Argentina's Comisión Nacional de Valores (CNV), a national regulatory agency within the Argentine Ministry of Economics and Public Finance, met with Juan Carlos Reyes, president of El Salvador’s National Commission of Digital Assets (CNAD), to discuss ways that the South American nation could learn from the Central American nation, the first to officially incorporate Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 (alongside the greenback, adopted twenty years earlier).

This meeting, focusing particularly on BTC adoption and regulation strategies, "highlights a growing interconnection between the two nations," Bitcoinist said.

"We are going to explore the possibility of signing collaboration agreements with them,” the CNV's Silva said of ongoing efforts to glean intelligence from the Salvadoran experience.

As of early this month, El Salvador's official government "Bitcoin Office" said it controls 5,750 BTCs worth roughly $350 million at current market prices. Some 474 of the coins were mined in the past three years partly via a small amount of geothermal energy generated by a volcano.