BTC regroups; all eyes on $70K

Crypto at large is greening up – total assets are $2.66 trillion, up 2% in 24 hours – a decent bump but a pause from all-out gangbusters mode, giving us time for a good look around.

Like everyone else, we've got eyes peeled on Bitcoin, $67K as of 8:30 a.m. (EST), flatly so. BTC did creep to $67.1K in one hour as of 9:30 a.m. (EST). Analysts generally envision $70K before the halving event in about five weeks.

Second-largest coin Ethereum had dipped by 1% to a whisker shy of $3,800, and this despite a fresh outbreak of Dencun fever.

Meanwhile, Render (+32%) is the largest one-day gainer. RNDR, native coin of Render’s decentralized data processing hardware collective, runs with an AI coin brat pack setting trends and partying. Fetch.ai (FET), SingularityNET (AGIX), each acutely green.

Sleepless AI (AI), something of a sleeper, as it's tucked away in the rear echelon of CoinGecko's Top 300, is awake and alert, rising by about 30%, right in step with bigger-cap AI-related peers.

It appears “what the hell, why not” bets are rotating away from the meme sector. The largest memecoins, Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, each turned mortifyingly red relative to earlier in the week.

Yesterday, Solana-run Dogwifhat (WIF) set a record high of $2.18. WIF currently is the 67th-largest coin. It has a market capitalization of $1.8 billion, per CoinGecko. Since hitting its ATH, WIF has lost nearly 20%.

No. 62 digital asset, BONK, which is also a Solana-run memecoin, fell 14%. But it remains up nearly 200% over the past 30 days.

Meanwhile, the Near protocol's native NEAR is close to $6 following a 100% surge in the past 30 days, one punctuated by a 26% gain over the past day. Near is a decentralized application (dApp) creation platform that uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, and which eventually plans to introduce a sharded architecture to scale throughput. But NEAR's bump today apparently actually has much more to do with a recent announcement that Binance will add NEAR (23rd-largest token, market cap, $5.8B) to its lending arm under the auspices of authorized loanable asset. NEAR spent most of 2023 commuting tediously from $1.80 to $2 and back again.

The DeFi sector snagged our attention with the sudden rise of Polkadot (DOT), squarely above $10 for the first time in what seems like forever.

Aave (AAVE) and Maker (MKR) are super green and slightly green, respectively. DeFi biggie Uniswap, which accounts for more than one-third of the DeFi Pulse Index (DPI), has been staging a comeback of late. It was $11 last week at this time. Last night, UNI shot above $16. It has since fallen to below $15.

As of today, at 8:09 a.m. (EST), UNI had declined 6% in the past 24 hours.

Asked straight up if Ethereum was a security, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler not surprisingly gave a "no comment," perhaps feeling tight-lipped as the agency gets ready to decide on whether to give a green light to ETF products tied to the spot price of ETH.

With the world focused on how high Bitcoin might climb ahead of its halving, Ethereum is in the midst of its own chunky advance, gaining 30% over a fortnight, partly owing to ETF rollout speculation but also to a coming upgrade, Dencun, slated for next Wednesday.

Described as a key step toward enabling Ethereum's “rollup–centric roadmap,” this suite of improvements will allow the network to function as “a proper database” for layer-2 chains to scale their storage offerings, said Fidelity Digital researcher Max Wadington.

The entire future of layer-2 projects has been called into question by Kenny Li, the co-founder of Manta, touting itself as a “multi-modular ecosystem for zero-knowledge (zk) applications.”

Now that's a brainy description and one that has sparked the kind of discussion into which techno wonks can really sink their teeth.

So-called "monolithic" L2 platforms, Li insists, are so rigidly bound to a single architecture that they are destined for irrelevance in a multi-chain, open Web3 world. Li laments these sorts of mono L2s as not being as flexible as "modular" networks like his Manta, launched in mid-January.

Li calls Manta the “first and largest” modular layer-2 network on Ethereum, as it uses Optimism’s OP Stack while plugging into Celestia for data availability.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, described the relatively new debate around the two descriptive terms as a “marketing stunt.”

Celestia created this distinction, Federa said. But it’s nonsensical, he adds, because "there’s no such thing as a monolithic system."

What some call a "monolithic" network is simply an “integrated” blockchain where tasks are handled in a single layer; whereas “modular” systems complete the same functions across several layers but not necessarily that much more efficiently, ultimately, he explained.

"They’re just different software architecture choices that are not actually that different,” Federa said.