Volatility, stomachs, settle

Bitcoin stood firm Thursday night into Friday morning. It was directly in eyeshot of $61K as dawn broke. An extended period of manic-kangaroo-inspired antics seems to have given way to a few calming hours of steadily standing pat ahead of a hotly anticipated Fed Chair speech later this morning.

Total crypto assets are flatly $2.26 trillion. Actually, that grand total is slightly down (-0.5%) over the past day. That was as of about 7:30 a.m. (EST).

A few robust gainers warrant attention. One of them is an Ethereum rival, Avalanche (AVAX), 14th-largest digital asset. Grayscale has introduced a trust vehicle tied to it. AVAX surged 11.5% in 24 hours as of Friday at 7:33 a.m. (EST).

And do also give Core (CORE) a cursory glance. It's a project seeking to integrate smart contract interplay into the Bitcoin network.

CORE, 76th-largest coin, per CoinGecko, has surged 11% in the past day.

And while today there's fresh chatter about DeFi making a comeback, don't sleep on the burgeoning realm of "BTCfi," as evidenced by the interest in Babylon's "BTC staking" mainnet phase 1 that just went live (but isn't paying yields just yet).

Babylon, as CoinGecko explains, is a project designed to improve the security of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains by allowing BTC holders to earn yield by staking idle coins.

Ethereum ETFs remain mired in a losing streak. U.S.-based spot ETH funds, nine of which were launched one month ago today, yesterday experienced a fifth-straight day of net outflows. Any inflows into these products are being exceeded by outflows from ETHE, Grayscale's pricey offering that had previously been a trust vehicle for accredited investors who could access over-the-counter instruments.

ETHE outflows have been observed in every trading session save for one, when the fund did not report any flows one way or another. Exits from ETHE had surpassed $2.5 billion as of earlier this week (Cointelegraph).

A Steno Research report picked up by CoinDesk and other crypto media outlets insists that in a world of falling interest rates and rising stablecoin supplies, decentralized finance (DeFi), an intermediary-free financial services realm built atop distributed networks, could be on the cusp of a major comeback. The report said that total value locked (TVL) across the crypto ecosystem is expected to reach an all-time high in the first half of next year.

In late 2021, the DeFi sector enjoyed a peak TVL of $180 billion, according to DeFiLlama.

Between that first, long, hot "DeFi summer" (in 2020 in the wake of Covid-crisis rate cuts) and the peak of crypto (in November of 2021), the total value of DeFi-related tokens increased from $15B to nearly $150B, per CoinGecko. The market cap for DeFi cryptos has since been cut in half.

As for the cutting of U.S. interest rates, investors right this very moment are standing on one leg waiting for Fed Chair Jerome Powell to utter words directly to the effect that a rate cut is coming in September.

"U.S. economic data is giving the Federal Reserve the green light to cut interest rates," Reuters said.

The central bank basically gave the game away: Wednesday's readout of its July meeting showed a "vast majority" of policymakers agreed easing likely would begin next month.

Powell's keynote speech this morning at the Fed's annual Jackson Hole research conference may seek to frame just where the economy stands, ahead of the first step on a road to looser monetary policy, giving traders a crack at displaying their tea leaf dissection skills as they game out the size (0.25% or 0.50%?) of that first potential cut.

CoinDesk notes that the Jackson Hole symposium has historically been used by Fed chairs to signal significant policy changes.