Positive vibrations

Running on the BNB Chain, BUILDon (B) has experienced more than its share of merriment so far this May, rising some 460% for the month as it vaulted into the ranks of the Top 100. B has surged 16% just in the past 24 hours. 

The project is billed as an “AI mascot” on a mission to build out an ecosystem in support of USD1, a stablecoin launched last year by World Liberty Financial. It was a little over one year ago that World Liberty revealed it had purchased a boatload of B tokens after BUILDon said it was going to build its world around USD1, resulting in a 1,300% spike that brought B out of obscurity.

Lately, though, the B token has languished. It fell under a dime as recently as this past October. But then B recently started trading on Binance Alpha, the big CEX’s pre-listing selection pool. This morning, B reached nearly $0.75. With a market capitalization of about $700M, B is now the 87th-largest digital asset, according to CoinGecko.

Major cryptos were flat or slightly down as of early Wednesday.

Bitcoin as of 8:40 a.m. (EST) continued to hold a rigid line right around $80,000. That represents a 1.1% decline over the previous 24 hours. A key support-versus-resistance mark of $82.3K is slipping away. Days ago, BTC scampered as high as $82.1K. It's definitely a dicey moment in time but not a panicky one.

“While macro risks pile up in the form of high inflation and hardening bond yields,” CoinDesk said, “the market remains calm.” 

The zen vibe shows up in 30-day implied volatility indices for BTC and ETH. The latter coin’s EVIV index just hit fresh YTD lows below 55%. BTC’s BVIV remains near 40%, a level of placidity not seen since late January.

Meanwhile, Dow futures were heading south as of about 9 a.m. (EST).

Financial headlines are focused on worrisomely high wholesale inflation numbers that came out today as well as on a pivotal visit to China by President Trump and an entourage of corporate executives.

If Trump asks for help ending the war, Chinese leader Xi Jinping can “extract a high price,” CNBC said.

JPMorgan has filed paperwork to launch a new tokenized money market fund that’ll run on Ethereum. This proposed new product comes on the heels of the global banking behemoth’s recent collaboration with Mastercard, Ondo Finance and Ripple to settle tokenized treasuries on the XRP Ledger.

JPMorgan's on-chain push comes amidst a recent flurry of fundraising by corporate-backed blockchains bent on real world assets (RWAs) or stablecoins or both. 

Late last year, Stripe’s Tempo blockchain garnered $500M at a valuation of $5B on a fully diluted basis. More recently, Circle's Arc held a $222M token pre-sale that closed with Arc enjoying a $3B valuation on a fully diluted basis. Institutionally backed Canton, meanwhile, is reportedly in the midst of raising $300M.

The pile-in pattern is no coincidence, Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan told The Block. 

Prior to last year’s landmark stablecoin regulation legislation, the GENIUS Act, most financial institutions, Hougan pointed out, were reluctant to commit capital to businesses built on uncertain legal footing. 

However, post-GENIUS, the capital raises came quickly and at scale, he noted. The still-being-debated Clarity Act, crypto's broader market-structure legislation, is the next variable potentially stoking institutional commitments, Hougan said. He added that while the final text of the bill is being hashed out — some 100 amendments were filed ahead of the Senate's markup debate — it does seem that tokenization efforts and regulated financial infrastructure stand to most benefit. “Clarity bears watching,” Hougan said.