Bitcoin braces for monumental task

Fixate on the last few hours if you must, but we're agog at rolling 30-day returns – and some of these percentage gains hurt our eye sockets.

Take Dogecoin, which hasn't had a great past few days. But over roughly a month, DOGE is up 540%.

Other members of the 500%-plus club looking back 30 days include indexing protocol The Graph (GRT) and programmable payments player Terra (LUNA). Amp (AMP) is up 300%; Ox (ZRX), more than 200%.

Oh and there is a coin called PancakeSwap (CAKE) that is up 1,000%. In a month. Who does that, even in a year?

In the 11 months since Bitcoin dramatically plunged during the earliest days of the pandemic, the largest digital asset has soared 1,100%. Thus far in 2021, BTC has risen 60%

Over the weekend, BTC almost touched $50,000. In some markets, Bitcoin got to $49,800. This occurred on Valentine's Day, Sunday. For understandable reasons, $50,000 is a coveted milestone of once-unimaginable loftiness that the market has bestowed with the same sort of (in-hindsight-needless) mysticism that used to shroud $20,000.

Investors in Asia seemed to want to take profits before $49,500 could become $50,000, and in that psychologically immense chasm there came a reversal, as Decrypt reported. During Asian trading hours, BTC fell to $46,000.

BTC has since recovered, to around $47,750, as of Monday at 7:30 a.m. (EST).

“We’re still in the midst of a violent bull run that will soon be more violent,” tweeted Ari Paul, CIO of Stamford, Connecticut-based crypto hedge fund BlockTower Capital.

Terrifying price move volatility helped usher in a “crypto winter” but that was three years ago. And what happened last March … seems like a lifetime ago.

For sheer unadulterated violence there are, right now, actually a slew of bloodied digital assets coming out of the weekend.

XRP and LTC are both down 6% over the past 24 hours. XLM and UNI are both down 7%.

ETH is down 2.4% after it set a new record ($1,840) on Feb. 12.

BTC is also down 2.4% after it set a record this weekend.

The fate of both biggies and the altcoins riding shotgun still seems to rest on the notion that more institutions may diversify cash holdings into BTC, leading to a move above $50,000 (CoinDesk).

Hong Kong’s crypto community is starting to coalesce around a clear message in their campaign to push back against looming trading restrictions there. The authorities’ heavy handed approach – banning small investors from legally accessing crypto markets – will backfire, warned the crypto industry body Global Digital Finance, in comments made today to the South China Morning Post.

Global Digital Finance represents crypto exchanges such as BitMEX, Huobi, Coinbase and OKCoin.

Hong Kong’s proposed law effectively shuts out 90% of the population not deemed professional traders.

The law would push retail traders to embrace unregulated platforms, GDF warns, Cointelegraph said.

Cream Finance and Alpha Finance were relieved of $37.5 million worth of funds in one of the largest flash loan attacks in history.

The daring DeFi exploitation happened on Saturday morning and involved a rapid-fire series of unauthorized flash loans and disbursals.

Alpha Finance said that its Alpha Homora V2 product was to blame.