Bitcoin creeps close to $17.5K

On a morning when U.S. air traffic got grounded due to a centralized aviation information system malfunction, there were still a couple of planes able to take off. Similarly, digital assets aren't really flying either.

Bitcoin did get a little lift from what appears to be a sustained uptick in volatility. BTC increased 1.1% to $17,426 as of 7:47 a.m. (EST); Ethereum gained 0.6%.

Among Big Ten coins, XRP had the biggest gain (+4%) as the sixth-largest coin flirts with being closer to forty cents than to thirty. XRP’s advance comes amidst a supposedly set-to-soon-conclude legal potboiler involving U.S. regulators and Ripple, the company with which XRP is closely associated.

The No. 10 asset in terms of market cap, Polygon, gained 2.1% since this time on Tuesday. Polygon's native MATIC is $0.858715. Per CoinGecko, MATIC is 70% off its all-time high of $2.92 hit last December.

Ladies and gentlemen, the fasten-your-seatbelt sign has turned on. And the current crypto rally has an estimated time of departure that remains up in the air, its arrival, in doubt. "BTC staged a brief but promising return to $17,500 overnight as newfound strength lingered," Cointelegraph said.

However, many pundit-analyst types expressed skepticism and urged caution. Inflation data, due out tomorrow, could whipsaw BTC prices back to where they were last week, tweeted the crypto commentator simply known as Johnny.

"The real breakout or dump will come on Thursday when CPI data is released," Johnny said.

The lack of price volatility in recent months has left scant opportunity on either side of the bull/bear table, as CoinDesk pointed out.

But this may be changing. Metrics tracking moving average standard deviation breaches, one way or the other, are signaling technical turbulence being experienced today by two dozen or so coins. Indeed, the largest crypto, BTC, found itself stuck in a holding pattern ($16K-$17K) for the past several weeks. But it appears in recent days to have finally transcended this narrow runway.

It's not just the cold, dark winter that has Coinbase feeling blue.

"We also saw fallout from unscrupulous actors in the industry and there could still be further contagion," Brian Armstrong, the exchange's CEO, said in a blog post.

And so Coinbase is jettisoning 950 employees, or about one-fifth of its staff. This is the third round of layoffs for the company. More than 2,000 positions have been slashed since June 2022 (Yahoo Finance).

CoinDesk estimates that 27,000 jobs have been lost across the crypto industry since early last spring.

Today came news that ConsenSys, the developer of MetaMask, reportedly plans to lay off 100 of its 900 staffers

Meanwhile, on Wall Street, where suspenders never went out of style, belts are tightening. Girding for a difficult year, Goldman Sachs is cutting 3,200 employees, or 6.5% of its workforce (CNBC).

Said investment bank compensation whisperer Alan Johnson: “You can’t have these expensive people sitting around with nothing to do.”

In a proposed but still not fully cemented deal valued at $1 billion, bankrupt Voyager is set to sell some of its assets to Binance (Decrypt).

A court filing indicates U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael Wiles gave Voyager permission to enter into an asset purchase agreement with the world's largest crypto exchange and to hold a vote about the sale among creditors.

The deal will not be final until a court hearing is held on March 2.

Voyager customers have been frozen out of their funds since July 2022; if this transaction pans out, they'll get half of their capital back.