BTC on thin ice

Leading decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap (UNI) saw its native token increase in value by 1.5% over the past 24 hours as of Tuesday at 7:49 a.m. (EST). The 25th-largest coin has gained 14% in the past week.

Winter storms battered the East Coast, a giant asteroid hurtled unusually close to Earth and digital asset markets continued to confront what's feeling more and more like a crypto winter.

Bitcoin fell 2% over 24 hours to below $42,000. Ethereum fell 4%. Every Top 20 coin is red. That is, if you exclude stablecoins. Although there are even some stablecoins in the red.

"We are not seeing any bottom fishing at these levels," Delta Exchange CEO Pankaj Balani told CoinDesk.

Chilled trading isn't expected to last long, at least according to the Perpetual Futures Open Interest market, swollen in size and a blinking "seatbelts on" signal if Glassnode ever saw one. In a research note yesterday, the blockchain analytics firm called futures markets "a powder keg for short-term volatility."

Banks and stock markets were closed Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, while the optics-minded U.S. Senate pushed off taking up voting rights legislation until today, with the measure looking likely to fail.

Pressing on, the organization Black Voters Matter continues to actively seek donations – in crypto (50+ coins accepted) – doing so by way of a partnership with The Giving Block.

From big city mayors to former central bankers, noteworthy voices increasingly view crypto as a means of empowering marginalized communities notoriously underserved by traditional banks for decades.

“Bitcoin is absolutely a tool for social justice,” said Charlene Fadirepo, a former audit manager at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

Now a crypto adviser, Fadirepo told Yahoo Finance on MLK Day that BTC is a promising means to build generational wealth in communities – Black, Latino, LGBT, Indigenous, others – that have been "left out of the discriminatory banking system we have today.”

A growing variety of digital tokens – beyond Bitcoin – are becoming more ubiquitous among consumers and businesses, according to BitPay (Fortune).

In 2020, BTC accounted for 92% of the crypto payments processed by BitPay on behalf of merchants. Last year, the BTC piece of the payments pie dropped to 65%. Gaining in use was ETH (15%) and USD stablecoins, as well as the two biggest meme coins, DOGE and SHIB.

With BTC prices soaring 60% in 2021, many investors seemed content to stack, not spend, their Satoshis. If BTC did get spent, it was often on luxury items: BitPay's crypto transaction volumes related to luxury goods surged 31% in 2021, versus the 9% rise seen in 2020.

PayPal getting into the crypto space has sparked wider mainstream acceptance, forcing more companies to start asking the question whether should they accept crypto payments, BitPay said.