Dicey intersection
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 30th April 2025.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
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What’s up
FLOKI Singularly Outperforms
The last day of April begins eerily similar to yesterday with Bitcoin sitting in limbo, clinging to $95K, while the overall crypto market slides amidst heightened macro uncertainty.
Charts are awash in red, top to bottom, as if an eczema sufferer got a case of shin hives, donned an Arsenal uniform and climbed onto a firetruck.
With one exception: Floki (FLOKI), a four-year-old token based on Elon Musk's Shiba Inu dog, has surged 7% in the past day to crack back into the Top 100. FLOKI's spot price is $0.00008906. Its market cap is about $860M, making it the No. 99 token, per CoinGecko. FLOKI has gained more than 60% in the past two weeks. It remains 74% off its ATH of $0.0003449 reached last June. Among large memecoins, Floki alone is in the green (CryptoNews).
What's down
Uh-Oh, Economist Warns
Fresh statistical evidence of an economic slowdown exacerbated recession fears and pushed U.S. equity futures lower just prior to Wednesday's opening bell. The Dow and S&P 500 each had been in the green for the past several days.
Total crypto assets as of 9:20 a.m. (EST) stood at $3.04T, down 2.8% in 24 hours. BTC stayed flat while ETH, XRP, SOL and DOGE all shed 3%-4%.
According to the Commerce Department, the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), reflecting the total sum of all the goods and services produced in Q1, fell at a rate of 0.3%, annualized, marking the first negative-growth quarter since Q1 of '22.
Some economists as recently as only a few days ago were forecasting a positive quarter. But then came some numbers showing a sharp surge in imports as companies and consumers tried to get ahead of the Trump tariffs. Imports subtract from GDP.
“Maybe some of this negativity is due to a rush to bring in imports before the tariffs go up, but there is simply no way to sugar-coat this," Chris Rupkey, chief economist at Fwdbonds, told CNBC. "Growth has simply vanished.”
What's next
Bitcoin Devs Split Over Core Proposal
A proposal for a technical tweak that would dramatically alter how Bitcoin is fundamentally used has caused a schism within the developer community.
If approved, the proposal, "removing OP_RETURN limits," would allow users to store much larger amounts of non-financial data directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, for use in things like text and images, Decrypt explained. Some members of the community see it as necessary progress.
Bitcoin Core, the main open-source software that runs the network, shouldn't have to maintain arbitrary limits, declared Peter Todd, the man responsible for this controversial proposal. He's a developer who in the past has been fingered as possibly being Satoshi Nakamoto (and who has denied it) and who these days strenuously argues that the limits are useless. That's because they are already bypassed through technical workarounds, making them "ineffective, and even harmful," he said.
But other devs fear the change could threaten Bitcoin's basic purpose, Decrypt pointed out.
A longtime Bitcoin Core contributor, Jason Hughes, clearly opposes it.
He said this on X: "Bitcoin Core developers are about to ... turn Bitcoin into a worthless altcoin, and no one seems to care."
Bitcoin Core Dev Pieter Wuille supports the change but also understands the backlash.
"I'm not happy with seeing the demand for those [non-core] transactions," he said. "But I also recognize the reality that that demand exists, and the alternative of pushing that demand to bypass the public network is far more damaging."
