Glimmer of hope
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. 1st May 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
Sensing Rescue, Investors Go Risk On
Bitcoin reached as low as about $93,300 yesterday morning after some disappointing U.S. economic news. What a difference a day makes. As of 8:10 a.m. (EST), BTC sits nestled at $96K and some analysts see a macro shimmer on the horizon.
Risk assets seemingly are now benefiting from expectations of an earlier-than-expected interest-rate cut, said James Butterfill, chief researcher at CoinShares. "A disappointing payroll figure on Friday could be the final nail in the coffin for [Fed Chair Jerome] Powell," Butterfill told CoinDesk.
Bitcoin gained 15% during the month of April. Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL), meanwhile, gained 150% in the past week. It's inching closer to $2. (VIRTUAL was $5 in January).
AI fever generally is in full swing. But a couple of specific things happened. Binance.US on Tuesday announced it had listed VIRTUAL. And yesterday, the team behind the AI-agent-ecosystem-juggernaut announced an upgrade to a token distribution mechanism engineered to goose demand, while also onboarding more vested developers. In yet another positive market tailwind, per CoinGlass data, it turns out that open interest in futures tied to VIRTUAL's spot price just hit $186M, up from $39M one month ago (CryptoNews).
What's down
Oil In April Not So Slick
Stock futures were on the rise in the early part of the morning after Microsoft and Meta each reported robust quarterly earnings. Guidance from the tech titans suggests the AI arms race (as well as related expenditures) remains in full swing.
At about 8:45 a.m. (EST), the Labor Department commemorated International Workers Day by announcing an unexpected uptick in jobless claims. Now then, would traders lean into this disappointing news, from a rate cut perspective? As of the opening bell, at 9:30 a.m. (EST), the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq indeed all immediately shot higher. Bitcoin continued to cement its foothold above $96K.
It's worth noting, gloomily, that oil prices just notched their worst month since the height of the global pandemic. Brent crude futures yesterday fell 1.76% to close near $63 a barrel, down 15% for April, marking the steepest 30-day loss since November of 2021. Analysts blame weaker demand on the ongoing trade war.
What's next
Ethereum Blazes Tokenization Trail
Last month saw continued momentum for a highly touted use-case trend in which real-world assets (stocks, bonds, you name it) are tokenized via blockchain technology. Ethereum is a primary beneficiary. Its market share of RWAs shot up 20% in April with the value of tokenized assets on the network rising to $6.2B, according to Cointelegraph.
RWA tokenization pilot projects have proliferated of late, Cointelegraph explained, and have involved assets such as real estate, gold and carbon credits. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, has likened tokenized RWAs to "digital deeds," which thus can be instantaneously exchanged.
The Ethereum community is confident the trend has only just begun and that the network will be the favored port of call for financial firms exploring RWAs, despite Ethereum's nagging scalability issues.
As far as Ethereum's leadership role, Fink is totally on board. Fink has said there's "no question that the blockchain we would start our tokenization on would be Ethereum, and that’s not just a BlackRock thing, that’s the natural default answer.”
