Nerves frayed
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. 6th 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
Risk-On Attitudes Held In Check
On a jittery Tuesday with charts splattered in red and crypto wheeling/dealing garnering mounting public scrutiny, there are a few curious moves worth mentioning.
MOVE is one of them. It's the native asset of Movement, a network billed as an ecosystem of modular, Move-programming-language-based chains custom-compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Yesterday, MOVE hit an all-time low of 16 cents. Five months ago, MOVE was $1.45. It was five days ago that Coinbase announced it would suspend MOVE trading, effective May 15, for failing to meet its listing standards. This impactful decision came after the Movement Network Foundation initiated its own third-party probe into a questionable market-making arrangement that appears to have led to severe downward pressure on MOVE in early December.
Additionally, Movement Labs has suspended Rushi Manche, a co-founder who brokered the controversial deal that appears to have led to the dumping of 5% of supply (66M MOVE worth $38M). As of this morning, MOVE had rebounded to 18 cents, up 9%. MOVE, with a market-cap of nearly half-a-billion-dollars, remains the 154th-largest digital asset, per CoinGecko.
MOVE's sudden upward surge is one of the biggest crypto moves of the day. Virtuals' VIRTUAL, the No. 92 coin, has been a major mover over the past month. A few days ago, it reached as high as $1.88, up more than 200% since early April. The rally is said to be fueled by "smart money" wallets, according to Nansen, which tracks on-chain data. VIRTUAL is the native crypto of Base-run Virtuals, a protocol for facilitating the creation and oversight of AI agents. VIRTUAL has bested all Top 100 cryptos over the past four weeks, CoinDesk said. Smart money wallets, per Nansen, are those owned by institutional investors and whales.
Yikes, VIRTUAL actually took a tumble over the past several hours, falling to $1.46.
Well, it does seem risk-asset investors are jittery over the tariff situation and are keeping a close eye on the U.S. Federal Reserve as it kicks off a meeting that will conclude tomorrow with an announcement on rates and perhaps some consequential guidance.
Canada's newly elected prime minister will talk trade with President Trump at the White House today. Last night, Trump, along with his crypto czar, David Sacks, hosted a $1.5M-per-plate dinner at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. Later this month, some 220 of the top holders the TRUMP memecoin will get to have dinner with Trump at this same club. These dinners, and the Trump family crypto business, World Liberty Financial, in general are attracting negative-tinged attention relating to potential conflicts of interest. Some Democrats on Capitol Hill are now seizing on the scent of a brewing backlash and putting up a resistance to crypto legislation that they previously supported, complicating the path toward long-awaited regulatory clarity (The New York Times).
What's down
Total Crypto Clings To $3T
Dow futures were slumping ahead of the opening bell. Traders want to see trade deals. And maybe a rate cut?
Total crypto assets are straddling the line between "squarely $3 trillion" and "perhaps not quite that enormous but still pretty huge." At last glance, the worldwide figure, per CoinGecko, stood at $3.01T.
Bitcoin, as of 9:22 a.m. (EST), was roughly $93,700, down 0.5%. Ethereum and XRP each fell 2%.
Among Top 30 coins, Litecoin took a tumble, shedding 7% in 24 hours. It seems Canary Capital's proposed ETF tied to spot LTC is facing a delay at the SEC. Still, say experts cited by CoinDesk, Canary's bid to launch a spot LTC ETF still has a solid chance of coming to fruition by the end of this year.
Meanwhile, Solayer, a much-hyped restaking protocol on Solana, saw its native LAYER plunge 46% in one day after yesterday reaching an all-time high of $3.39. The three-month-old DeFi token remains the No. 173 coin on CoinGecko's list based on total market cap. LAYER’s is about $380M.
What's next
Relax, What's The Worst That Could Happen?
The Fed policy meeting will conclude with a rate decision scheduled for public dissemination tomorrow afternoon. The central bank is expected to hold rates steady. In the futures markets tied to the direction of the Fed Funds rate, data suggests there is less than a 3% chance of a rate cut.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s scripted remarks, and his answers to questions from the media, will be meticulously parsed.
“Uncertainty rules amid a trade war and the ever-changing landscape of tariffs,” Bankrate’s Greg McBride told CNBC. “But with the hard data on consumer spending and employment still hanging in there, the Fed will remain firmly planted on the sidelines.”
BTC investors seem to be holding their breath in a pattern that could break one way or the other between today and tomorrow, said analyst Crypto Capital Venture in a video post examining the current calm prior to a potential storm.
If Powell says something that spooks the market, it's okay, he explained, as BTC has a solid floor of support; traders should hold tight until there is a "narrative pivot," possibly one driven by the Fed cutting rates, or some beginnings of a resolution to trade tension. "In the choppiness of it all, Bitcoin is just waiting," Crypto Capital Venture told YouTube channel subscribers.
Failsafe support appears to be in place at the $79K level were a worst-case downswing to occur, he added.
