Bitcoin then drops above $24.1K after FOMC minutes
Touched but not shocked, crypto markets fell slightly on Thursday, rising a little but remaining in the red after the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve released minutes that were less than encouraging.
Bitcoin recently traded at $24,164, down 1% in the past 24 hours. The largest cryptocurrency by market cap fell near $23,600 in the immediate wake of the FOMC report, which noted slowing growth — a boon for investors hoping for looser monetary policy from the Federal Reserve — but also data suggesting that inflation and the prospects of a hard recession remained real, pleasing monetary hawks.
“Everyone is wary of what will happen this year,” Jake Boyle, chief commercial officer at crypto brokerage Caleb and Brown, told CoinDesk TV. “Right now it looks like the stance has become more conservative as 25 basis points has less impact than 50, but it’s critical we all remember that it’s still going up, which means the fix is clearly not there . .”
Boyle added, “Combined with the regulatory uncertainty the crypto space seems to have these days, it would be reasonable to assume that there will be more volatility and unexpected announcements over the course of this year.”
Ether recently changed hands for $1,641, a 1.1% discount from Tuesday, the same time. Still, CoinDesk analyst Glenn Williams noted that BTC and ETH were diverging on another front, with investors sending bitcoin to exchanges and moving ether away from them. The moves indicate bearish sentiment for bitcoin and bullishness for ether, a departure from their usual correlation. Separately, on Tuesday, the Arbitrum scaling system at layer 2 surpassed Ethereum in daily trades, increasing Arbitrum’s dominance as the leading layer 2 rollup.
Other major cryptos were mixed, with some ticking up a bit but others slightly in the green, although APT, the token of tier 1 platform Aptos, is up more than 6% recently.
Stocks fell amid the same inflation and recession fears that have plagued markets in recent days with the S&P 500, which has a tech-heavy component, down 0.2%, its fourth straight daily decline, and the tech-focused Nasdaq and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) also fell slightly.
Crypto news ranged from joyful to memories of cryptos’ nearly 15 months of storm and urgency. Investment banker JPMorgan said in a research report that crypto exchange Coinbase is well positioned to deliver a notable year-over-year improvement in EBITDA. lender Voyager Digital and its executives for deceptive marketing of cryptocurrency.
In an email to CoinDesk, Anthony Georgiades, co-founder of Pastel Network, a decentralized blockchain for non-fungible tokens, cryptocurrencies and Web3 technology, optimistically wrote that “the slightly better-than-expected earnings reported by Coinbase could suggest we have entered the last innings of a crypto winter.”
“Clearly there has been increased interest in the digital asset market in recent months, as evidenced by a rally that surprised many observers. Part of this has to do with market psychology – everyone has been so incredibly bearish that the obvious counter trading would be bullish. Coinbase has also been able to increase its overall market share due to the fallout from major crypto marketplaces like FTX.”
Georgiades was especially optimistic about the outlook for cryptos in Asia: “There is a lot of speculation that buyers in Asia are increasingly starting to scale back to crypto. As a result, the strength in the digital asset market may very well continue for the even if If the Fed remains aggressive in the coming months, what is happening in other parts of the world in terms of monetary easing may be enough to offset what is happening in the United States.”
But he cautiously added that “there could be deep pullbacks in Bitcoin and crypto” even if “the fodder for a lasting rally appears to be there.”
Hundreds of fake ChatGPT tokens are luring crypto investors; Majority spent on BNB Chain
This story first appeared on CoinDesk on February 21.
Malicious market participants are trying to cash in on the ongoing ChatGPT craze in technology circles by issuing counterfeit tokens branded after the artificial intelligence chatbot, despite having no official association with the tool.
Hundreds of such tokens have been issued in recent weeks. Of these, 132 different tokens have been issued on BNB Chain, 25 tokens on Ethereum and 10 single tokens on other blockchains such as Solana, Arbitrum, OKChain and Cronos.
These bogus releases follow software giant Microsoft’s move to integrate OpenAI’s chatbots for search services into Microsoft’s Internet browsers.
While OpenAI is the creator of ChatGPT, Microsoft’s own chatbot is a custom tool and would be an improvement over the publicly accessible ChatGPT.
However, scammers don’t waste a chance to monetize the hype. Several “BingChatGPT” have been issued, riddled with liquidity and seeing thousands of dollars in trading volume – red flags notwithstanding.
“PeckShield has detected dozens of newly created #BingChatGPT tokens, 3 of which appear to be #honeypots and 2 have a high sales tax,” blockchain security firm PeckShield said in a tweet Monday.
“2 of them are already down more than -99%. Deployer 0xb583 has already created dozens of tokens using a pump & dump scheme,” PeckShield added, referring to the wallet address of the nefarious issuer of these tokens.
In cryptocurrency, honeypots are smart contracts that pretend to leak their money to a random user, provided the user sends additional money to it.
Sales tax, on the other hand, refers to the intentional amount of money taken by an unauthorized smart contract when a related token is sold – usually higher than 50%, meaning a user who sells $100 worth of a token is only worth $50 , with the remaining “taxed” amount going to the developer of that smart contact.
At the time of writing on Tuesday, more than 170 ChatGPT-branded tokens have been issued on decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap and PancakeSwap, data from DEXTools shows.
The most popular has a market cap of over $250 million, with over 300 unique holders and $600,000 in liquidity and is issued on Ethereum. A separate BNB Chain version has $246,000 in liquidity and a market cap of $24 million.
Trading volumes on such fake tokens – and in some cases scams – are a glimpse of the crypto punting dream alive and well.
Coinbase reported Q4 earnings after the bell Tuesday, beating expectations, but usage continues to fall. Pastel co-founder Anthony Georgiades shared his analysis of crypto markets. Additionally, Bill Hughes, Director of Global Regulatory Matters at ConsenSys, shared his view on the future of US crypto regulation. And Marcello Mari, CEO of SingularityDAO, examines the far reaches of where Web3 and artificial intelligence collide for CoinDesk’s “BUIDL week.”
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