Bitcoin, Ether Losing Ground; Polkadot leads losers in top 10; US stock futures fall
Bitcoin fell in early Tuesday morning trading in Asia, falling to $28,000 and then falling through the support line later in the morning. Ether and the other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies traded lower, with Polkadot and Solana leading the losers. The three major US stock futures indices fell after the month started with another bank failure in the US. Trading volume picked up in crypto overnight, but stock trading was thin ahead of the Fed’s decision on interest rates on Wednesday and more data on the state of the US economy coming later this week.
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Crypto
Bitcoin fell 4.1% to US$28,058 in the 24 hours to 08:00 in Hong Kong, according to CoinMarketCap data. The fall left the world’s largest cryptocurrency with a slimmer seven-day gain of 1.97%. Uncertainty about the US banking system and whether more failures will follow make most investors cautious about crypto and other assets, despite recent predictions of significant gains for Bitcoin this year.
Ether fell 2.16% to $1,830, down 0.6% for the week. The token’s price has now returned to the values seen in early April and has given up most of the gains associated with the Shanghai hard fork on April 12, which freed up billions of dollars in Ether to be withdrawn from staking pools.
Solana lost 3.45% to USD 21.97, which could be profit-proofing after the latest buzz surrounding the debut of the blockchain’s first smartphone “Saga” scheduled for May 4. The token is still up 2.7% for the week. Polkadot led the losers, falling 3.73% to $5.67, bringing its seven-day decline to 3.81%.
Total crypto market capitalization fell 3.21% in the past 24 hours to $1.16 trillion, while trading volume jumped 28.9% to $40.97 billion.
NFT
The indices are proxy measures of the performance of the global NFT market. They are managed by CryptoSlam, a sister company of Forkast.News under the Forkast.Labs umbrella.
In the non-fungible token (NFT) market, the Forkast 500 NFT Index fell 0.86% to 3,717.16 in the 24 hours to 8:00 AM in Hong Kong, losing 1.16% for the week.
While the index fell, developments in the overall NFT market are gaining momentum. Leading art auction house Sotheby’s, which has reportedly handled around $120 million in NFT sales, is now offering peer-to-peer trading of NFT art between collectors on its platform via the Ethereum and Polygon networks.
Blur, currently the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume, so On Monday, it is launching a peer-to-peer NFT lending protocol called “Blend,” which will allow users to post collateral for the purchase of NFTs. The developers say that the service will use the same principle as a mortgage to buy a house, and that it will bring more money and users into the market.
Stock
U.S. stock futures fell at 8 a.m. in Hong Kong, marking the direction of the market when Wall Street opens later Tuesday. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures lost 0.11%, and S&P 500 index futures fell 0.14%. Nasdaq 100 futures fell 0.15 percent.
All three indexes closed lower in regular Monday trading, overshadowed by the failure of First Republic Bank over the weekend, the fourth bank failure in the United States this year after Silvergate, Silicon Valley and Signature banks.
US regulators took control of First Republic after it reported in April that about $100 billion, or more than 40% of deposits, had been withdrawn and its stock plunged. JPMorgan won the bidding to buy the bank’s remaining assets, the Wall Street investment bank said in a press release on Monday.
In more industry gloom, Morgan Stanley said on Monday it will cut another 3,000 jobs in the second quarter, according to Reuters, while Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned on Monday that the US government could default on its debt by June 1 if Congress does not raise the debt. debt ceiling.
Other indicators of the health of the US economy and businesses coming this week include earnings from Apple, the world’s largest company by market capitalization, on Thursday and April jobs numbers on Friday.
Before these, however, the focus is on the Federal Reserve’s next move on interest rates, which will come on 3 May. The Fed has repeatedly raised interest rates over the past year to try to bring inflation down to the 2% target range.
With US inflation still trending around 5%, analysts at CME Group now expect an 85.5% chance the Fed will raise interest rates by 25 basis points this week, and this is largely priced into the markets. Interest rates in the world’s largest economy are currently between 4.75% and 5%, the highest since June 2006.
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