Bitcoin BTC Price, Ether ETH Price Back In The Green After Being Tested By Fed Chair Powell’s Comments

Good morning Asia, here’s how the markets are performing today.

Bitcoin and Ether started the morning in Asia in the green, but are back in the red, if not by much, after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the economy is running hotter than expected and that the Fed is “prepared to increase the pace of rate hikes” in the name to maintain price stability.

The world’s largest digital asset begins the Asian trading day at $22,249, down 1.1% in the past hour, while ether is trading at $1,568, down 0.4% in the past day.

“I think there will be an impact on anything valued or traded against the US dollar,” AdvisorShares CEO Noah Hamman said on a recent appearance on CoinDesk TV’s All About Bitcoin. “ The secondary concern is the reduction of the Fed’s balance sheet. This pulls a lot of liquidity out of the market, and it’s more challenging for risky assets.”

Meanwhile, China token Conflux is up 9.1% in the last 24 hours. In the past week, the token has risen by 12.8%, outperforming other Chinese narrative coins such as NEO and Filecoin.

Ether continues to outperform bitcoin, if ever so slightly. Bitcoin is down around 1% over the last 48 hours, while Ether is down 0.25%.

“There is significant narrative and meaningful structural tailwind behind Ethereum over the next 12-18 months with Shanghai [upgrade] and a lot of the stake becomes liquid,” Quinn Thompson, head of capital markets at Maple Finance, told CoinDesk TV during a recent interview.

While Ethereum and the mission-critical parts of the infrastructure may be having their moment, Thompson said some of the more “speculative” projects on the “longer tail of the spectrum” are going to struggle.

“That’s a bit of the problem that’s plaguing crypto right now. With lower activity on the chain, lower new addresses, there’s not really an increase in activity that coincides with an increase in revenue,” he said. “Most protocols and projects in the space facing a small crunch on the budget side.”

All of this helps the consolidation narrative, he said, and leads to majors like bitcoin and Ether outperforming.

Crypto funds are dented but barely broken after freefall in 2022.

In any other industry, like TradFi or technology, this would be the end of those funds. Losing almost the entire fund would mean that the money men, limited partners (LPs), would ensure that everyone involved in executing the fund’s investment strategy would be fired.

But this is crypto and things work differently.

While there is still some rot within the crypto VC industry, and Galois Capital, which closed its doors at the end of February after losing $40 million on the collapse of FTX, will not be the last fund to fail, many of these funds are enduring . And a number of them are even over a longer time horizon.

Data from CryptoRank, which tracks the fund’s portfolios and known holdings, shows that although large funds such as Delphi Digital, Polychain or Animoca have fallen 80%, 64% and 81% over the last 365 days, they are still well into it green in the last three years.

Many are also up in the last three months, thanks to the mini bull market in January and early February.

Nature is healing. Bitcoin is trading above $20,283, the price on November 2nd, the day FTX collapsed.. There are many tokens still in the red, but many that have made incredible and somewhat unexpected gains in recent weeks. Who saw the rise of China tokens like Conflux or Filecoin?

But there are a few caveats.

CryptoRank cannot track the value of equity investments the firms would have made (although there are always more tokens than equity in their wallets), nor can it track the premium prices they may have secured for tokens as an investor.

It also does not know whether funds have capital fixed at FTX – because the courts will not open a list of creditors. Token prices are liquid and bounce back. But capital stuck on FTX will be an Achilles heel for funds, given that it could take a decade to recover.

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s discount to net asset value has fallen to its lowest level in a month, ahead of oral arguments in federal court related to Grayscale’s lawsuit against the SEC. Grayscale and CoinDesk are both owned by DCG. Maple Finance Head of Capital Markets Quinn Thompson shared his crypto market analysis. In addition, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club generated $16.5 million from the auction of 288 NFTs in its TwelveFold collection based on the Ordinals protocol. Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano shared his reaction. And Uniswap Labs Chief Operating Officer Mary-Catherine Lader joined the conversation.