Bitcoin BTC Price Flat, Ether ETH Price In Red As Long Weekend Begins.

Good morning. Here’s what happens:

Prices: Bitcoin is flat at $28K while Ether is down 1.1% at $1878 as market hopium drops.

Insight: Twitter CEO Elon Musk spurred a jump in DOGE and got the crypto world’s attention again. But Musk’s long-term benefit to the industry remains questionable.

Good morning Asia, here’s a look at how the markets are shaping up this Friday morning.

Bitcoin climbed out of the red as the market shifted from west to east while ether is slightly down.

The world’s largest digital asset is flat at $28,067, while ether is in the red down 1% to $1,878.

Brent Xu, CEO of DeFi lender Umee, believes there is a gap between the reality of the market and what the market wants to think.

In a recent appearance on CoinDesk TV, Xu pointed out that the mini-bull market that has formed since January 2023 has been largely driven by positive sentiment.

“This is driven by three factors: tamed inflation, the market’s belief that there will be no future rate hikes, and the avoidance of a banking crisis,” he said. “So that’s what the market wants to think.”

But the wild card here is interest rates, especially if they continue to rise.

“There’s a big battle between the bulls and the bears right now,” he said on CoinDesk TV. “There’s not a lot of liquidity and depth around, so that’s why you’re seeing these volatile moves right now.”

Next week, the latest consumer price index is scheduled to be released, which is the key to determining inflation and thereby guiding the Fed’s hand on interest rates.

It will be a good update in the battle of bulls and bears.

Is Chief Twit Elon Musk also top DOGE?

So this is how mass adoption happens? Elon Musk, at least at one point the world’s richest man, replaced Twitter’s classic blue bird logo with a sprite of DOGE, the Shiba Inu dog known as much for memes as meme coins. Dogecoin rallied something like 40%, and has yet to crash. I’m hearing that excitement is building for DOGE to pump over the 10 cent threshold, which is proportionally one-tenth as exciting as when the so-called proletariat investors of the GameStop era tried to drive dogecoin, sometimes unironically called “the people’s cryptocurrency ,” ” past $1 (it didn’t work).

Dogecoin is apparently surging because people believe Elon Musk may soon integrate a permanent dogecoin payment system into Twitter, the microblogging platform he overpaid ($43 billion) for. Twitter has several million daily active users, many of them high-profile, and if only a small percentage starts trading in DOGE – as a joke or not – it’s not entirely irrational to speculate that it will command a higher price. Mind you, Twitter already has payment/tip features using US dollars and the Bitcoin Lightning network. The latter is rarely used, giving an indication of how often the even less widespread and even less reliable crypto, dogecoin, would (or would not) be used.

Of course, this is my attempt to attribute meaning to crypto price movements. Prices are basically the only thing that matters in crypto, but rarely, for one reason or another, investors usually rely on when assessing the expected return of an asset. Instead, crypto prices are an almost perfect reflection of market sentiment – ​​or, to put it in the language of the people, mood. Is the coronavirus shutting down the global economy? Bad vibes. Trapped workers with excess cash turning into lazy-happy day traders? Fun vibes. A massive stablecoin experiment that crashes and burns? Bad vibes. The Collapse of US Banking Revealing Bitcoin’s Virtues? Apparently good vibes.

Elon Musk has manipulated the price of dogecoin in the past. The first time it happened, in early 2020, DOGE jumped after the Tesla founder tweeted out a meme. He apparently got a taste of something he likes – power through s**tposting – because he made similar moves over and over again, each time raising the stakes as the joke wore on. He weighed in on a dispute between DOGE traders and crypto exchange Binance. Tesla, his car company, would allow DOGE payments. Musk planned to bring DOGE to space, with a SpaceX satellite launch. Over 30-some tweets until the end of 2022, Musk pumped the price of DOGE by 4.5% on average, according to crypto-skeptic news site Protos.

Read the full story here:

Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade, also known as “Shapella”, is expected to go live on April 12. It will mark Ethereum’s complete transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) network and enable the withdrawal of ETH. Runa Digital Assets Chief Operating Officer Max Williams and Umee CEO Brent Xu discussed. Plus a closer look at Japan’s new Web3 white paper that made recommendations for growth in the country’s industry. And “The Crypto Lawyer” Irina Heaver shared her insights on the crypto industry in Dubai.