Bitcoin BTC Price Flips Above $24.1K After Mixed FOMC Minutes
Bitcoin Drops Than Rally Above $24.1K After FOMC Minutes
Shaken but not shaken, crypto markets fell slightly, rose slightly but remained in the red after the US Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) published minutes that were not encouraging.
Bitcoin recently traded at $24,164, down 1% in the last 24 hours. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization fell near $23,600 in the immediate aftermath of the FOMC report, which noted slowing growth — a boon for investors hoping for more dovish monetary policy from the Federal Reserve — but also data suggesting that inflation and the prospect of a hard recession remains real, comfortable money hawks.
“Everyone is on the lookout for what’s coming this year,” Jake Boyle, chief commercial officer at crypto brokerage Caleb and Brown. “At this point, the stance appears to have become more conservative on the basis that 25 basis points is less impactful than 50, but it is important that we all remember that it is still going up, which means the solution is clearly not there. ”
Boyle added: “Paired with the regulatory uncertainty that the crypto space seems to have these days, it would be fair for us to assume that there is going to be further volatility and unexpected announcements during this year.”
Ether recently changed hands at $1,641, off 1.1% from Tuesday, same time. Still, CoinDesk analyst Glenn Williams noted that BTC and ETH diverged on another front, with investors sending bitcoin to exchanges and removing ether from them. The moves have signaled bearish sentiment for bitcoin and bullishness for ether, a departure from their usual correlation. Separately, on the Tuesdaylayer 2 scaling system, Arbitrum surpassed Ethereum in daily transactions, 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 ticker of Tier 1 platform Aptos, recently climbed more than 6%.
Stocks fell amid the same inflation and recession fears that have roiled markets in recent days with the technology-heavy S&P 500 down 0.2%, its fourth straight daily decline, and the technology-focused Nasdaq and Dow Jones Industrial Average ( DJIA) also goes down a bit.
The crypto news ranged from positive to reminders of cryptos nearly 15 months of turmoil. Investment banking giant JPMorgan said in a research report that crypto exchange Coinbase is well positioned to deliver notable year-on-year improvement in EBITDA. credits Voyager Digital and its executives for misleading cryptocurrency marketing.
In an email to CoinDesk, Anthony Georgiades, co-founder of the 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 may indicate that we have moved into the final stages of a crypto winter.”
“Clearly there has been more 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 was so incredibly bearish that the obvious counter trade was going to be bullish. Coinbase has also been able to increase its overall market share on the back of the fallout from major crypto marketplaces like FTX.”
Georgiades was particularly bullish on crypto prospects in Asia: “There is a lot of speculation that buyers in Asia are starting to scale back to crypto in increasing numbers. As a result, the strength in the digital asset market may very well continue for the foreseeable future. Even if the Fed remains hawkish for several months to come, what happens in other parts of the world in terms of monetary easing may be enough to offset what happens in the United States.”
But he cautiously added that “there could be deep pullbacks in Bitcoin and crypto going forward,” although “the fodder for a sustained rally appears to be there.”
Hundreds of Fake ChatGPT Tokens Lure Crypto Investors; Majority issued on BNB Chain
This story first appeared Feb. 21 on CoinDesk.
Dodgy market participants are trying to cash in on the ongoing ChatGPT craze in tech circles by issuing fake tokens branded after the AI chatbot despite having no official affiliation with the tool.
Hundreds of such tokens have been issued in recent weeks. Of this, 132 different tokens have been issued on the BNB Chain, 25 tokens on Ethereum and 10 separate tokens on other blockchains such as Solana, Arbitrum, OKChain and Cronos.
These fake issuances follow software giant Microsoft’s move to integrate OpenAI’s chatbots for search services on Microsoft’s browsers.
While OpenAI is the creator of ChatGPT, Microsoft’s own chatbot is a custom tool and is said to be an improvement over the publicly available ChatGPT.
Scammers, however, don’t waste a chance to cash in on the hype. Several “BingChatGPTs” have been issued, seeded with liquidity and seeing thousands of dollars in trading volume – despite red flags.
“PeckShield has discovered dozens of newly created #BingChatGPT tokens, 3 of which appear to be #honeypots and 2 have high sales tax,” blockchain security firm PeckShield said in a tweet on Monday.
“2 of them have already dropped above -99%. Deployer 0xb583 has already created dozens of tokens with 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 an arbitrary user, provided the user sends additional funds to it.
On the other hand, turnover fee refers to the intentional amount taken from an illegal smart contract when a related token is sold – usually amounting higher than 50%, meaning that a user who sells a token worth $100 receives only $50 worth , with the remaining “taxed” amount going to the developer of the smart connector.
At the time of writing on Tuesday, there are over 170 ChatGPT-branded tokens 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 more than 300 unique owners 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 of such fake tokens – and fraud in some cases – is a glimpse that the cryptosponding dream is alive and well.
Coinbase reported Q4 earnings after hours on Tuesday, beating expectations, but usage continues to decline. Pastel co-founder Anthony Georgiades shared his crypto market analysis. Additionally, ConsenSys Director of Global Regulatory Matters Bill Hughes shared his views on the future of US crypto regulation. And, SingularityDAO CEO Marcello Mari explores the far reaches of where Web3 and artificial intelligence collide for CoinDesk’s “BUIDL Week.”
