Bitcoin BTC price rockets past $24.7K to hit 6-month high

Bitcoin’s surge takes it past $24.7

Just when bitcoin seemed likely to head south, investors sent the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization higher, largely due to a short squeeze.

BTC was recently trading at around $24,625, up more than 11% from the same time on Tuesday. Bitcoin last traded above $24,500 in August. Wednesday’s peak followed a tepid consumer price index that made investors feel less anxious about the future of the US economy and the Fed’s next monetary policy move.

But short-selling investors seemed more responsible for the unexpected reversal of the past few days. Data from crypto data provider Coinglass showed at one point Wednesday that traders betting on price moves liquidated about $65 million in bitcoin from the previous 24 hours, about $60 million of which was in short positions.

Ether enjoyed an almost equally bullish day, passing $1,700 before settling slightly below this threshold. The second largest crypto by market capitalization was recently up more than 9%. Other majors turned bright green during the day with YGG, the symbol of gaming guild Yield Guild Games, and NEAR, the native crypto of smart contract platform Near Protocol, each recently rising well over 11%. The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), a measure of the broader digital asset market’s performance, was recently up 10%.

And while stock markets were less adventurous overall with the tech-heavy Nasdaq and S&P 500 both closing down less than a percentage point, crypto-related stocks rallied with both exchange Coinbase ( COIN ) and bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings ( MARA ) rising 17% and 18% , respectively. Business software company MicroStrategy (MSTR), a major BTC holder, recently rose more than 9%.

The sad saga of FTX continued as U.S. federal prosecutors asked a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to change the terms of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s release on bond to prohibit him from using cell phones or the Internet except under very specific conditions. Prosecutors alleged that Bankman-Fried used a virtual private network at least twice, supposedly to watch the National Football League playoffs. It’s a sharp escalation of previous requests, in which prosecutors are essentially asking that Bankman-Fried only be banned from using encrypted or volatile messaging applications.

In an interview on CoinDesk TV, Joey Krug, investor and co-founder of Augur and Eco, said he thought “the markets had bottomed out back in June of last year,” but also noted, “There’s probably going to be some cutback. in the markets as inflation is not moving as fast as people hoped. My view is that things were oversold last summer and things are finally coming back.”

Krug added: “The second half of the year is going to be bullish for crypto. Most of the people who are going to sell crypto have already sold.”

NFT Marketplace Blur’s Token Reaches $500M Trading Volume After Airdrop

(A version of this story appeared Wednesday on CoinDesk’s website.)

Tokens from NFT marketplace Blur have already amassed over $500 million in trading volume in less than 24 hours since their much-hyped airdrop.

A Blur airdrop tracking page on Dune Analytics, created by Crypto Twitter user pandajackson42, shows that 320 million of the total 360 million airdropped blur tokens were claimed by users, representing nearly 90% of the airdrop.

Airdrops are the unsolicited distribution of a cryptocurrency token or coin, usually for free, to a number of wallet addresses and are typically used as a tactic to gain users.

BLUR tokens were sent to users of the Blur marketplace, with the airdrop amount depending on total activity, network volume and transactions made by each user on the platform. There were a total of three airdrop rounds. The first was for anyone who traded in the 6 months prior to the launch of the Blur marketplace, the second was for traders who actively listed on the Blur marketplace through November, and the third was for traders who bid on Blur.

The third type of recipient received the most tokens in the airdrop.

Blockchain data collected on Dune shows that 40% of all users received between 100 to 1000 blur tokens. About 22% of users received less than 100 blur tokens, while 30% received between 1,000 to 10,000 blur tokens.

Less than 1% of users received more than 1 million blur tokens – worth over $1 million as of Wednesday morning.

Blockchain data shows that there are over 33,000 unique wallet holders of BLUR as of Wednesday morning, with a majority of these first receiving the airdrop before likely transferring tokens to other wallets.

Some traders sold tokens en masse after receiving the airdrop. The tokens were initially listed at $1 on crypto exchange Coinbase, but fell to as low as 48 cents late on Tuesday. However, Asian hours on Wednesday saw buying pressure and the tokens rose to 72 cents at press time.

CoinGecko data shows that over $530 million worth of BLUR has been traded across exchanges such as OKX, Kucoin and Uniswap.

Meanwhile, the total value of tokens on the Blur market increased by $10 million in the last 24 hours, DeFiLlama data shows.

Bitcoin regained a foothold comfortably above $22,000, despite the tepid US Consumer Price Index (CPI) in January. eToro investment analyst Callie Cox shared her crypto market analysis. Separately, Paxos, the issuer of the $16 billion Binance USD (BUSD) stablecoin, has burned more than $700 million of BUSD tokens since Monday. Former Paxos Head of Portfolio Management and Columbia Business School Adjunct Professor Jesse Austin Campbell explained why stablecoins can be as safe as regulated financial products such as money market funds.