Bitcoin Pushes Above USD 28,000; Polygon’s Matic leads the winners

Bitcoin rose on Wednesday morning in Asia, moving past the US$28,000 mark. Ether and most other top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies also won, with Polygon’s Matic token leading the winners. Polygon’s blockchain is also seeing an increase in non-fungible token (NFT) sales. U.S. stocks fell as job vacancies fell to their lowest since May 2021, signaling a cooling economy and raising fears of a recession after a year-long run of interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.

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Fast facts

• Bitcoin gained 1.36% to $28,172 in the last 24 hours to 8 in Hong Kong, up 3.32% in the past week, according to CoinMarketCap data. The leading cryptocurrency was up nearly 3% in mid-morning Asian trade. Ethereum rose 3.35% to $1,870, a weekly gain of 5.53%.
• Polygon’s Matic token was the biggest gainer of the 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, adding 3.84% to US$1.14 for a weekly gain of 4.74%. Polygon’s y00ts NFT sale was the largest among all blockchains in the 24 hours through Tuesday morning, according to Polygon’s official Twitter handle.
• “Compared to this time last year, Polygon is seeing approximately 3-5x the number of unique sellers, buyers and total transactions each month. This is largely due to non-NFT traders now being exposed to non-fungible tokens through Starbucks rewards and Reddit avatars, says Yehudah Petscher, strategist at Forkast Labs’ NFT data specialist unit, Cryptoslam.
• Dogecoin, which rallied on Tuesday following Elon Musk’s move to change Twitter’s blue bird icon to the memecoin’s Shiba Inu dog image, fell back 0.89% to $0.09523. The value of the meme token jumped 29% in the past seven days, which seems to have woken up some wallets, with Whale Alert noting that one contains 1.2 million Doge activated after more than nine years of dormancy.
• The global crypto market capitalization rose 1.43% to $1.19 trillion, while total trading volume in the market fell 14% to $42.06 billion over the past 24 hours.
• In the NFT market, the Forkast 500 NFT index fell 0.11% to 4,035.10 in the 24 hours to 09:00 in Hong Kong, but added 0.74% for the week. The CryptoSlam Index is a proxy measure of the performance of the global NFT market and includes 500 eligible smart contracts on a given day.
• From January 1, 2022 to April 4, 2022, the Forkast 500 showed the market fell almost 12%, and for the same period up to April 4 this year, the index is down only 2%, Petscher said. “We trade in cycles, so I’m curious if we really have much further to fall or if we’ve found some sort of floor that is supported by collectors who are here for the long term,” he said.
• US stocks closed down on Tuesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.59%, and the S&P 500 lost 0.58%. The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.52 percent.
• US job vacancies fell to 9.9 million in February, the lowest since May 2021 and below market expectations of 10.4 million, indicating a cooling economy, according to Trading Economics.
• The data points indicate that the Fed’s fight against inflation may be working, but also raise concerns that with US interest rates now between 4.75% to 5%, or the highest in 17 years, the central bank may have gone too far and the world’s largest economy could slip into a recession. Analysts at CME Group have revised their views on the outcome of the Fed’s May 3 meeting to set interest rates, with a majority of analysts, around 59%, predicting no change, while 41.1% expect a 25 basis point increase.
• U.S. stock futures were trading higher at 9:30 a.m. in Hong Kong. Dow Jones Industrial Average Index Futures rose 0.098%, S&P 500 Futures rose 0.097% and Nasdaq-100 Futures gained 0.13%.

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