Mooners and Shakers: Bitcoin Fall with Wall Street; Ankr increases on Microsoft partnership

Wall Street went back to trading overnight, and it was a bit of a bummer, frankly. Bitcoin and the crypto market have fallen somewhat with it. Meanwhile, China can, just quietly, support Hong Kong’s crypto hub.

After a brief pause to celebrate George Washington and Abe Lincoln, but probably not so much Trump and Biden, Wall Street’s major indexes closed about 2% lower, with traders apparently spooked by the outlook posted by Walmart and Home Depot.

In other news, however, as we noted yesterday, it has been reported this week that regulators in Hong Kong are proposing to relax crypto laws in their region with some support for retail crypto trading looking possible.

And according to Bloomberg, it appears that China may be in on this. Chinese officials have apparently been seen meddling during recent crypto events in Hong Kong, exchanging business cards and WeChat accounts.

“The meetings have been friendly, with officials checking on developments, asking for reports and in some cases making follow-up calls,” an unnamed source revealed.

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has already made the decision to allow investors with USD 1 million or more to buy and trade crypto assets, starting June 1. Letting regular schmos into the party is on the table, but is a pending decision.

In any case, there is something to cling to on a red day in the market. And speaking of clinging to a narrative, here’s Twitter-popular analyst tedtalksmacro, who spies a vague connection between Bitcoin and Chinese stocks, which he notes are “entering a bull market.”

Top 10 overview

Bitcoin (BTC) is hanging there above US$24k for now. It’s failure to break the US$25k level, and the 200 weekly moving average around $100 or so above it, however, has caused some concern among analysts, along with falls in US stock markets overnight.

Others, however, are sticking to their plans and believe it’s still a good time to gather. Dutchman Michaël van de Poppe has noticed shallower corrections for Bitcoin and altcoins and wouldn’t be surprised to see a small dip here before a run to around US$35-$40k. (Er, before another tough correction back to today’s levels. He’s setting himself up for a real rollercoaster in H1, then.)

Meanwhile, one of the biggest daily losers in the crypto majors today is Polygon’s MATIC token, after a recent run of very good form.

Part of the reason for the sharp drop is an announcement that Polygon Labs made to cut about 20% of its staff, totaling about 100 employees.

Overdraft and downdraft: 11–100

With a market cap of around $11.8 billion to around $497 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour winners and losers at press time. (Statistics accurate at time of publication, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPS

• Conflux (CFX), (market cap: USD 705 million) +15%

• 1 INCH (1INCH), (mc: USD 544 million) +13%

• WEMIX (WEMIX), (mc: USD 631 million) +9%

• SingularityNET (AGIX), (mc: USD 501 million) +7%

• Stacks (STX), (mc: USD 854 million) +2%

DAILY SLUMPERS

• OKC (OCT), (market cap: USD 539 million) -9%

• Curve DAO (CRV), (mc: USD 867 million) -9%

• NEO (NEO), (mc: USD 934 million) -9%

• The Mina Protocol (MINA), (mc: USD 819 million) -8%

• Arweave (AR), (mc: USD 851 million) -8%

Ankr and Fetch.ai rise

Looking a little further down the list of stock market values, there are at least a couple of notable performers today.

Web3 infrastructure and floating staking protocol Ankr (ANKR) is currently up more than 30% in the last 24 hours, on the back of a partnership announcement with Microsoft. Not small.

Here’s Ankr’s Josh Neuroth (who chatted with us last year about the project) with the tweet.

And then there’s the AI ​​crypto protocol Fetch.ai, with a partnership announcement of its own. It is partnering with electronics giant Bosch to develop Web3 and AI technology. The FET token is up approx. 4% at the time of writing – ok, not as big a “swing” as Ankrs.

Around the blocks

Some relevance and randomness that stuck with us this morning is moving through the Crypto Twitterverse.

Here’s some airdrop-based positivity on a negative day…

… countered by this, from American computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky, who warned on a Bankless podcast appearance that AI is basically going to murder us all in the next 15 years.

Maybe we should stop worrying about the price of Bitcoin, then.