Mooners and Shakers: Bitcoin Flattening; Lido DAO police some FUD; Maker, Synthetix and ImmutableX provide gains

Welcome to another week of mildly obsessive viewing of crypto prices and charts. It was an old end to the week on Friday for crypto, although the US stock market got a nice pump. But Bitcoin and friends managed to stabilize over the weekend.

And the main reason the crypto market didn’t keep up with the Nasdaq and S&P’s rally at the end of the week? That would be the ongoing FTX contagion scare that is still spreading and lingering – this time via Silvergate’s “cryptobank” saga.

The crypto-friendly bank has tied up with major crypto firms including Coinbase, Circle, Gemini, Galaxy Digital and more. Revelations that it is on the verge of crumbling, as these firms take steps to distance themselves from it, have stalled the overall bullish market momentum, bringing the bears further into the picture.

How’s the crypto market going, then? Let’s turn to one of the industry’s leading trackers for that. Alternative.me’s Fear & Greed Index shows that it is down again from the “Greed” that materialized in January and February.

And that likely aligns with Silvergate concerns, along with the broader climate of regulatory crackdowns on the crypto industry, led by Gary “The Destroyer” Gensler at the US securities regulator, the SEC.

Last month, stablecoin issuer Paxos was served with a Wells Notice from the SEC, seeking to operate the Binance-affiliated BUSD stablecoin as an unregistered security. And before that, US crypto exchange Kraken agreed to shut down its betting service in a US$30 million settlement with the SEC.

Add to that, Ripple Labs’ ongoing battle with the regulator, plus further rumors of multiple Wells Notices being thrown at various DeFi projects, and you can see why some investors may be quite nervous at the moment.

Bankless podcaster spreads Lido DAO, SEC-related fears

The DeFi project rumors were spread over the weekend, by the way Bankless crypto podcaster David Hoffman, who specifically mentioned the Lido DAO liquid staking protocol (LDO). After initially describing the rumor as a “Wells Notice Carpet Bombing” of the crypto industry by the SEC, Hoffman has since backtracked, at least on some of his wording.

“Although there is at least one confirmed Wells, take note hair expired recently, it is not it known to the public, the idea of ​​a recent mass carpet bomb is not correct,” he tweeted.

Then moving on to some of the recent price action.

Top 10 overview

As reported late last week, the overall crypto market took a big dive from where it had been sitting at our last morning roundup, which was Friday morning. In fact, it has managed to liquidate about $40 billion from its total market capitalization since then.

Nevertheless, there was something of a consolidation over the weekend, which some observers, such as Scott Melker, aka “The Wolf of All Streets” have found to be a bit odd…

Meanwhile, fellow US trader/analyst Justin Bennett, who we mentioned in our recent Crypto Twitter alpha article (and we probably should have put Melker on it too, to be fair), believes that $23,130 is the very specific price level which BTC watchers should keep an eye on.

A failure to catch it pretty damn soon and Bitcoin could trend lower, Bennett tweeted.

Dutchman Michaël van de Poppe is also prepared for things to fall (the $21.3k area is “important to hold”), but seems more confident of a Bitcoin rally at some point this year.

Overdraft and downdraft: 11–100

With a market cap of about $8.94 billion to about $437 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

• Maker (MKR), (market value: USD 855 million) +11%

• Synthetix network (SNX), (mc: USD 971 million) +8%

• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: USD 891 million) +6%

• Filecoin (FIL), (mc: USD 2.4 billion) +4%

• GMX (GMX), (mc: USD 578 million) +3%

Maker (MKR) has been in good price-action form recently, partly due to news circulating in the market that MakerDAO may allow users to borrow DAI stablecoin against the MKR management token.

MakerDAO enables the generation of DAI, which is the market’s leading decentralized stablecoin.

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Trust Wallet (TWT), (market cap: USD 544 million) -4%

• Hyphen (DASH), (mc: USD 727 million) -3%

• Theta network (THETA), (mc: USD 995 million) -3%

• SingularityNET (AGIX), (mc: USD 559 million) -2%

• Casper network (CSPR), (mc: USD 437 million) -2%

Around the blocks

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

By the way, we noted many of the following in our Crypto Twitter alpha account article, which we think is a pretty decent start for anyone building an informative crypto themed feed…