Mooners and Shakers: Crypto market sees China’s economic wildcard as Conflux and Filecoin rise again
Morning (only), Coinheads. Bitcoin and the crypto market are awash in a turbulent sea of macroeconomic data and narratives that spin in an unconvincing manner – like Jim Cramer jogging in a pair of thongs. And it has been for a while.
January was generally a great month for Bitcoin and the Cryptoverse. And it was February okay, with BTC just ending a green month. Which way will the tide take us in March? Hard to say.
Chinese economic data gives crypto market a boost
We are able to observe one thing for sure and that is some rising hopium based on China which is reintroducing liquidity to the markets. Er, yep, despite the ongoing ban on crypto trading and crypto mining over there. There is also no small amount of hope for the concept of Hong Kong developing into a China-backed crypto trading hub.
The founder of cryptocurrency Tron and a leading stakeholder with the Huobi exchange, Justin Sun is certainly encouraged by Hong Kong’s new licensing rules, which are set to boost institutional crypto trading and open up retail crypto trading in the region from June.
Meanwhile, the idea of more liquidity in global finance from a zero-covid-policy-relaxed China could well mean a rise in the prices of volatile, risky assets…in theory.
Regardless, Bitcoin and the crypto market had a little pump overnight. And while the market is still widely seen as correlated to the daily, weekly and monthly fortunes of US stocks and inversely correlated to the US Dollar Index, Chinese economic data and stock results throw a wild card into the mix.
As Stockhead’s Eddy Sunarto reported earlier today in his excellent Market Highlights round-up, which you should definitely be following every single morning, China posted a rather impressive Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) overnight.
The index reportedly rose to 52.6 in February – the highest level in more than a decade – indicating expanded economic activity in the eastern superpower. This could potentially ease concerns about global financial growth and give certain commodities (oil, gold) a boost, as well as increase risk appetite in the markets.
It seems to have increased risk appetite a bit in Bitcoin and some of the crypto majors in the last 24 hours, but more so in “Chinese coins” like Conflux, and also Filecoin – one of several projects that have been known to be extremely popular with Chinese investors in the past. Let’s take a look…
Top 10 overview
With the total crypto market cap at $1.13 trillion, up approx. 2% since this time yesterday, here is the current status among the top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.
Amidst the general green scene on the daily timeframe in the majors, there are a couple of standouts – Ethereum (ETH) and Polygon (MATIC).
Ethereum may be one of the better performing cryptos in the top 10 today, based on news. Blockchain has already implemented the “account abstraction” feature, often referred to by co-founder Vitalik Buterin as a positive improvement for the network.
As CoinDesk reports, the upgrade, known as ERC-4337, is designed to make it easier for users to recover their crypto if they lose private keys to an online wallet.
“Account Abstraction is a concept that turns users’ wallets into smart contract accounts, to make Ethereum wallets more user-friendly and to prevent the loss of crypto-keys,” the report said.
Meanwhile, Polygon’s MATIC token price has lifted out of its early week hibernation. Guess you can’t keep a good “zk rollups” for Ethereum scaling solution down for too long.
Overdraft and downdraft: 11–100
With a market cap of around $10.2 billion to around $480 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 503 million) +23%
• Maker (MKR), (mc: USD 839 million) +17%
• Filecoin (FIL), (mc: USD 2.9 billion) +12%
• SingularityNET (AGIX), (mc: USD 656 million) +12%
• Fetch.ai (FET), (mc: USD 462 million) +2%
Conflux and Filecoin. We’ve covered both a bit recently.
The former is apparently China’s only fully regulated, government-backed public blockchain. And it has made some partnership and funding waves recently, including a deal to build blockchain-based SIM cards with China’s second-largest wireless carrier — China Telecom.
Also this – a hefty chunk of funding from Singaporean investment firm DWF Labs:
Meanwhile, like Ethereum and its series of impending upgrades, Filecoin is making some noise at the ETHDenver “innovation festival” as it prepares to launch its Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) – which will bring smart-contract user programmability to the Filecoin network. much like Ethereum.
DAILY SLUMPERS
• Osmosis (OSMO), (market value: USD 510 million) -1%
• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: USD 895 million) -1%
Around the blocks
Some relevance and randomness that stuck with us this morning is moving through the Crypto Twitterverse.
Do we feel like we don’t have enough to say here? Ok, here is an unbiased trader/analyst Justin Bennett with something negative for traders and investors to consider…
But then there’s this, from another popular analyst, Rekt Capital:
