Traders in Asia push BTC past $25K

High buying pressure pushes Bitcoin past 25K

Most major digital assets are in the green as Asia begins its working day.

Bitcoin is up 5.3% in the last 24 hours to $25,703, while ether is up about 2.8% to $1,697. Binance’s BNB token is up 8.7% to $331.

Kaiko’s research director Clara Medalie said on a recent CoinDesk TV appearance that this mini-crypto rally is due to low liquidity in the market and high buying pressure. Binance converting $1 billion of BUSD into bitcoin, ether, BNB and other tokens was the fuel for the fire.

“This is a huge buying pressure on the markets,” she said. “As the markets are not that liquid, significant buying pressure is likely to have a significant impact on prices as a whole.”

“There are quite a few crypto companies that are actually based in Europe or APAC that have maintained their banking relationships, so it actually presents quite a large opportunity for those regions to accept crypto business,” she said.

Medalie also notes that the correlation between stocks and crypto is breaking, pointing to the divergence between the crypto and stock markets at the beginning of the year and during this latest rally.

“It turned around this week. We see the crypto markets rally, while the stock markets have completely collapsed, she said. “The divergence in these markets has reversed and is being sustained, creating this diminishing correlation for both Nasdaq technology stocks and the Europe 600 index.”

The Shiba Inu Community debates the origin story of the Shibarium

For the SHIB token and Shibarium blockchain community, it’s the difference between code that has been plagarized and open source code that has been recycled.

The drama began on Thursday Asian time when an established member of the Discord chain pointed to the Shibarium chain with the same chain ID number, 917, as the Rinia Testnet chain.

While Discord members were quick to generate their own explanations for the similarity, with some panic selling the token pushing it down 10%, the explanation from the developers behind the Shibarium chain is something far more benign.

“Few chain IDs were randomly picked – 417(Alpha), 517(Staging), 917(pre-pod/beta) and these chains were not registered anywhere at the time, I made a mistake not to double check when the puppy network was launched” tweeted Kaaldhairyaone of the pseudonymous developers.

Kaaldhairya tweeted that they were “redistributing a new version of the BETA network with a new chain ID.”

“Fresh deployments will be rare in the future, but are possible because we will still be in the BETA phase,” he continued.

Others pointed to similarities in code found on Github, a code repository.

Coders often reuse each other’s work for mundane and benign tasks. These pre-written blocks are known as libraries, and are available as open source. That is, code that is intended to be copied and reused.

Andrew Angrisani, a member of the project’s Telegram community as well as its Discord, and a crypto-security engineer, explained the code similarities of both Rinia and Shibarium using the same open source code.

“Both Rinia TestNet and Shibarium copied the open source code for their block explorers called Blockscout, and both were probably lazy in their implementation,” he said.

Another high-ranking community member, JesusM, called all of this a “minor mistake made in beta.” JesusM said this is the point of the beta process.

“Flaws in it are being tested and then fixed,” they said.

Angrisani speculated that part of this could be a ploy to drum up free marketing for Rinia and an upcoming project.

“Rinia Testnet chain Dev launches a [initial coin offering] for Firechain called a Shib Killer on March 31st. They can use this mud in the water to create free marketing since the ChainIDs were the same,” he said. “It may be an artifact of copying source code from an open source project.”

This isn’t the first time accusations have flown around either. In February, questions were raised on Discord about similarities between Shibarium and Rinia.

“At the end of the day, Shibarium is probably still a long way off, open source is being used (which is fine – other projects do), the Unification Fund is still working on Shibarium, and the Firechain/Rinia developer is using this to promote their upcoming ICO,” Angrisani concluded.

While the SHIB token has recovered some of its losses since the initial sale, it is still down 8% on the day.

Bitcoin assets were hemorrhaging coins even as US bank failures add heat to expectations of an early Federal Reserve central bank in favor of easing liquidity. Kaiko Research Director Clara Medalie shared her crypto market analysis. Plus, Signature Bank is on the market after being shut down by government regulators on Sunday, but any potential buyer will reportedly have to agree to a big caveat: no crypto. (The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Friday denied the report.) Jason Brett, CEO of Key Bridge Advisors and former U.S. regulator at the FDIC, shared his reaction. Besu Protocol Engineer Justin Florentine also joined the conversation.