First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Stable Around $19K as Inflation, Earnings Haunt Traditional Markets

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Price Point

Bitcoin (BTC) started the week off trading down 1% on the day, dipping below the $20,000 mark after spending the weekend trading in a range between $19,200-$19,500.

U.S. stock futures were lower after Friday’s jobs report and a possible escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war. European stocks fell for the fourth straight day. Investors in traditional markets are looking ahead to a big week of corporate earnings reports and the monthly Consumer Price Index report scheduled for release Thursday.

Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, was also down slightly on the day, around $1,300.

For altcoins, TRON (TRX) made gains of 3% on the day and Quant Network lost 4%.

In the news, Huobi Global, one of the biggest token trading outposts in the Asia markets, said late Friday that it has agreed to be purchased by Hong Kong-based investment company About Capital Management's M&A fund.

Crypto investment firm Blockwater Technologies defaulted on a loan from TrueFi, a decentralized lending protocol, TrueFi said in a statement Sunday. The South Korea-based crypto investment firm failed to make a payment on a $3.4 million loan to TrueFi, a decentralized lending protocol.

And privacy-focused cryptocurrency and payments firm MobileCoin, in collaboration with stablecoin platform Reserve, has launched a new stablecoin dubbed “Electronic Dollars” (eUSD). The company says eUSD is fully collateralized and is uniquely designed to protect users’ private transactional data.

Early Monday, the Bitcoin mining difficulty (the degree of difficulty involved in discovering new bitcoin blocks through mining) increased significantly by 13.55% to 35.61 trillion, a record high and the largest increase since May 13, 2021, as noted by WuBlockchain on Twitter.

CoinDesk Market Index

Biggest Gainers

Asset Ticker Returns DACS Sector dYdX DYDX +3.16% DeFi TRON TRX +2.74% Smart Contract Platform Vechain VET +0.98% Currency

Biggest Losers

Asset Ticker Returns DACS Sector Maker MKR -12.46% DeFi Chiliz CHZ -5.04% Culture & Entertainment Lido DAO LDO -4.39% DeFi

Sector classifications are provided via the Digital Asset Classification Standard (DACS), developed by CoinDesk Indices to provide a reliable, comprehensive and standardized classification system for digital assets. The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) is a broad-based index designed to measure the market capitalization weighted performance of the digital asset market subject to minimum trading and exchange eligibility requirements.

Chart of the Day

Record Liquidity Tightening

By Omkar Godbole

• "If you think that [quantitative easing] was helpful on the way up, you have to believe that [quantitative tightening] will be unhelpful on the way down," Callum Thomas, head of research and founder at Topdown Charts, wrote in a email.