Bitcoin Price: US$ 71,315.25 (+2.73%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 3,694.61 (+6.96%)
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has deferred its decision on allowing the New York Stock Exchange to offer options trading on spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs), affecting Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB), Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), and other trusts holding Bitcoin on the NYSE. The SEC’s delay, impacting Nasdaq’s request for options trading on BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) as well, extends to May 29. Meanwhile, the metaverse is poised to revolutionise the $54 billion medical tourism market, with telemedicine technology leveraging the metaverse concept to enhance patient experiences and streamline acquisition. Thumbay Hospital launched the first fully functional metaverse hospital in October 2022. Additionally, 1inch Network has introduced a crypto debit card in collaboration with Mastercard and Baanx, offering cryptocurrency-to-fiat bridge functionality, aiming to bridge Web3 and Web2 worlds. It starts with availability in the UK and European Economic Area, with plans for further expansion.
Ethereum-based investment products experienced negative outflows for the fourth consecutive week, totalling $22.5 million, contrasting with positive inflows seen in other crypto-based investment products as per a CoinShares report. Despite Ethereum’s outflows, Litecoin, Solana, and Filecoin registered weekly inflows of $4.4 million, $4 million, and $1.4 million, respectively. Meanwhile, the decline in investor appetite for exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is evident, with weekly flows moderating and volumes declining since early March. In another development, Polkadot has hit a record high of over 600,000 active addresses on its network by the end of March, with Moonbeam accounting for over 41% of these addresses. However, total transactions on the network remain subdued compared to previous months. On a separate note, the dYdX Chain encountered issues following a scheduled protocol upgrade, with block production halted and ongoing investigations by the team to resolve the situation amidst prior developments, including a community-approved staking of 20 million tokens.
The decentralised finance (DeFi) lending protocol Frax Finance has greenlit a $250 million allocation of Ethena Labs’ USDe to a new liquidity pool after passing a community governance proposal. This move, part of Frax’s Singularity Roadmap, aims to create an automated market operation (AMO) facilitating the minting of new FRAX tokens backed by overcollateralised debt, approved on April 5. The new Curve-based liquidity pool already holds $44.9 million in liquidity, with $30.6 million in FRAX coins and $14.6 million in USDe synthetic dollars, according to Curve Finance data. Meanwhile, Ethena Labs has surpassed $2 billion in total value locked (TVL), offering a 37.1% annual percentage yield (APY) on USDe to over 125,300 investors, after adding Bitcoin backing to USDe in March. In another development, PayPal USD PYUSD, a stablecoin issued by PayPal and Paxos, saw a significant circulation drop of 39% in March, according to Paxos’ transparency report, despite rallying cryptocurrency markets. As Bitcoin’s halving event approaches in mid-April, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju highlights the necessity for Bitcoin to hold above $80,000 to keep mining profitable, given the anticipated rise in mining costs from $40,000 to $80,000 post-halving.
Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Base has surpassed $4 billion in total value locked (TVL) for the first time, with a surge of over 13.2% in the past week. Its 30-day transactions have outpaced Ethereum and Arbitrum, reaching 50.34 million, while its average daily transactions per second (TPS) jumped by 29.7%. Despite its growth, Base has faced challenges such as an 18-fold increase in successful phishing scams from January to March, with $3.35 million stolen last month. Meanwhile, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson remains optimistic about upcoming upgrades, including the Chang hard fork and Ouroboros Leios, amid criticism over Cardano’s token and ecosystem. In another development, the Open Network (TON) ecosystem developers have allocated $5 million in Toncoin tokens to incentivise users to verify their identity using state-of-the-art palm scanning technology, aiming to enable digital identity verification for Telegram users over the next five years.
Source: https://cointelegraph.com
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