Rise in Traffic on Crypto Exchanges; Futures Rolling Basis Takes a Dive

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Chart of the Day

Over the weekend, the broader crypto market largely remained stagnant. BTC experienced a brief rally on Sunday evening (Asian trading hours) before plunging back to the $41.8k level in the early hours of Monday. As of the time of writing, the number one cryptocurrency is settling above the $42k level after posting a 1% loss in the last 24 hours, with the immediate overhead resistance level sitting in the $42.6k to $43.2k zone. However, BTC may move further down to test the $40k support if it fails to clear said resistance. It looks like BTC will struggle to break out of its old trading range in the coming weeks, unless there is a major catalyst that can help generate some bullish momentum to propel BTC past the multiple hurdles littering its path to the $45k level.

In a similar vein, ETH is back below the $3,200 level after shedding 2% of its market value in the last 24 hours. Most major altcoins have also flipped red again, with LUNA leading the pack (this time for negative reasons) after seeing its value shaved by 7% from 24 hours ago. There are silver linings though. In the broader scheme of things, the number of active users on the Ethereum network has actually been trending up in recent times, whilst the traffic on crypto exchanges has also risen by 6.1% in March. According to The Block's research, Bybit has been ranked third for four months in a row now when it comes to trading volume within the spot and derivatives spaces.

Back to (the) Futures

Over the past weekend, the derivatives trading volume has remained low. Since the start of April, the futures rolling basis across all major exchanges has also taken a dive from its local peak. The macro-environment remains (at least for the time being) the number one factor influencing the derivatives market. From this, we can derive that the U.S. Federal Reserve's hawkish stance may actually be the culprit behind weakened spot prices and the general dormancy currently (as of the time of writing) plaguing the derivatives market.

Talk of the Town

If you recall, we discussed 0x650d, the owner of a lot of 104 high-value CryptoPunks NFTs that was meant to be auctioned off on Sotheby's in February with an estimated total valuation of $20 million to $30 million, in a previous article. We also mentioned that the lot was withdrawn at the very last minute. Well, the pseudonymous owner has now taken a whopping $8.3 million loan with said lot of CryptoPunks NFT as collateral. The value of this loan marginally surpasses another one that was made in early March (that was backed by a separate bundle of 101 CryptoPunks NFTs), and has now become the largest NFT-backed lending amount ever officially reported. This reflects a growing trend within the crypto space right now, whereby many NFT holders are going for short-term liquidity by leveraging on their digital collections.

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