🐳 Daily Edition: Crypto Mounts a Comeback as Stock Market Rises

After a gut-wrenching series of red candles which brought Bitcoin down over 35% from its all-time-high in just a few weeks, BTC has now risen almost 10% from Friday’s lows. This isn’t really a recovery given the sheer magnitude of the sell off, but it could definitely be the start of one… and sometimes it’s just nice to see some green after all the red! Today also marked the official launch of Monad’s mainnet and native token MON, something we’ve all been hearing about for years now. After initially falling to $0.025 (the price of the presale on Coinbase), it quickly rebounded and looks to be climbing to the $0.04 mark. Interestingly, while 4 cents would still be significantly higher than the presale price, it’s still a far cry from where premarkets like Hyperliquid had it trading. In fact, $0.04 was the lowest price the Hyperliquid premarket traded at prior to the announcement of the presale.

The main problem with listing perpetuals for a token that hasn’t launched is that because collateral can’t be deposited (because the collateral doesn’t exist yet), the market is inherently illiquid and difficult to short. This often leads to inflated valuations that don’t accurately predict launch pricing as we’ve seen time and again. They can be a helpful tool to gauge general market sentiment on a launch, but treating the prices as fact is a mistake.

Even though Monad’s brand has been around for a few years now, with their chain live they’ll actually have to execute. It’s no secret that this cycle hasn’t been kind to alt Layer 1’s, so I’m interested to see what they have up their sleeve to break the curse. Back when they raised at a $3B valuation, buzz words like “parallelization” and claiming high TPS was enough to command a high FDV, but now things are different. With one more anticipated launch by way of MegaETH set to come soon, keep an eye on Monad’s performance (both price and chain activity) to see if the market will have the appetite to support another chain token.

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The Beluga intern has been hard at work gathering all the most important crypto news stories so you have them in one place!

The Majors

• Bitcoin mining in China rebounds, defying 2021 ban

• Largest Ethereum treasury BitMine invests another $200 million, addresses recent ETH price decline

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Bitcoin giant Strategy skips Bitcoin buy with stock down 67% from peak

• Neobank Revolut boosts valuation to $75 billion ahead of potential stablecoin launch

New Launches

• Monad Blockchain goes live with 100B token supply and airdrop

Interesting Reads

• Aerodrome addresses last week’s “domain jacking”

• Veteran DeFi trader Taiki Maeda documents his reasoning behind his $1.5M ETH short

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