🐳 Daily Edition: Bitcoin Slides to $91k, Sellers Gain Momentum

In a little over a month, Bitcoin has fallen 27% from its peak to $92,000, representing a loss of nearly $700B in market cap while the rest of the crypto market has lost $500B over the same time frame. The stock market certainly hasn’t been peachy, but relative to Bitcoin’s 25% decline this month it looks quite strong. When we have downturns like this everyone wants to know what’s causing it, but unfortunately this time the culprit isn’t some singular event or entity selling. Virtually nothing has changed over the last 4 weeks that should cause sell pressure this significant… except the 10’s of billions in liquidations of course. Leverage (essentially borrowing money to increase position size) can be a powerful tool when used carefully, however as pointed out in a tweet by The Kobeissi Letter yesterday, there are a lot of speculative crypto traders out there who are cranking the leverage slider up to 100x sometimes. In fact if you’ve spent time on Crypto Twitter, you’ve likely seen several images of positions worth 10’s of millions (or more) taken at 25x leverage — we aren’t talking about gambling a few dollars here, but massive positions that can have a real impact on the market if liquidated.

And liquidated they have been! Things like ETF outflows, bearish sentiment, macro fears, or even random posts from Donald Trump on Truth social can move the market 5% on a daily basis, enough to liquidate anyone using 20x leverage or higher. With Bitcoin dropping 5 times that this month, you can start to see where the problem is. Until the “spot chads” regain control from the perpetuals gamblers, we should expect to see volatility like this continue.

While I may still be bullish, it’s clear the market is feeling the pain. The long awaited launch of Monad is just a week away, with today marking the start of their public ICO on Coinbase (the first of its kind). The sale offers a chance for Coinbase users to invest in the MON token at a $2.5B valuation, a drop from their last round 2 years ago which was at a $3B valuation. Even with the discount and premarket exchanges trading MON at over $4B, the sale is still under 50% of the total allocation in terms of commitments so far. Of course this is just the first day and it will likely sell out, we’re used to seeing “quick flips” (when you can instantly sell for profit) like this go quickly. This tells me the market likely doesn’t agree with premarket valuations being so high, and we should expect it to launch and trade closer to the $2.5B mark.

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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!

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• Vitalik Buterin unveils Kohaku, a privacy-focused framework for Ethereum

• BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF sheds record $463M as crypto funds see worst week since February

Alt Coins and Stocks

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• Crypto’s riskiest coins plummet to lows not seen since pandemic

New Launches

• Monad’s MON sale goes live on Coinbase’s new platform

Interesting Reads

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• Man behind Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos Twitter hacks to repay over $5 million in stolen bitcoin

• $REKT Memecoin gets rekt by 50% drop as traders get liquidated

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