Crypto, a sector valued at over $2T, is often overlooked by traditional financiers. However, the market has begun its recovery towards previous highs, with Bitcoin rising 52.79% since the beginning of the year. While the prevailing narrative suggests that the altcoin season has ended due to a recent price drop, the data tells a different story. According to CoinMarketCap, out of the top 100 coins, 20 have outperformed Bitcoin in the last month and 34 since the start of 2024.
Market Updates
Bitcoin Miner Rewards Halved. Transaction Fees Reach Record Highs
The successful halving of Bitcoin on block 840,000 has led to a reduction in mining rewards for servers running Bitcoin nodes, decreasing from 6.25 to 3.125. That has majorly impacted several things:
Daily Supply: The daily supply of BTC has shrunk from 900 to 450, equating to approximately 165,000 per year. Consequently, the current stock of Bitcoin, referring to the amount already mined and not to be confused with stocks, stands at 19 million. That is 120 times greater than the yearly supply.
Stock-to-Supply Ratio (SoS): Such a stock-to-supply ratio is rare for markets valued over 1 trillion and has only been achieved by a few asset classes like Real Estate and Gold.
Inflation Rate: The reduction in the issuance of new Bitcoin has resulted in the inflation rate of BTC dropping to under 1%. That makes it less than that of Gold, officially making Bitcoin the hardest money ever to exist.
Transaction Price: The current medium price for Bitcoin transactions stands at $15, a decrease from the peak we saw during the halving block, which recorded several Txs with fees exceeding $400k. That surge in Bitcoin fees contributed to a 300% increase in the total Layer-1 fees collected over the weekend.
Bitcoin Runes Debut To Challenge BRC-20
Runes, a new token issuing protocol on Bitcoin, launched concurrently with the halving to improve the efficiency of creating fungible tokens. The new standard differentiates from Ordinals, which are non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Runes are fungible tokens that work on an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model, whereby new tokens are created using Bitcoin.
The launch brought some surprises, with over 10 projects making their debut in the ecosystem. For instance, BitX, a Runes decentralized exchange had its X (Twitter) account hacked. Overall, the Rune ecosystem aims to outpace its competitor, BRC-20, which currently comprises 8 main coins with a combined market cap of $2.34 billion, representing just 0.10% dominance of the entire crypto market. One theme that prevails is that many crypto natives don't quite understand how the Runes tech works either.
Scam Highlights: $30M Rug Pull And A $110M Lawsuit
A crypto betting platform, 'ZKasino', recently debuted on the Ethereum network. However, speculation quickly arose that the founders may have defrauded its early adopters of over $32M.
According to ZachXBT, an on-chain and Twitter crypto investigator, the team behind the project has a history of scamming crypto users, making the current situation unsurprising. Despite the ongoing FUD, ZKasino founder stated on X that "the launch will proceed as planned". However, he did not address why users are currently unable to withdraw their funds.
In other news, last week, Avraham Eisenberg was unanimously convicted by a jury in the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) first case involving open-market manipulation of cryptocurrency. Court documents and evidence presented at trial revealed that Eisenberg engaged in a scheme to fraudulently obtain approximately $110 million worth of cryptocurrency from Mango Markets and its customers. That was achieved by artificially manipulating the price of certain perpetual futures contracts.
More Bite-Sized Stacks
DeFi
- Tether Introduces USDT And Gold Stablecoins On TON
- DeFi Platform Hedgey Finance Hit By $44 Million Exploit
- Ondo Finance Integrates Tokenized Treasuries Into Cosmos With Noble
Crypto Courtroom & Regulations
- SEC Claims Justin Sun's Extensive US Travel Influenced Lawsuit
- Users To Drop Lawsuit Against SBF To Pursue FTX Influencers
- The U.S. IRS To Kill Crypto Privacy With New Form 1099-DA?
Institutions
- MicroStrategy's Saylor Nets $370 Million Selling Company Shares
- Coinbase To Offer $WIF Memecoin Perpetual Futures To Non-US Customers
- Bitcoin Mining Stocks Rebound on Halving Momentum
Yields, Airdrops & Degen Plays
- Blockchain DataAvailability Project Avail Announces Token Airdrop
- Binance Launches 'Megadrop', A Platform For Early-Access Web3 Airdrops
- FriendTech V2 To Launch on April 29 With Potential $FRIEND Token
Tweets For Thought
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