Mooners and Shakers: Bitcoin bounces out of Easter; LUNA and Moonbirds soar

April 19, 2022 Editor Monero 0

The overall sentiment in the crypto market is still one of “fear”, but Bitcoin has a post-Easter spring in its step today after recovering back above US$41k.

Elsewhere, but worth paying attention to for the inverse-correlation thesis, the US dollar is apparently showing signs of weakness this week with a “bearish divergence” – at least according to the Dutch trader Michaël van de Poppe. That said, the DXY has been chopping sideways today, currently up 0.10% on this time yesterday.

Stonks, though… which Bitcoin and friends definitely still take their cues from, these have had a refreshingly strong opening to the equities trading week on Wall Street. The S&P 500 is moving in this direction at the time of writing…

Sustainable strength? That’d be a particularly bold call considering the macro environment and potential headwinds from the interest-raising Fed among others.

But Aurélien Ohayon, CEO of software firm XOR Strategy, seems to think it’s possible, citing a bullish, potentially bottoming-out move related to the relative strength index (RSI) on the S&P 500’s three-week chart…

Something to consider, at the very least.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap a bit over US$2 trillion, up about 4.8% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

As mentioned above, and as per the Crypto Fear & Greed Index, the cryptoverse sentiment right now is still in a fearful state (albeit less “extreme” than last week’s mood)…

However, scanning around for various purportedly expert takes on Crypto Twitter, we’re seeing a reasonable amount of hopium-inducing analysis. Here’s Aurélien again…

And a couple of other large-account chartists…

Although, for a touch of balance, let’s bring the mood down again with a “Roman Trading” reality check…

Beyond Bitcoin, we’ve got some other strong movers in the majors today, including layer 1 protocols Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL) and Avalanche (AVAX). But Terra’s governance token LUNA is clearly the main top-ten mooner of the past 24 hours.

You can put that partly down to the continued strengthening of Terra’s ecosystem, to which LUNA is tied. Terra’s stablecoin UST, for instance, has now toppled Binance USD (BUSD) to become the third-largest stablecoin by circulation.

 

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$20.6 billion to about US$977 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time.

DAILY PUMPERS

• THORChain (RUNE), (market cap: US$2.74 billion) 22%

• ApeCoin (APE), (mc: US$3.67 billion) +15%

• The Sandbox (SAND), (mc: US$3.46 billion) +13%

• NEAR Protocol (NEAR), (mc: US$11.7 billion) +12%

• STEPN (GMT), (mc: US$1.97 billion) +11%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS 

• Monero (XMR), (mc: US$4.63 billion) -1%

Only one coin here in the red in the top 100 at the time of publishing – privacy coin Monero, which has actually had a good week, up about 14% over the past seven days. A cool-off today, then?

A “bank run” of sorts has been staged by participating Monero holders in an effort to test the strength of XMR reserves on exchanges. It’s alleged that some crypto exchanges may be selling more of the token than they actually possess…

 

Uppers and downers: lower caps

Moving below the crypto unicorns (in some cases well below), here’s just a selection catching our eye…

DAILY PUMPERS

• InsurAce (INSUR), (market cap: US$42 million) +34%

• DOSE (DOSE), (mc: US$21m) +33%

• Shiba Predator (QOM), (mc: US$131m) +33%

• XMON (XMON), (mc: US$88m) +27%

• Everscale (EVER), (mc: US$374m) +26%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• SafeMoon (SFM), (mc: US$368m) -13%

• apM Coin (APM), (mc: US$14.6m) -7%

• pSTAKE Finance (PSTAKE), (mc: US$40.5m) -7%

• Syntropy (NOIA), (mc: US$65.6m) -5%

• DerivaDAO (DDX), (mc: US$58m) -4%

 

Around the blocks

Meanwhile, in NFT land… the biggest story of the past week, and biggest mooner (by a very long way) has been Moonbirds.

It’s a Proof Collective initiative, co-founded by renowned US internet entrepreneur Kevin Rose, and is currently the most-traded NFT profile-pic collection on OpenSea with more than 74,000 ETH worth of volume. That’s a lot.

Intially priced at 2.5 ETH a handful of days ago, the floor price for the collection is now hovering around the 19 ETH mark. That means the cheapest Moonbird will now set you back about US$59,000. Yup, for a digital owl.

Why are these 10,000 pixelated owl jpegs garnering so much attention? Some see them as the next Bored Ape Yacht Club-style success story. Owning a Moonbird gives the holder entry to an exclusive Discord club, and “nesting” (think staking) the bird holds the promise of future benefits and airdrops that might potentially prove lucrative. At least, that’s the premise.

This observer (below) has some in-depth thoughts on it all, centred around the evolving utility and power of NFTs as a fundraising mechanism. (Which, incidentally, pretty much also describes the idea behind another NFT project – Ethlizards, which Illuvium’s Kieran Warwick told Stockhead about recently.)

There are some great thoughts in that thread. That said, “STACCED” probably also makes a fair point here, too…

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