Thursday, 2 March 2023

Mooners and Shakers: Crypto market eyes China’s economic wildcard as Conflux and Filecoin surge again

by Berkeley Lovelace

Morning (just), Coinheads. Bitcoin and the crypto market is awash in a turbulent sea of macroeconomic data and narratives flip-flopping about unconvincingly – like Jim Cramer jogging in a pair thongs. And it has been for some time.

January was generally a great month for Bitcoin and the Cryptoverse. And February was okay, with BTC only just closing out a green month. Which way will the tide take us in March? Difficult to say.

 

Chinese economic data gives crypto market a boost

We’re able to observe one thing for sure, though, and that’s some rising hopium based around China re-introducing liquidity into markets. Er, yep, despite the ongoing ban on crypto trading and crypto mining over there. There’s also no small amount of hope, too, for the concept of Hong Kong developing into a China-backed crypto-trading hub.

The founder of cryptocurrency Tron and a leading stakeholder with the Huobi exchange, Justin Sun is certainly encouraged by Hong Kong’s new licensing rules, which are set to boost institutional crypto trading and open up retail crypto trading in the region, as of June.

Meanwhile, the idea of more liquidity in global finance from a zero-COVID-policy-relaxed China could well mean a price rise in volatile, risk assets… in theory.

In any case, Bitcoin and the crypto market had a little pump overnight. And, while the market is still widely seen as correlating with the daily, weekly and monthly fortunes of US stocks and inversely correlated to the US Dollar Index, Chinese economic data and stocks performance is throwing a wildcard into the mix.

As Stockhead’s Eddy Sunarto reported earlier today in his excellent Market Highlights round-up, which you should definitely clock into every single morning, China recorded quite impressive manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) data overnight.

The index reportedly rose to 52.6 in February – the highest level in more than a decade – and indicates expanded economic activity within the eastern superpower. This is potentially easing global financial growth concerns and giving certain commodities (oil, gold) a boost, as well as increasing risk appetite in markets.

It seems to have increased risk appetite slightly in Bitcoin and some of the crypto majors over the past 24 hours, but more so in “Chinese coins”such as Conflux, and also Filecoin – one of several projects that have been known to be extremely popular with Chinese investors in the past. Let’s take a gander…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.13 trillion, up about 2% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Amid the overall green scene on the daily timeframe in the majors, there are a couple of standouts – Ethereum (ETH) and Polygon (MATIC).

Ethereum might be one of the better-performing cryptos in the top 10 today on the back of news its blockchain has already deployed its “account abstraction” feature, often touted by co-founder Vitalik Buterin as a positive enhancement for the network.

As CoinDesk reports, the upgrade, known as ERC-4337,  is designed to  make it easier for users to recover their crypto if they lose private keys to an online wallet.

“Account Abstraction is a concept that turns users’ wallets into smart contract accounts, in order to make Ethereum wallets more user-friendly and to prevent any loss of crypto keys,” reads the report.

Meanwhile, Polygon’ MATIC token price has lifted out of its early-week doldrums. Guess you can’t keep a good “zk-rollups” Ethereum scaling-solution narrative down for too long.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$10.2 billion to about US$480 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPERS

• Conflux (CFX), (market cap: US$503 million) +23%

• Maker (MKR), (mc: US$839 million) +17%

• Filecoin (FIL), (mc: US$2.9 billion) +12%

• SingularityNET (AGIX), (mc: US$656 million) +12%

• Fetch.ai (FET), (mc: US$462 million) +2%

 

Conflux and Filecoin. We’ve covered both a little bit recently.

The former is apparently China’s only fully regulated, government-backed public blockchain. And it’s been making a few partnership and funding waves just lately, including a deal to build blockchain-based SIM cards with China’s second-biggest wireless carrier – China Telecom.

Also, this – a hefty chunk of funding from Singaporean investment firm DWF Labs:

Meanwhile, like Ethereum and its suite of impending upgrades, Filecoin is making some noise over at the ETHDenver “innovation festival” as it gears up to launch its Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) – which will bring smart-contract user programmability to the Filecoin network, much like Ethereum.

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Osmosis (OSMO), (market cap: US$510 million) -1%

• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: US$895 million) -1%

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

Feel like we’re not giving bearish views enough of a say here? Okay, here’s impartial trader/analyst Justin Bennett with something negative for traders and investors to consider…

But then there’s this, from another popular analyst, Rekt Capital:

 

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