- Prices Point: Bitcoin slid on Friday after gaining 5.1% on Thursday, but overall, the cryptocurrency has been resilient under tough market conditions.
- Market Move: Ethereum miners have $319 million in ether that they theoretically could start dumping, which would weigh on the price.
- Chart of the Day: The discount between the price of liquid-staking protocol Lido’s staked ether (stETH) and the price of ether (ETH) has pretty much evaporated, according to data source Dune Analytics.
Price Point
Bitcoin (BTC) was sliding after a surprisingly strong performance on Thursday – a 5.1% gain that was the largest cryptocurrency’s best single-day return in two weeks.
“Bitcoin continues to display strong resilience in the face of a broader risk-averse mood in financial markets,” Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at the foreign-exchange brokerage Oanda, wrote in an investor update. “Given it is the ultimate risk asset, this is quite surprising and perhaps even encouraging.”
Traditional markets were reeling Friday from signs that there’s no easy fix for the global economic challenges, with activity slowing or possibly even contracting, inflation still persistent and central bankers ratcheting monetary conditions tighter.
The U.K. pound tumbled as the government announced a plan to stimulate the economy through tax cuts – prompting fresh inflation warnings from economists and leading traders to bet on faster interest-rate hikes by the Bank of England.
The dollar surged to a new record valuation in foreign-exchange markets, which is likely seen as a negative for bitcoin, because the cryptocurrency often trades in an inverse relationship to the greenback. As of press time, bitcoin was changing hands around $18,900.
The CoinDesk Market Index was roughly flat over the past 24 hours.
Arthur Hayes, former CEO of crypto exchange BitMEX, wrote in his latest blog post that he thinks ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency, will outperform bitcoin following last week’s successful completion of the Ethereum blockchain’s Merge: “The price of ETH continues to get smoked due to deteriorating USD liquidity, but give the changes in the supply and demand dynamics time to percolate. Check back in a few months, and I suspect you’ll see that the dramatic reduction in supply has created a strong and rising floor on the price.”
