April 11, 2023

Bitcoin broke the $30,000 level for the first time since June on Tuesday as March's banking turbulence fades further into the distance and investors grow more optimistic about the Federal Reserve's monetary policy. Bitcoin was up 6% in the past 24 hours to $30,100. Trading volume, however, remains low, according to Matteo Bottacini, a trader at Crypto Finance AG. “This indicates that few are taking profits from the year-end low and new buyers are still hesitant to enter the market,” Bottacini wrote in a morning note. Crypto-related stocks also climbed on the back of bitcoin’s rise. Marathon Digital (MARA), Coinbase (COIN) and MicroStrategy (MSTR) all rose on Monday and were up further in premarket trading on Tuesday. 

Bitcoin's 24-hour price chart

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss recently lent their Gemini cryptocurrency exchange $100 million to support the business amid the market downturn, Bloomberg reported. The brothers provided the loan after trying to get outside investment for Gemini, Bloomberg said, citing anonymous sources. A Gemini spokesperson didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The $100 million figure stands out in part because that equals the amount Gemini agreed to give some of its customers as part of the Genesis bankruptcy case. Genesis, which, like CoinDesk, is owned by Digital Currency Group, froze withdrawals in the aftermath of crypto exchange FTX's collapse last year, a decision that locked up money for customers of Gemini's Earn yield product.

Millions of aptos (APT) tokens will be unlocked on Wednesday in a planned move that’s set to increase the circulating supply by 0.5%, data shows. APT rose nearly 8% in the past 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows. The Aptos network has a market cap of over $2.3 billion, and the APT unlock is valued at over $50 million based on current prices. Unlocks refer to the automatic release of new tokens belonging to any blockchain network into the open market. They are often based on previously planned token plans. Aptos is a blockchain that was founded by former employers of Facebook's parent company, Meta Platforms (META), after Facebook abandoned its own plans to create a blockchain-based payments network called Diem (formerly Libra).

Ethereum's highly anticipated Shanghai upgrade, also called the Shanghai-Capella hard fork, is set to occur on Wednesday, after which users will have access to the $31 billion worth of ether staked in the blockchain since December 2020.

The upgrade has been widely hailed as long-term bullish for Ethereum's native token. Still, bitcoin, not ether, is outperforming the broader crypto market and becoming more dominant as the upgrade approaches.

Bitcoin's dominance rate, which measures the largest cryptocurrency's share of crypto's total market valuation, rose to 48.5% early Tuesday, the highest level since July 2021, according to data tracked by charting platform TradingView. The metric has risen by 15% this year.

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– Omkar Godbole

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