Bitcoin held down, the market pulled back, the meme presale on Solana attracted more than 100 million funds, and the SEC postponed the Ethereum ETF request

Crypto Daily Summary: Bitcoin Declines, Market Pullbacks, Meme Presale on Solana Attracts More Than 100 Million Funds, SEC Postpones Ethereum ETF Request

Looking at the trading activity of Bitcoin ETFs first, according to Farside Investor data, Grayscale's GBTC outflows continued to be large on March 19, at $443.5 million, while the Fidelity Bitcoin Spot ETF (FBTC) saw inflows of $39.66 million and the Bitwise Bitcoin Spot ETF (BITB) saw inflows of $2.5 million.

On March 19, the price of Bitcoin continued to fall, hitting a minimum of around $61500, down 5.4% in 24h. ETH is now trading at $3,208.57, down 6.6%, with altcoins showing a general decline. This is mainly due to the fact that the majority of Bitcoin holders gradually take profits and sell Bitcoin, which is also a typical pre-halving price retracement. In the long term, investors remain bullish on BTC and ETH.

Since $BOME opened the pre-sale mode and harvested an unexpected amount of funds, the token price has also soared, and more and more imitation memes have also appeared on Solana, such as the two-day hit $SLERF (Gate has already launched $BOME and $SLERF tokens).

After the Slerf developer apologized on social platforms for accidentally burning the token, it triggered a wave of "out of the circle", and the community's attention caused the token price to soar, once exceeding $1.37, and now falling back to around $0.85.

But now there is quite a bit of controversy about whether the developer "did it on purpose". The developer, of course, denied it, saying that he had "no intention" to burn the tokens. "That's true, but I have no intention of burning the airdropped tokens," Slerf wrote in a March 19 post to X.

However, Wildcat's creator, Laurence Day, said that Slerf's burn was "almost certainly deliberate" in order to hype up the project – he explained that someone deposited $1.9 million into a liquidity pool shortly after the burn and sold it for $5 million, suggesting that insiders may have taken advantage of the incident to profit from the hysteria.

On-chain detective ZachXBT made a presale project statistic, saying: "I would love to know how much SOL the presale yuan brings, and after calculation, 27 presales have raised a total of >65500 SOL ($122.5 million). ”

(I was interested to see how much SOL has been sent as a result of the presale meta and calculated >655,000 SOL ($122.5M) raised from 27 presales.)

In response, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said that he did not support the presale, retweeting Zach's data and saying "stop this".

On Tuesday, March 19, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) again postponed a decision on the proposed "Spot Ether ETF" by Hashdex and ARK 21Shares. While May 24 is the SEC's final decision on ARK 21Shares, Hashdex's application will face an ultimatum from regulators on or before May 30.

Analysts have recently not been optimistic about the likelihood of approval for the 8 Ethereum ETFs currently proposed by BlackRock, Grayscale, Fidelity, Invesco Galaxy, VanEck, Hashdex, and Franklin Templeton.

Market Analysis: Altcoins Fall Market volatility has increased significantly

Market Trend:

The market has seen wild volatility during this period, with BTC briefly approaching $61,000 and ETH approaching $3,100, while altcoins generally fell. In addition, the BTC spot ETF continued the previous day's net outflows, temporarily lacking the previous strong buying, while the ETH ETF application was also delayed.

On the macroeconomic front, U.S. equities were mixed, with expectations that the Fed could cut interest rates in June, but the likelihood of that expectation has been greatly reduced. On the other hand, the Bank of Japan announced an interest rate hike for the first time in 17 years, announcing the end of the era of negative yen interest rates, and the mainstream view is that the yen rate hike will have an inevitable impact on risk assets.

Market Hot Spots:

1. In the field of public chains, projects such as FTM, APT, and SUI have risen. Of particular note, APT will unlock $400 million worth of tokens on April 12. Generally speaking, there will be a certain price increase before the token is unlocked to cope with the problem of token selling pressure that may be brought about after unlocking.

2. In terms of meme concept coins, BOME has fallen by 70% after experiencing a high point, and has now stabilized and rebounded. SLERF's 24-hour trading volume exceeded $2.69 billion, attracting the attention of the vast majority of the market. At the same time, meme projects on the Solana chain are increasingly lacking in novelty.

Overall, the market as a whole is showing a trend of increasing volatility, and investors need to pay close attention to market hotspots and macroeconomic trends to formulate corresponding investment strategies.

Macro: Saudi Arabia plans to set up a $40 billion fund to invest in AI, the yen is weak, and the Federal Reserve policy meeting is in focus

The Saudi Arabian government plans to set up a fund of about $40 billion to invest in artificial intelligence, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing three people familiar with the matter. Representatives of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) have discussed in recent weeks a potential partnership with the American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and other financiers.

PIF officials also discussed what role Andreessen Horowitz could play and how the fund would operate, adding that the plans could still change. Other venture capitalists are likely to participate in the kingdom's AI fund, which is expected to launch in the second half of 2024, the newspaper said.

On the global market front, the focus remains on Japan and the Federal Reserve, with a weaker yen sending Nikkei futures up 0.6% after the Bank of Japan ended years of negative interest rates with a well-publicized move. The Nikkei 225 is back above 40,000 and is just one step away from the all-time high of 40,472 set earlier this month.

With the BoJ out, the focus is now entirely on the outcome of the Fed's policy meeting at a later date, with the risk that the new economic projections (the dot plot) could signal only two rate cuts, starting with three or more rate cuts. With recent data showing that inflation remains sticky, markets have pushed back the Fed's first rate cut until June, or even until July.

Raskin expects the dot plot and Fed Chair Powell's message at the post-meeting press conference to be slightly more hawkish, which will be positive for the dollar.

"It is doubtful that Powell will take steps to undermine US-led risks sufficiently to warrant a reconsideration of short-JPY-centric arbitrage, rather than long high-yield Latin American bonds. ”

Goldman Sachs expects the Fed to also debate the level of the neutral rate. The bank estimates the long-term neutral rate to be in the range of 3.25-3.5%, higher than the consensus of 2-2.5%. Some officials have identified June as the month in which discussions of a rate cut by the ECB may begin.

In the foreign exchange market, the euro and the Australian dollar rose against the Japanese yen. The euro touched 164.34 yen, its highest level since 2008, and the Australian dollar traded at 98.72 yen, just below a nine-year high.

In commodities, oil prices retreated from multi-month highs on the back of a stronger dollar. Brent crude fell 0.2% to $87.19 a barrel, while U.S. crude fell 0.4% to $83.18 a barrel.

Gold prices held steady at $2,156.08 an ounce, a significant pullback from the all-time high of $2,194.99 reached earlier this month.

**Author: Sherry S. & Icing This article represents the views of the author only and does not constitute any trading advice. The content of this article is original, the copyright is owned by Gate.io, if you need to reprint, please indicate the author and source, otherwise you will be held legally responsible. **