Daily News | Bitcoin Holding Down, Market Retreat; The Pre-sale Trend of Memes on Solana Attracted Over $100 Million; Saudi Established $40 Billion Fund to Invest in AI

Crypto Daily Digest: Bitcoin’s holdings are falling, leading to market correction; The pre-sale trend of memes on Solana has attracted over 100 million funds

Firstly, let’s examine the trading activities of Bitcoin ETFs. According to Farside Investor data, on March 19, Grayscale’s GBTC funds continued to Flow out significantly, reaching $443.5 million. Meanwhile, the Fidelity Bitcoin spot ETF (FBTC) inflow was $39.66 million, and the Bitwise Bitcoin spot ETF (BITB) inflow was $2.5 million.

On March 19, the price of Bitcoin continued to decline, hitting a low of around $61,500, with a 24-hour decline of 5.4%. ETH is currently reporting $3,208.57, a decrease of 6.6%, with Altcoins showing a general decline. This is mainly because most Bitcoin holders are gradually taking profits and selling Bitcoin, which is a typical price retreat before halving. In the long run, investors remain bullish on BTC and ETH.

Since $BOME started pre-sale mode and received unexpected amounts of funds, token prices have skyrocketed, and more and more Altcoin memes have appeared on Solana one after another, such as the hot $SLERF (Gate has already launched $BOME and $SLERF tokens).

Slerf developers apologized on social media after accidentally burning tokens, which instead caused a wave of “going viral.” The community’s attention led to a surge in token prices, exceeding $1.37 at one point but now falling back to $0.85.

But now, there is considerable controversy over whether developers intentionally did this. The developer naturally denied it, stating that he had “no intention” of destroying the token. “This is a fact, but I have no intention of burning the dropped tokens,” Slerf wrote in a post sent to X on March 19.

However, Wildcat creator Laurence Day stated that Slerf’s burning was “almost certainly intentional” to excite the project. He explained that someone had deposited $1.9 million into the liquidity pool shortly after the destruction and sold it for $5 million, indicating that insiders may have used the incident to profit from hysteria.

Chain detective ZachXBT made a pre-sale project statistics and said, “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.”

Regarding this, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, stated that he does not support pre-sales and forwarded Zach’s data, saying, “Stop these.”

On Tuesday, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) again postponed its decision on the “spot Ethereum ETF” proposed by Hashdex and ARK 21Shares. The SEC’s final decision on ARK 21Shares is May 24, and Hashdex’s application will face an ultimatum from regulatory authorities on or before May 30.

Analysts are not optimistic about the possibility of approval for the eight Ethereum ETFs proposed by BlackRock, Grayscale, Fidelity, Invesco Galaxy, VanEck, Hashdex, and Franklin Templeton.

Market Trends: Altcoins generally fell, leading to a significant increase in market volatility

The market experienced severe fluctuations during this period, with BTC prices approaching $61,000 and ETH approaching $3,100, while Altcoins generally fell. In addition, BTC spot ETFs have continued their net outflow trend from the previous day, temporarily lacking strong buying as before, and the application for ETH ETFs has also been delayed.

Regarding macroeconomics, the US stock market has fluctuated. Previously, the market had expected the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in June, but the likelihood of this expectation has dramatically decreased. On the other hand, the Bank of Japan announced its first interest rate hike in 17 years, ending the era of negative yen interest rates. The mainstream view is that a yen rate hike will inevitably impact risky assets.

Market Hotspots

In the public chain field, projects such as FTM, APT, and SUI have increased. Of particular note, APT will unlock tokens worth $400 million on April 12. Generally speaking, there will be a certain price increase before unlocking tokens to cope with the potential token-selling pressure after unlocking.

Regarding Meme concept coins, BOME experienced a 70% decline after experiencing a high point and has stabilized and rebounded. SLERF’s 24-hour trading volume exceeded $2.69 billion, attracting most of the market’s attention. Meanwhile, the Meme projects on the Solana chain are increasingly lacking novelty.

Overall, the market is showing an increasing volatility trend, and investors need to closely monitor market hotspots and macroeconomic trends to develop corresponding investment strategies.

Macro: Saudi Arabia plans to establish $40 billion fund to invest in artificial intelligence. The Japanese yen is falling, and the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting has become the focus

According to the New York Times on Tuesday, citing three sources familiar with the matter, the Saudi Arabian government plans to establish a fund of approximately $40 billion to invest in artificial intelligence. In recent weeks, representatives from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) have discussed potential partnerships with American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and other financiers.

PIF officials also discussed Andreessen Horowitz’s role and how the fund will operate, adding that these plans may still change. The newspaper reported that other venture capitalists may participate in the Kingdom’s artificial intelligence fund, which is expected to be launched in the second half of 2024.

On the global market front, the focus is still on Japan and the Federal Reserve; Japan was closed for a holiday, but the weakening yen caused Nikkei index futures to rise 0.6%. The day before, the Bank of Japan ended years of negative interest rates with a well-known move. The Nikkei 225 index has returned above 40,000 points, just one step away from its historical high of 40,472 points earlier this month.

With the exit of the Bank of Japan, the focus now is entirely on the outcome of the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting later, with the risk that the new economic forecast (the dot plot) may only predict two rate cuts, starting with policy easing from three or later rate cuts. Due to recent data showing that inflation remains sticky, the market has postponed the first rate cut by the Federal Reserve to June, or even July.

Raskin expects that the dot plot and Federal Reserve Chairman Powell’s information at the post-meeting press conference will lean towards a slightly hawkish stance, which will benefit the US dollar.

“It is doubtful whether Powell will take measures to weaken the US fully led risk and ensure a reconsideration of arbitrage centered around short yen, rather than long high-yield Latin American bonds.”

Goldman Sachs expects the Federal Reserve to continue debating the level of neutral interest rates. The bank estimates that the long-term neutral interest rate is in the range of 3.25-3.5%, higher than the widely believed 2-2.5%. Some officials have recognized June as the month when discussions about the European Central Bank’s interest rate cut may begin.

The euro and Australian dollar rose against the Japanese yen in the foreign exchange market. The euro/yen exchange rate touched 164.34 yen, the highest level since 2008, while the Australian dollar/yen exchange rate was 98.72 yen, slightly lower than a nine-year high.

Regarding commodities, oil prices have fallen from several months of high levels due to the strengthening of the US dollar. Brent crude oil fell 0.2% to $87.19 per barrel, while US crude oil fell 0.4% to $83.18 per barrel.

The gold price remained stable at $2,156.08 per ounce, with a significant decline from the historical high of $2,194.99 earlier this month.