First Mover Americas: Altcoins Lead as BTC Struggles to Stay Above $21K

Parikshit Mishra is the news editor for CoinDesk during the mid Asia and early European hours. He does not have any crypto holdings.

Good morning, and welcome to First Mover. I’m Lyllah Ledesma, here to take you through the latest in crypto markets, news and insights.

• Price point: Altcoins lead, BTC recovers from weekend lows and fights to stay above $21,000.
• Market Moves: A large wallet at the center of the governance drama at Solana lending protocol Solend started to move millions of dollars of cryptocurrencies this morning.

Price point

Altcoins are taking the lead Tuesday, with Polygon’s MATIC up 11%, Solana (SOL) by 9.5% and NEAR Protocol (NEAR) by 9%.

Bitcoin was 2.6% up on the day and hovering around the $21,000 mark. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is 20% higher compared to the 2022 lows around $17,000 reached over the weekend.

This short and sharp downward movement was triggered by liquidations and some miners selling positions around $20,000 to re-enter at a lower price, according to Pablo Jodar, financial products manager at Storm Partners, a systems provider for the cryptocurrency space in Europe.

Although bitcoin is seeing some consolidation towards $23,000, it still needs to break that resistance to start considering a higher movement towards $30,000, said Jodar. The $19,000 level is still the key support level.

“If the $23K level is broken, we might have a bull summer for cryptos and potentially a good end of the year, but volatility remains quite high to make such an assumption,” Jodar said.

Another reliable metric to test market sentiment is the in-and-out transfers from exchanges to private wallets, according to Jodar. The metric provides insight into what whales (individuals or entities that hold large amounts of cryptocurrency) are doing with their funds.

Over the last month, there were many inflows in exchanges from whales liquidating their positions, but this has started to change, with big outflows spotted Monday from exchanges to private wallets, according to data from Glassnode.

“You see tremendous outflows when BTC came down to $17.6K, and then netflows being less negative now,” said Jodar.

“This means that some big investors have bought back again and expect to hodl the coins,” said Jodar. "Hodl" is crypto jargon for the practice of holding assets for the long term with no intent to sell even if the price crashes.

Market moves

A large wallet at the center of the governance drama at Solana lending protocol Solend started to move millions of dollars of cryptocurrencies this morning, Solend said in a tweet.

The move potentially averts the risk of contagion in case of a liquidation that could have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

The anonymous wallet had deposited 95% of Solend’s pool of SOL tokens and represented 88% of USDC borrowing, but came close to a margin call last week as the SOL price dropped more than 40% to as low as $27.

The protocol would have automatically liquidated up to 20% of the whale’s collateral if SOL hit $22.30, and potentially led to damage in the broader Solana ecosystem. A governance vote was floated by protocol developers to take control of the account and take adequate risk management steps.

The wallet’s actions Tuesday came as the SOL price rose by 12% over 24 hours to hit $37. This means the liquidation levels are far below current levels, allowing the wallet’s user to take necessary steps to prevent unforeseen damages in the case of liquidation.

Latest headlines

• CBDCs, Not Crypto, Will Be Cornerstone of Future Monetary System, BIS SaysA 42-page chapter in the Bank for International Settlements’ 2022 Annual Economic Report envisions a future where programmability and tokenization are built on top of central bank digital currencies.
• Kaiko to Provide Deutsche Borse With Crypto Market DataThe integration is expected to be completed by Q4 of this year.
• Cardano Developers Delay 'Vasil' Upgrade Citing BugsSeven bugs remained outstanding to completing the hard fork, leading to a delay in the scheduled upgrade.
• European Crypto Unicorn Bitpanda Is Now Regulated in SpainThe cryptocurrency exchange is also registered with regulators in Austria, France, Italy and Sweden.
• Solana NFT Marketplace Magic Eden Raises $130M at $1.6B Valuation The large raise comes during an otherwise downcast crypto climate.

Today’s newsletter was edited by Bradley Keoun and produced by Nelson Wang.