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BTC's "organic movement" Toward $70,000 And Recession Fears
For bitcoin, the week started with a test of the $80,000 level, following a drop over the previous few days.
On Tuesday, the price hit a local low near $77,000. By the middle of the week the rate partially recovered. On Saturday night, the chart showed a local high near $84,500.
At the time of writing, bitcoin is trading at $83,266. With a capitalization of $1.65 trillion, the first cryptocurrency has fallen in price by 0.3% over the previous week.
Social media analysis shows that after the market crash on Feb. 27, users' anxiety level over a possible price drop to $70,000 has peaked.
But Santiment estimates that the real "capitulation point" will come when the $50,000-69,000 corridor dominates forecasts and the $100,000-119,000 range becomes rarely mentioned.
Nansen analyst Aurelie Barter called bitcoin's move toward $70,000 "an organic part of the current bull market."
In her opinion, the first cryptocurrency is moving in the general macro trend. The next range will be $71,000-72,000 - but that exceeds levels recorded before the November US election.
QCP Capital called the trigger for the market drawdown the U.S. president's indifference to recession risks. Despite his reputation as a defender of the stock market, he allowed a correction - a "correction" of the state through a downturn on Wall Street.
CryptoQuant noted a sharp drop in open interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum futures, suggesting a "washout of leverage" and a chance of market stabilization.
The total was down $1.37 billion - of which $668 million was attributed to digital gold and $700 million to the second most capitalized cryptocurrency.
Ethereum opened the week at $2,000, losing about 20% over the previous seven days.
On March 13, the ETH/BTC exchange rate fell to 0.0224, a record low since May 2020.
At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading at $1895. It has a capitalization of $228.69 billion. The drop for the week is 10.4%.
According to Alliance DAO co-founder Qiao Wang, Ethereum's current oversold level is comparable to the situation after the Terra crash in 2021, the 2018 bear market, and the hack of The DAO in 2016.
Glassnode recorded an accumulation of 600,000-700,000 ETH at $1900 when assessing the onchain picture on a week-to-week basis. Resistance may be $2200 (deals for 465,000 ETH have been made).
The supply gap between the two marks remains insignificant, which makes a short-term movement to resistance likely, analysts emphasized.
On the horizon over the past six months, experts highlighted the accumulation of coins at $1800, $2400 and $2900 levels.
By March 11, the price of SOL dropped below realized value for the first time in about three years - the difference is 8%. Relative to the high of $293.31 reached on Jan. 19, the exchange rate has sagged 57.7%.
Against the backdrop of the collapse of the meme-coin hype, there has been a sharp decline in TVL ecosystem and Solana's onchain revenues.
The former has fallen more than 45% from its January peak, the latter by 93%.
About 80% of the Solana network's revenue comes from commission revenue from trading meme coins on platforms like Pump.fun, according to a VanEck report.
The "funny coin factory" revenues peaked above the $15 million mark in the second half of January, but as early as March 10, the daily figure was ~$130,000.
The GMCI Meme Index, which reflects the capitalization of the largest meme-coins, is also slowly falling.
Among the assets on the top-10 list by capitalization, only BNB (+5.2%) and XRP (+4.1%) rose over the past week.
TRX (-10.6%), ETH (-10.4%) and ADA (-8.4%) were the biggest losers.
The US Will Consider A New Crypto Reserve Bill
Senator Cynthia Lummis presented an updated Bitcoin Act bill in the U.S. Senate that would allow the government to store more than 1 million bitcoins as part of a newly created crypto reserve.
The document suggests that the US will buy 200,000 BTC each year for five years, reallocating current Federal Reserve (Fed) and Treasury Department funds. This would allow for the accumulation of 1 million bitcoins.
The updated version of the law allows accumulation of cryptocurrency by legal means - through confiscation, donations or transfers from federal agencies.
US states will be able to voluntarily transfer bitcoin reserves to the general strategic reserve. Such assets will be kept in a separate account.
The main provisions of the Bitcoin Act are:
- Creating a decentralized network of secure bitcoin vaults managed by the Treasury Department "guaranteeing the highest level of physical and cybersecurity."
- buying 1 million BTC within a "set" period of time to acquire 5% of the cryptocurrency issue, which corresponds to the size and scale of the U.S. gold reserve;
- Pay for the program by diversifying existing Federal Reserve and Ministry of Finance funds;
- reaffirming the rights of private bitcoin holders to self-storage without infringing on individual financial freedoms.
The regulations for handling assets resulting from the fork of bitcoin have also undergone changes. Now, after a mandatory holding period, the secretary is given the authority to select and retain the most valuable version of the asset based on market capitalization.
Republican Byron Donalds intends to introduce a bill in the U.S. Congress that would protect the strategic bitcoin reserve from a possible revocation of the decree by a future head of state.
Some politicians, on the other hand, are calling for the government to scrap the plans. Among them is U.S. House of Representatives member Gerald Connolly, who called the reserve "useless" and accused the president of a conflict of interest.
The politician also called Trump's plans "unreasonable fiscal policy," pointing to the selection of digital assets via social media.
According to a poll by the firm Data For Progress, 51% of American voters oppose implementing such a strategic reserve, while 34% support the idea and another 15% are unsure.
User intentionally interfered with Pectra testing
An attacker was involved in technical issues that arose in the Sepolia Ethereum testnet after the rollout of the Pectra update.
According to developer Marius van der Weijden, an unknown user took advantage of an unreported edge case to intentionally cause network outages.
After an update was released, the Ethereum client Geth started reporting errors and mining empty blocks. The failure was caused by incorrect event generation by the deposit contract. A test transaction was sent to it to test the withdrawal functionality.
The developers created a patch and after about three and a half hours, deployed it in a coordinated manner. However, the network soon began producing empty blocks again. The programmers discovered another problematic transaction that resulted in the same error.
According to van der Weyden, at first they thought that one of the trusted validators had made an inaccuracy. But as it turned out, the transaction was made from a new, recently funded account.
The team suspected that an attacker was reading some of their chats and decided to perform an update without publicity.
"The only way to stop the attack is to filter out all transactions that interact with the deposit contract. That's why we made a private patch that we deployed on several of our own nodes," van der Weyden explained.
These nodes accounted for approximately 10% of the network, allowing full blocks to be offered again and testnet to be used for further coordinated remediation.
"We did not lose finalization during the incident. As stated earlier, the problem only occurred on Sepolia because we use a deposit contract with a token lock as opposed to the main network," the developer added.
The EU Has Doubts About The Digital Euro
According to analysts at the European Central Bank, eurozone citizens are not interested in the digital euro and don't see much value in the CBDC.
The average household allocated only a small portion in a hypothetical scenario of allocating €10,000 to its digital version, leaving the share of traditional assets like cash, current and savings accounts virtually unchanged.
Europeans prefer existing payment methods and see no real benefit in a new type of payment system amidst the plethora of offline and online alternatives.
Amid a failure in the central bank's payment system, doubts have arisen among parliamentarians about the regulator's ability to implement the national digital currency project.
Problems with the Target 2 (T2) system late last month caused transactions to be delayed by a day. The cause was an error in the initial diagnosis of the failure by ECB technicians.
The regulator said that the digital euro would be closer in architecture to the TIPS instant payment system, which "processes millions of small transfers around the clock and has proven itself to be reliable". According to central bank officials, the disruption in TIPS on the day of the incident was minor.
Four of the eight groups of the European Parliament expressed concern about the incident. In their view, it calls into question the credibility of the ECB in the context of the development of the digital euro, which is supposed to operate as a new payment system throughout the eurozone.
The launch of the digital euro is planned by October 2025, provided the necessary regulatory framework is adopted, said the regulator's head Christine Lagarde. The project requires the consent of the European Parliament, the EU Council and the European Commission.
A Solo Miner Hit The Jackpot
On March 10, a solo miner mined block #887,212 on the first cryptocurrency network using a home Bitax rig with a hash rate of 480 GH/s. His reward amounted to 3.15 BTC or ~$250,000.
According to CKPool administrator Kon Kolivas, the probability of computing a block with such power is one in a million - on average, it requires 3,500 years of work.
In total, the user involved in mining six Bitax produced by D-Central Technologies with a combined hash rate of ~3.3 TH/s. The "winner" was one of the Ultra model installations. It uses an ASIC chip for Bitmain's Antminer S19XP.
Kolivas noted that connecting multiple miners increases the chances of luck. In his opinion, it is the total computing power that plays the main role in this case.
CKPool users have already mined 297 bitcoin solo blocks, Kolivas emphasized.
