WEEKLY CRYPTOCURRENCY MARKET ANALYSIS

Hello, welcome to this week’s 276th edition of Cryptonaire Weekly Magazine. The global crypto market cap is $1.08 Trillion, down $50 Billion since the last week. The total crypto market trading volume over the last 24 hours is at 88.89 billion. The DeFi volume is $7.84 Billion, 8.82% of the entire crypto market’s 24-hour trading volume. The volume of all stable coins is $84.87 Billion, which is 95.48% share of the total crypto market volume the last 24 hours. The largest gainers in the industry right now are WrappedTokens and Synthetic Issuer cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin’s price has increased by 9.13% from $22,450 last week to around $24,500 and Ether’s price has increased by 7.94% from $1,575 last week to $1,700 Bitcoin's market cap is $474 Billion and the altcoin market cap is $606 Billion.

The United States banking sector witnessed a huge turmoil in the past week. It started after Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) said on March 8 that it needed to raise $2.25 billion to strengthen its balance sheet. That spooked customers who withdrew $42 billion of deposits by the end of March 9, according to a California regulatory filing. This bank run unnerved investors and stoked fears that other banks may also get affected. To prevent that and to reassure customers, the U.S. regulators stepped in and shut down the bank on March 10. However, by then, the contagion had already spread and customers withdrew $10 billion in deposits from Signature Bank, a board member told CNBC. The US regulators announced on March 12 that they will take over Signature Bank to protect the depositors and strengthen confidence in the US banking system. The Federal Reserve announced the creation of a new Bank Term Funding Program to safeguard investors’ deposits but that did not stop the bloodbath in regional banks when US markets opened on March 13.

Percentage of Total Market Capitalization (Dominance)

Some economists expect the Fed to hold rates steady due to the banking crisis. The CME FedWatch Tool shows a 25% probability of a pause by the Fed in their March meeting. The collapse of the legacy banking system had an effect on the crypto companies. Circle, the issuer of USD Coin (USDC), tweeted on March 10 that $3.3 billion of its $40 billion USDC reserves were stuck at SVB. That created panic among crypto investors and resulted in the USDC losing its peg to the US dollar. The USDC fell to $0.87 on March 11 but recovered and fully re-pegged to the US dollar by March 13, according to CoinGecko data.

A silver lining in the chaos of the past few days is that Bitcoin witnessed aggressive buying at lower levels. Bitcoin rose from $19,568 on March 10 to $24,710 on March 13, a 26% jump within a short time. This suggests that Bitcoin is behaving as a safe haven during the crisis.