Bitcoin bigger than gold?

Preparing for a different sort of flippening

Happy Monday! Bitcoin is flexing a breakout above its February range highs at about $52,400 on a 4-hour closing basis.

A break above $53,000 a couple hours ago suddenly had market commentary newsletter writers everywhere throwing out their drafts and starting over. If it holds above that level by end of day, it opens a door for the rally — which had stalled last week — to continue higher.

Of course, it’s a long day ahead; this breakout could always fail, in which case a period of consolidation in March would remain probable.

Goings-on in Washington are among the catalysts to keep tabs on this week: The clock is ticking for members of the US Congress to cut a deal by Friday and avert a government shutdown.

Fed watchers are eyeing Thursday’s release of Core Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index numbers, policymakers’ preferred measure of inflation.

In airdrop news, Ethereum layer-2 (that wasn’t), Blast, says it's on track to meet its end of February target date, with mainnet slated for Thursday as well. Depositors have yolo’ed almost $2 billion dollars worth of ether and stablecoins into a one-way bridge since November. 

Speculation is abound that Wormhole’s $W token launch is close, but nothing’s confirmed there. One Solana play that is, though — real estate based trading platform Parcl, whose token, PRCL, is apparently going live in April.

— Macauley Peterson (X: @yeluacaM | Farcaster: @Macauley)

Starknet activity, past 7 days:

Source: Starkscan.co

Tomorrow marks one week since the STRK token claim window opened. That led to a flurry of activity on Starknet. But it seems to have been short-lived, as active account figures have returned to pre-airdrop levels.

Although “Provisions” can be claimed until June, most available tokens have already been snapped up. Price has remained stable in recent days, trading in a range between about $1.85 and $1.95.

The Uniswap Foundation has put the idea of a fee switch up in the governance forum, paving the way for an additional taker rate to be imminently turned on. This should result in further upside for UNI, especially on the back of Dencun and Uniswap v4’s launch in Q3 2024.

Ethena is an Ethereum protocol that democratizes access to an ETH funding/basis trade via its synthetic dollar, USDe.

Though the opposing flow trend is likely to slow over time, industry watchers note, bitcoin fund assets could one day eclipse the $90 billion gold ETF space.

Celestia had the first mover advantage. EigenDA has staked ether. What sets Avail apart?

The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.