What happened
Weekends have been good for the cryptocurrency market recently, and today is no different. After a pop in values last Saturday, the move has been repeated this weekend, with green across the market.
As of 9:00 a.m. ET, Bitcoin (BTC 0.51%) has jumped as much as 8.6% in the last 24 hours, Ethereum (ETH -1.99%) gained 5.9%, and Solana (SOL -3.36%) was up 19%. Those moves have trailed off slightly, and the tokens are now up 5.5%, 2%, and 6.9%, respectively, in the last day.
So what
The macro driver of the crypto move is clearly the economic and monetary backdrop. Recent data has shown inflation pressures easing, and there is speculation the Federal Reserve will slow interest rate increases in the next few months. Earnings season has begun also, and results have been strong for the banking industry. That’s causing investors to flood back into higher-risk assets, like crypto.
We did get the long-anticipated bankruptcy of crypto firm Genesis on Thursday night. This is certainly bad from a visibility standpoint for crypto, but it also hasn’t caused much concern within the industry because withdrawals have been locked since November.
The next shoe to drop may be Genesis’ parent company, Digital Currency Group (DCG), which has run into its own funding issues related to illiquid assets and losses from FTX and Three Arrows Capital going bankrupt.
Investors like certainty, and while Genesis’ bankruptcy isn’t good for the industry, it does bring more clarity to the situation. We are also seeing fewer knock-on effects from these businesses going bankrupt. You may remember that Three Arrows Capital went bankrupt this past summer, and it took months for that to lead to FTX’s collapse and the resulting plunge in Solana’s value.
Genesis and DCG going bankrupt or becoming a fraction of themselves is likely priced into the market and doesn’t seem to have the same downstream effects on other businesses.
While all this has been going on, Solana, in particular, has…