Wed Mar 15 2023

Digital assets held on to their stellar performance. BTC, which has benefited from the USDC fud and banking 'fud' opened at $24.7k. ETH relatively underperformed to open at $1.6k. There is some general optimism that the FDIC has stalled the crisis with a backstop. But Credit Suisse, across the pond, has raised concerns about its own well-being. As a result, the equity markets are down 1.5%. Ethereum developers are releasing the final upgrade to the Goerli testnet today. Liquity’s LUSD stablecoin has gained new admirers during the USDC depeg. BTC's 30-day correlation with Nasdaq and STOX has plummeted, with STOX's correlation now in negative territory. Deribit has the highest OI for its March 31st expiration. The  30D skew is again positive after turning negative during the recent fud. OI has increased by $21.5k in strikes, puts, and $31.0k calls.

While Meta is dropping NFTs while it restrategizes, several top NFT players have welcomed Amazon's entry to the NFT market. Filecoin has successfully implemented its own VM and is supporting smart contracts. More than 3 million ETH has been burned since EIP 1559 was rolled out, which divided the fees into a base fee (burnt) and a tip. March 11th saw 9.4 thousand ETH burned, a daily ATH. Uniswap is launching on BNB, challenging Pancake.

SBF's lawyers want to handle his HOOD shares worth $465 million after the criminal charges are settled. DOJ is arguing that the legal protection offered to those involved in Voyager's sale to Binance US is a case of the bankruptcy court overstepping its authority. Russia is yet to regulate decentralized cryptocurrencies, but the Bank of Russia has approved its fifth entity for the authorized issuers of digital assets. NYDFS has clarified that Signature Bank's takeover had nothing to do with crypto or anti-crypto messaging. The past month saw the most investments by VCs since November. Crypto custodian Anchorage is joining the layoff wagon with a 20% staff reduction. UK has added a crypto declaration to the tax forms.

The US PPI showed a marginal decline for February. Retail sales continued their downward trend and were down 0.4% month over month. The Fed has many new datapoints before its next meeting on the 22nd. Inflation is still three times its target rate, but the Fed cannot risk being extra hawkish for the time being.