Things change fast in the cryptocurrency industry. In the span of seven days, the market shifted completely, with the sentiment escaping the fear zone. The total capitalization also soared, adding a whopping $165 billion in the process. But what happened? Well, let’s dive in.
First things first, it’s important to note that BTC’s price is currently trading above $26K, reaching highs last seen nine months ago in June 2022. This marks a 30% increase, and it comes on the back of major macroeconomic developments in the United States.
Recall that Silicon Valley Bank – a major financial institution in the US with a substantial amount of VC money in deposits, went bust. The bank revealed a hole in its balance sheet and was unable to patch it through a share offering, scaring

The Arbitrum airdrop is arguably one of the most highly-anticipated events in the cryptocurrency industry throughout the past couple of months. It seems that the wait is finally over.
The team also released documentation as to which users qualify, so let’s have a look.
First things first, the airdrop will take place on March 23rd, but users can already check their eligibility, and their precise claim to ARB tokens is here.
There is a point system that will dictate how many tokens each user will get, with everyone needing a minimum of three points to qualify.
The point score is capped at 15, and some of the actions include bridging funds to Arbitrum One, doing transactions, and so forth.
The maximum allocation a single address can get is 10,200 tokens.
The ARB token will

As if the traditional banking system isn’t causing enough troubles, a DeFi lending protocol called Euler Finance was also hit by a flash-loan attack.
The damage equates to almost $200 million worth of staked ether, USDC, wrapped BTC, and DAI.
Euler Finance is a decentralized lending protocol that was most recently exploited for a whopping $197 million in total.
The breakdown of the funds is as follows: $8.7 million worth of the decentralized stablecoin DAI, $34 million worth of USDC, $19 million WBTC (wrapped BTC), and $136 million worth of staked ETH.
The hacker was able to borrow a large amount of money and drain them from the DeFi protocol through a so-called flash loan.
The way flash loans work is they enable users to take a loan without collateralizing them, provided

The past 24 hours saw the cryptocurrency market take a bit of a breather as it managed to recover around $16 billion in terms of its total capitalization.
That said, the turmoil around USDC continues, although the stablecoin recovered to about $0.95 as Circled issued a somewhat reassuring statement.
USDC Recovers to $0.95
USDC’s depeg has been the hottest topic in the cryptocurrency market throughout the past 48 hours. It’s the second-largest stablecoin by means of total capitalization and the fifth-largest cryptocurrency altogether.
As a stablecoin, USDC’s price should never fluctuate from $1, but yesterday, it crashed and burned below $0.90 for the first time. This happened Silicon Valley Bank – one of the largest financial institutions in the fintech world, was

The past seven days turned into a bloodbath across the entire cryptocurrency market, which dropped below $1 trillion in terms of total capitalization. This happens for the first time since January 14th.
The decline comes on the back of a lot of negative macroeconomic developments, so let’s unpack.
First things first, Bitcoin’s price is trading around $20,000, albeit slightly below it at the time of this writing. The intraday low sits at $19,549 on Binance and BTC is down about 15% in the past seven days. Most of the losses happened during the last 24 hours, though.
The rest of the market is no different. Ethereum is also down 15%, BNB – 9.1%, Dogecoin – 20%, MATIC – 17.7%, SOL – 20.5%, and so forth – you get the picture. The only notable exception is XRP. Interestingly,

It’s safe to say that Bitcoin’s price has seen better days. The cryptocurrency fell below $20,000, reaching an intraday low at around $19,791 (on Binance) and charting a decline of around 8% in the past 24 hours alone.
Source: TradingViewThat said, the move didn’t come without its catalysts, so let’s have a look at five potential reasons why it happened.
Silvergate Bank
On March 2nd, Silvergate Bank – a financial institution that used to serve a myriad of crypto heavyweights – said that it’s going through operational issues and that it won’t be able to file its financial reports in time. Some experts believed, at the time, that most of the damage in terms of market impact is done, but that obviously wasn’t the case.
Not long after that, however, the bank announced that it

The Bitcoin price has picked up some steam throughout the past few minutes, and the primary reason for this seems to be the fact that Jerome Powell is testifying before Congress.
The  Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, is testifying before congress for the second day today.
Addressing the House Financial Services Committee in remarks, the Chairman admitted that inflationary pressure is higher than they had previously anticipated.
… inflationary pressures are running higher than expected at the time of our previous FOMC meeting.
However, he also noted that from a broader perspective, inflation is somewhat moderated compared to the middle of last year but still remains well above their target of 2%.
It’s also worth noting that he didn’t say something that he

This week was a complete rollercoaster in terms of price action as the majority of cryptocurrencies found themselves stuck in a chopping range before the ultimate leg down.
Bitcoin was trading at around $23,300 this time last week, and a couple of days later, it attempted the first push toward $24K. it was unsuccessful, and at around the end of the week, BTC found itself below $23K. However, this dip was immediately bought up, and the price tapped $24K on Wednesday.
The bulls weren’t convincing enough, which allowed the sellers to take control and send the price backward. It wasn’t until today, though, when the market shifted completely following a vicious hourly candle that saw the price crash by over $1K in a matter of minutes. At the time of this writing, BTC is trading

Some reports have started running rampant following a tweet that CryptoPotato created earlier today.
More specifically, the tweet in question is this:

RE: @binance – Voyager deal
This is what a US Judge responded to an SEC attorney who failed to provide specific arguments:
“Deliberative is one thing, but what have you done? If there are reasons to be concerned here, I need to hear specifics.” @cz_binance pic.twitter.com/fzMRzmtyu2
— CryptoPotato Official (@Crypto_Potato) March 3, 2023

It is related to recent developments with the SEC motion that opposes the attempt of BinanceUS to acquire Voyager Digital.
BinanceUS entered into a deal with Voyager back in December 2022, but the SEC objected in February this year.
Recent reports revealed some of the arguments that the US

Bitcoin’s price has been on a rollercoaster throughout the past seven days, and it has failed to chart any significant increase (or decrease) throughout the period. However, it was particularly volatile.
Last week at this time, the price was hovering around similar levels, around $24K, but it quickly took for the skies and touched $25K on Sunday. What followed was the first correction back to $24K, after which BTC bounced again and reached $25K once more. It remained there for a couple of days, but bulls were unable to establish control, and bears eventually won the war, pushing the price back below $24K.
On Thursday, BTC attempted yet another shot at recovery and got to around $24,700, but was unable to sustain these levels and retraced to where it’s currently trading at

The cryptocurrency industry has long been a target of phishing attacks, and it seems that hackers are finding new and more clever ways to scam their victims.
This time, it was the website of an anticipated event that was entirely faked in an attempt to trick victims out of their crypto.
ETH Denver is advertised as the largest and longest-running ETH event in the world. This year, it will take place between February 24th and March 5th.
Conferences are typically a place of interest for many people, and a lot of them tend to be newcomers who aren’t yet familiar with the dangers of the industry.
This is what hackers have recently tried exploiting, creating a completely new fake website that resembles the official website of ETH Denver.
The threat was detected by crypto

The past seven days saw Bitcoin’s price increase by a whopping 10% in a few violent green candles that took place in the span of a couple of days. This brought a lot of positivity to the industry, and the total capitalization is also up by about $100 billion.
At the time of this writing, BTC trades at around $24K, but it managed to paint a fresh high of above $25K for the first time since the summer of 2022. This has also had an impact on the entire market, as most of the altcoins are also charting massive gains. Ethereum is up 8.3%, ADA – 10.4%, MATIC – 20.3%, OKB – 37.4%, SOL – 11%, and so forth.
This has also raised hopes for many that the bear market is finally over and that the next stop for BTC is $30K. One of those who support this idea is no other than Mike

Ordinals keep making headlines as there are now more than 100,000 inscriptions carried out on Bitcoin’s network. This has had a notable effect on the network state itself and has sparked a massive debate within the community.
Inscriptions are Bitcoin’s version of a non-fungible token (NFT), and they have been making strides throughout the past couple of weeks.
Multiple high-end sales already took place within the range of the first 1,000 inscriptions, with Ordinal Punks currently holding the all-time high.
Today, a new milestone for this relatively nascent space took place as the protocol saw the 100,000th inscription take place.
Dune Analytics reports that there are currently around 106K of them, highlighting the speed at which people are inscribing.
It’s also worth

The past seven days saw the cryptocurrency market decline considerably and lose around $60 billion of its total capitalization. This came on the back of a regulatory crackdown on behalf of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission toward cryptocurrency staking.
It all started a couple of days back when a report suggested that the SEC is targeting the crypto exchange Kraken to allege that its staking offerings represented unregistered securities.
The following day, the CEO of Brian Armstrong also tweeted his concerns on the matter, saying that this would be particularly negative for the industry. The results were not late. Shortly after, the SEC came out with a statement that they settled with Kraken. The latter shut down its entire cryptocurrency staking program

The long-awaited second airdrop of Ethereum’s layer-two scaling solution – Optimism – is here. The protocol distributed a total of 11.7 million OP tokens to over 300,000 addresses.
The price of OP dropped after the announcement.
Many have been expecting the second airdrop of the popular Ethereum layer-two scaling solution, Optimism. The first one saw around 200 million OP tokens airdropped to 250,000 early adopters, and some of them received up to $20K worth of tokens on the day of the event.
This one, however, pales in comparison. The airdrop saw 11.7 million tokens distributed to 300,000 addresses based on various criteria.
This means the average user who qualified got about 39 tokens worth less than $100 at current prices.
The announcement reads:
Airdrop #2 has been

The cryptocurrency industry, in general, became a lot more popular in the past couple of years. This saw the development and launch of hundreds, if not thousands, of decentralized applications (dApps) in various fields, such as DeFi, gaming, learning, trading, investing, and whatnot.
There are many reasons for this, including but not limited to the massive bull run in 2021, the rise of non-fungible tokens, the popularity of memecoins, and more. This saw hundreds of thousands of users flocking to whatever the next trend may be.
Unlike previous cycles, however, this time, we also saw regular users take advantage of on-chain availabilities and interact with various dApps such as Uniswap, OpenSea, and so forth. And while this had a massively beneficial effect on the industry’s

Scaling Ethereum has undoubtedly been one of the hottest topics in the past months. The network’s transition to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm in September 2022 was a huge milestone in this regard, as it opened the door for many different scaling solutions to be implemented.
While Ethereum developers are working on ways to scale the network natively, the power of layer-two solutions is only beginning to manifest.
Concepts such as zero-knowledge proofs are now becoming a working reality, but for many, they are still very foreign ideas. To help us understand more about the future of Ethereum scaling is Gal Ron – a product manager and a blockchain researcher at StarkWare – a company primarily focused at exactly this.
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The Problem With Ethereum
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StarkWare – a company focused on Ethereum scaling – will open-source its Zero-Knowledge (ZK) software.
StarkWare announced today that it plans to open-source its STARK Prover – the engine that’s designed to generate cryptographic proofs that compress hundreds of thousands of transactions for submission to Ethereum in fewer kilobytes than a smartphone photograph.
This is also the technology that powers Starknet and StarkEx – solutions that have reportedly scaled more transactions on Ethereum than all other L2 scaling solutions combined.
According to the press release shared with CryptoPotato, the plan will take time to implement, but when it’s complete, the Starknet technology stack will be open source.
Speaking on the matter was Eli Ben-Sasson, President of StarkWare, who

Optimism continues to perform. The cryptocurrency just painted a fresh all-time high which, at this point, happens almost daily.
This brings its total gains for the week to around 43%.
Optimism continues to be one of the best performers within the cryptocurrency market, and its native token – OP – managed to increase by 43% in the past seven days.
Its monthly gains are even more impressive, clocking in at around 230% for the past 30 days.
At the time of this writing, OP trades at around $3.22 (on Binance), charting a fresh all-time high.
Source: TradingView
The impressive price performance comes on the back of a considerable increase in the total value locked in the protocol, which is currently sitting at a 3-month high.
The last time the TVL was so high was back in

The past seven days saw the total cryptocurrency market capitalization increase by around $35 billion, and the industry continues to recover from the multitude of bankruptcies in 2022.
Some argue that the pace of the recovery is slowing down and that this might be the cause for another bearish reversal. Others are making a bullish case because they expect the US Federal Reserve to pivot in its monetary policy and to slow down in increasing interest rates. This is supported by this week’s FOMC meeting when the Fed hiked the rates with 25 basis points – exactly as many expected. This had a positive impact on the markets as a whole.
Bitcoin soared to a high above $24,000 for the first time since August 2022, while the rest of the market also rallied. There’s been a correction

The market sentiment continues to improve as cryptocurrencies see another week of trading in the green. The market added around $70 billion to its total capitalization, while the overall sentiment is at a 10-month high.
It’s interesting to note that Bitcoin’s dominance continues to increase. This means it fared better than altcoins in terms of price performance. The leading cryptocurrency managed to add around 9% and is now battling for the important level at $23,000. A couple of days ago, the price pushed toward $24K aggressively but was immediately rejected in what were a few hours of massive volatility.
Macroeconomic data, according to many, favors risk-on assets as inflation is slowing down, the US GDP numbers were better than expected, and today’s PCE was in line with

Aptos is undoubtedly the hottest story of the past month, being amongst the absolute best-performing cryptocurrencies in the past 30 days. APT, its native token, skyrocketed by a mind-blowing 400% during that period.
This put the project at the forefront and also gave way to a renewed layer-1 trade narrative, with other names also popping off.
You can check our complete guide on Aptos in the following video:
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That said, there are a few reasons which explain the increase in APT’s price, so let’s dive in.
The Entire Market Rallied
Undoubtedly the biggest reason for APT’s increase is the fact that the entire cryptocurrency market saw tremendously renewed interest since the beginning of 2023.
The total market capitalization is up by about $250 billion in that

Ethereum Liquid Staking tokens are going through the roof. Lido is up 150% in a month, similarly Frax Shares, while other protocols, such as Rocket Pool, are also catching up. 
But that’s not all. NFTs are also seeing massive volumes for multiple consecutive weeks, showing little signs of slowing down.
The question now is for how long this positive trend will sustain – is it a dead cat bounce or the beginning of a much-awaited recovery?
To help us crunch the numbers and interpret some of the on-chain data is Martin Lee – a Data Journalist from the popular cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen.
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Liquid Staking Coins Trend Upwards, but for How Long?
Ethereum LSD, or liquid staking derivative coins, have been the hottest story of 2023 so far, with many of the

The acting Chief Executive Officer of FTX, John J. Ray III, who is in charge of making sure that the creditors of the bankrupt exchange receive as much compensation as possible, said that the platform might restart.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, John J. Ray III said that restarting the exchange is on the table.
Everything is on the table. If there is a path forward on that, then we will not only explore that, we will do it.
FTX filed for Bankruptcy back in November 2022, using Chapter 11.
Mr. Ray further clarified that he will be looking into whether restarting the international exchange would recover more value for the company’s creditors than his team could potentially get from simply liquidating the assets or selling the entire thing.
There are

Pi Network is a controversial cryptocurrency project that has been making rounds across the crypto industry over the past few weeks after the token was listed on some crypto exchanges, including the popular trading platform Huobi.
Since its inception four years ago, the project has attracted millions worldwide as users can mine and earn its native token, dubbed Pi, by completing simple tasks.
Some experts have raised concerns about the legitimacy of the Pi Network, claiming the project is nothing but a classic Ponzi Scheme seeking to defraud investors in the long run. But is this true? Let’s take a look.
This article unravels everything about Pi Network, from its beginning to its latest controversial listing.
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What is Pi Network?
Pi Network is a

Ethereum is the largest smart contract platform in the industry, and it underwent a major shift by transitioning to a new consensus algorithm in 2022.
What is commonly referred to as The Merge saw the network abandon Proof of Work and transition to Proof of Stake in pursuit of fulfilling its broader roadmap towards scalability, decentralization, and security.
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With the introduction of Proof of Stake on the Beacon chain a while back, users were able to deposit 32 ETH to become full validators of the network.
This is part of Ethereum’s core components – namely, decentralization and transparency. In essence, users across the world are able to maintain the network and uphold it by running their own validator nodes.
However, this, in itself, also brought up a

In a hearing from today, a bankruptcy attorney said that FTX has managed to locate over $5 billion of assets.
Per a CoinDesk report, the attorney said that they’ve managed to locate over $5 billion of cash and liquid assets.
We have located over $5 billion of cash, liquid cryptocurrency, and liquid investment securities measured at petition date value.
This number doesn’t include the $450 million in cryptocurrencies that are currently held by the Securities Commission of the Bahamas.
In addition, they also located illiquid cryptocurrency tokens where they hold such large positions that can’t be offloaded without affecting the market for said tokens.

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The total cryptocurrency market capitalization managed to increase by around $17 billion in the past seven days. Interestingly enough, the gains came mostly on the back of altcoins. This is highlighted in the declining Bitcoin dominance – a metric that’s commonly used to gauge BTC’s share relative to that of the rest of the market.
At the time of this writing, the BTC dominance sits at 38.1%, having peaked at over 38.4% last week.  Bitcoin’s price increased by a total of 0.9%, whereas altcoins such as BNB and ETH are up over 4%. Cardano surprised market participants and soared by around 11%, whereas Solana is undoubtedly the best performer from the leading coins, increasing by 37%.
While there are plenty of reasons for Solana’s increase, perhaps a leading one played the

Memecoins have been a part of the crypto culture for almost as long as the community existed, but 2020 and 2021 saw them soar to a whole new level.
It got to a point where two memecoins – Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) became frequent members of the top-10 club (the 10 largest cryptocurrencies by means of total market capitalization).
The bear market of 2022 has impacted most memecoins severely, but DOGE and SHIB continue to be leading coins.
That said, there’s a new kid on the block – one built on Solana – and is going the miles. The cryptocurrency in question is called Bonk Inu (BONK), so let’s have a closer look at what it actually does.
What is Bonk Inu (BONK)?
According to its official one-pager, BONK is the very first Dog-themed memecoin on Solana that’s “for

In an open letter to Barry Silbert, Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss said that Digital Currency Group owes Genesis approximately $1.675 billion.
Cameron Winklevoss shared an open letter to Barry Silbert – the founder of Digital Currency Group – on Twitter.
On behalf of many people, he argued that Genesis – a subsidiary of DCG – owes $900 million to them.
Winklevoss argued that the two companies are “beyond commingled.”
Furthermore, he alleged that:
To be clear, this mess is entirely your own making. Digital Currency Group (DCG) – of which you are the founder and CEO – owes Genesis (its wholly owned subsidiary) approx. $1.675 billion. This is money that Genesis owes to Earn users and other Creditors. You took this money – the money of schoolteachers – to fuel greedy