Bitcoin resumed advancing last week and is below $25,200 currently testing Fibonacci 161.8 resistance. The price is in consolidation mode after rebounding from the Fibonacci 100 level. The RSI is in neutral zone. Bulls are struggling to consolidate their control to push the price above the Fibonacci resistance in medium term. It needs to be seen whether they can muster more momentum to breach above the resistance.
Markets ended mixed last Friday as Conference Board's Leading Economic Indicators declined for 10th straight month in January. Investors are awaiting for the Federal Reserve's favored inflation indicator - personal consumption expenditures (PCE) data due this Friday. Meanwhile as the crypto market is showing signs of momentum revival, the US SEC sued Do Kwon and Terraform Labs for misleading investors on TerraUSD stablecoin and Japan announced it will launch a pilot in April for issuing digital yen while data show crypto startups are postponing token launches.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Terraform Labs, the company behind the failed TerraUSD stablecoin, and its co-founder Do Kwon last Thursday. SEC alleges that Kwon and Terraform worked with a US trading firm to restore UST's peg after it fell nearly 10 cents in May 2021, paying the trading firm in LUNA tokens from Terraform after it bought amounts of the UST token. The complaint claims Terraform and Kwon began to make materially misleading statements after UST’s recovery in May 2021 - telling that the algorithm underlying UST restored the UST peg to the dollar and not the true cause - the deliberate intervention by the trading firm.
The Bank of Japan (BoJ) announced it will work on experiments on a digital yen with three mega-banks and regional banks in the country. The pilot program in April “is not expected to see any actual transactions between retailers and consumers" but will establish a CBDC Forum and invite private businesses engaged in retail payments or in related technologies to participate.
Data from CoinMarketCap show a steep decline in applications for token listings as liquidity dries up. Data show that new coin applications fell throughout 2022, from 10,264 in the first quarter to 6,350 in the fourth. The drop accelerated toward year's end after crypto exchange FTX bankruptcy and year to date, the figure is just 3,000 applications.
