March 20, 2024

Bitcoin’s (BTC) price correction gathered pace Tuesday as the U.S.-listed spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) fell out of favor. The leading cryptocurrency by market value fell over 8% to under $62,000, data from charting platform TradingView shows. That’s the biggest single-day percentage (UTC) decline since Nov. 9, 2022. That day, prices tanked over 14% as Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX, formerly the third largest crypto exchange, went bankrupt. Bitcoin’s latest price slide has been catalyzed by several factors, including outflows from the spot ETFs, according to trader and economist Alex Kruger. Provisional data published by investment firm Farside show that on Tuesday, there was a net outflow of $326 million from the spot ETFs, the largest on record. On Monday, Grayscale’s ETF witnessed a record outflow of $643 million. “Reasons for the crash, in order of importance: #1 Too much leverage (funding matters). #2 ETH driving market south (market decided ETF was not passing). #3 Negative BTC ETF inflows (careful, data is T+1). #4 Solana shitcoin mania (it went too far),” Kruger said on X.

(TradingView)

Web3 gaming developer platform Immutable and venture capital company King River Capital have teamed up to form a $100 million “Inevitable Games Fund” (IGF) with help from Polygon Labs. IGF will target high-growth opportunities for professional and sophisticated investors in Web3 gaming, according to an emailed announcement on Tuesday. Immutable and Polygon Labs will identify investment opportunities, while King River will manage the investment process and deploy the capital across game studios and Web3 infrastructure firms. The fund is hoping to capture the opportunity in the Web3 gaming industry. “Since 2018, the sector has attracted approximately $19 billion in investments. In 2023, blockchain gaming-related rounds reached $1.7 billion. A significant part of that has flowed to the 270+ blockchain games in development on Immutable,” the press release said, citing industry research.

Investment management giant BlackRock (BLK) has created a fund called the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, according to a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, will be launched in partnership with asset tokenization firm Securitize. The filing does not reveal what assets the fund will hold. Still, Securitize’s presence potentially suggests the product has something to do with the tokenization of real-world assets, or RWA – industry jargon for representing ownership of a wide range of assets through a token on a blockchain. After BlackRock’s filing came out, Ondo Finance’s native token ONDO jumped as much as 20%. Ondo runs a RWA platform.

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Solana has replaced Ethereum as the No. 1 smart-contract blockchain by trading volume.

Trading volume in Solana-based decentralized exchanges (DEX) has increased 67% to $21.3 billion in seven days, data tracked by DeFiLlama show. Volume in Ethereum-based decentralized exchanges rose 3% to $19.4 billion over the same period. There are 17 DEXes on Solana. Orca, the largest, accounts for 88% of the total volume. On Ethereum, Uniswap leads the pack of 46 DEXes.

The so-called flippening seems to have been catalyzed by speculative fervor in Solana-based meme coins dogwifwhat, bonk, book of meme, and slerf.

- Omkar Godbole