Bitcoin rose slightly on Thursday while the U.S. dollar slipped as investors showed an increased appetite for risk. Bitcoin was up 1% over the past 24 hours to about $28,500. It reached an intraday high of $29,100 but has since retreated a bit. Contracts on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 advanced 0.4% after a rally on Wednesday to enter into a bull market for the first time in nearly three years. Meanwhile, data from IntoTheBlock shows that bitcoin now has the highest "Sortino ratio" compared with traditional markets and ether. The metric measures the risk-adjusted performance of assets. A higher Sortino ratio suggests better risk-adjusted returns.

IntoTheBlock

Crypto investors are fleeing Circle Internet Financial’s USD coin (USDC) stablecoin, with many of them switching to tether, another stablecoin, which has reached a 22-month high in market share. Net outflows from USDC have surpassed $10 billion since March 10 That's when regulators shuttered Silicon Valley Bank, a firm Circle banked with. Circle, a payments firm, has weathered SVB’s collapse as USDC has re-established the U.S, dollar price peg it lost in the immediate aftermath of SVB's failure, but the token has still dropped 23% from its one-time $43 billion market capitalization, according to crypto price tracker CoinGecko. USDC’s plunge comes as the stablecoin sector has been severely tested by problems in the banking industry and regulatory scrutiny. Crypto exchange Binance’s BUSD token has also plummeted, among other stablecoins.

OKX says it has identified $157 million in digital assets belonging to FTX and Alameda Research, and is turning them over to the bankruptcy estate for the two firms that both filed for bankruptcy in November. The exchange didn’t specify what digital assets it had identified. OKX said in a release it conducted investigations to identify any FTX-related transactions on its exchange, and upon discovering assets and accounts linked to FTX and Alameda Research, a trading firm that is affiliated with FTX, it moved to secure the assets and freeze the connected accounts. Shortly after the collapse of FTX, a hacker siphoned $600 million from the exchange's wallets, leading to fears that FTX accounts on other exchanges were compromised.

Coinglass

Investors are looking again at the futures market tied to payments-focused cryptocurrency XRP amid hopes that Ripple Labs, the company that issued the token, will win its legal battle against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and spur more risk taking in the broader market.

XRP has rallied 57% since March 22, reaching a 10-month high of about 58 cents, according to CoinDesk data.

Since the rally began, the notional open interest, or the dollar value locked in unsettled and active contracts trading on futures and perpetual futures exchanges, has increased by nearly 90% to $843 million, the highest since December 2021, data from Coinglass shows.

An increase in open interest coming alongside an increase in price typically suggests an influx of new money on the bullish side and is said to confirm the uptrend. At press time, funding rates – representing the cost of holding bullish long or bearish short positions – were positive on most exchanges, indicating the dominance of bullish leverage traders.

Chart of the Day

Source: Amberdata

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