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Bitcoin surpasses $66,000 as interest rate cuts loom
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(CoinDesk)
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Bitcoin is priced at around $66,200, up about 6% in the past 24 hours, following its best day in two months. BTC rose more than 7.5% on Wednesday after US inflation data raised the likelihood of an interest rate cut by the Fed in the coming months. Like other risky assets, BTC is sensitive to expected changes in the monetary policy of major central banks and recovers when the cost of borrowing is expected to decline. Markets also expect the Bank of England and the European Central Bank to cut rates in June. The broader digital asset market is up more than 6% in the past 24 hours, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20).
Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) plans to offer bitcoin spot trading in response to customer demandaccording to the Financial Times. Already the leading bitcoin futures exchange, CME aims to take on the likes of Binance and Coinbase, which dominate the spot market. “Cryptocurrency exchanges could lose some business with the potential debut of a bitcoin spot market on the CME, a global derivatives giant, as the current bull run is particularly driven by institutions, which prefer to trade on regulated streets,” Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research, says spot trading activity could be handled through the EBC’s currency trading venue in Switzerland, the report adds.
ShibaSwap, the decentralized exchange associated with The Shiba Inu meme coin has expanded to Ethereum’s Shibarium layer 2. Users can now create new liquidity pools on Shibarium, allowing traders to trade tokens on the network and earn a cut of trading fees for providing liquidity. The developers said that increased use of the Shibarium blockchain for transactions will result in a higher consumption rate for the SHIB token, reducing supply. SHIB price rose 8.8% in the past 24 hours, in line with the broader market jump. “The more transactions are executed on the Shibarium blockchain, the more the protocol will burn base gas fees, which will impact the overall consumption rate of $SHIB,” they said.
Chart of the day
(Coinglass)
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The chart shows that the dollar value locked in the number of PEPE perpetual futures contracts opened on Binance rose to a record $285 million on Wednesday. Futures are sized at 1,000 PEPE per contract.
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Data shows fast money is once again chasing meme cryptocurrencies as weak US data has increased investor appetite for risky assets.
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Source: Coinglass
-Omkar Godbole
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