By Omkar Godbole (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)
Risk assets, including cryptocurrencies, perked up Monday on reports that President Donald Trump’s expected reciprocal tariffs scheduled for April 2 may be more measured than initially thought.
The news came days after the Federal Reserve retained forecasts for two interest-rate cuts while downplaying fears of a prolonged inflationary impact from the tariffs.
“Bitcoin is attempting to form a bottom, supported by Trump’s recent shift toward ‘flexibility’ on the upcoming April 2 reciprocal tariffs, softening his earlier rhetoric,” Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research, said in a note to clients.
Thielen noted the Fed’s recent tone suggested that it will “look past short-term inflationary pressures, laying the groundwork for potential future easing.”
As BTC rose over 1% since midnight UTC to $87,300, AI coins, meme cryptocurrencies and layer-1 tokens posted bigger gains. Ether rose 4% to $2,090 with its supply held on centralized exchanges sliding to the lowest since November 2015.
Mantle Network’s MNT token surged 6%, with Trump-linked WLFI snapping up coins worth millions. Other notable gainers included the TRUMP token, buoyed by the President calling it the “greatest of them all,” fartcoin and sonic, all up over 9%.
Tokenized real-world assets, as a category, rose into the $10 billion total value locked club, with Maker, BlackRock’s BUIDL and Ethena’s USDtb each accounting for more than $1 billion in TVL.
In other news, Andrei Grachev, the head of DWF Labs, announced a $250 million fund focused on established mid-sized and large-cap crypto projects. Bloomberg reported that Coinbase is in talks to acquire Deribit, the world’s leading cryptocurrency options exchange. CryptoX had the wind of it in February.
Decentralized perpetuals trading platform dYdX announced a program to allocate 25% of the net protocol fees to monthly buybacks starting today.
The week ahead promises to be busy, with the U.S. personal consumption expenditure, the Fed’s preferred inflation measure, due for release Friday. Additionally, SEC nominee Paul Atkins and Comptroller of the Currency nominee Jonathan Gould will testify before the Senate Banking Committee on March 27. Stay alert!
What to Watch
- Crypto:
- Macro
- March 24, 9:45 a.m.: S&P Global releases (Flash) U.S. March producer price index (PPI) data.
- Composite PPI Prev. 51.6
- Manufacturing PPI Est. 51.9 vs. Prev. 52.7
- Services PPI Est. 51.2 vs. Prev. 51
- March 24, 2:00 p.m.: Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey will deliver a speech on growth in the U.K. economy.
- March 24, 7:50 p.m.: The Bank of Japan releases the minutes of its March 19 monetary policy meeting.
- March 26, 3:00 a.m.: The U.K.’s Office for National Statistics releases February consumer price inflation data.
- Core Inflation Rate MoM Prev. -0.4%
- Core Inflation Rate YoY Est. 3.6% vs. Prev. 3.7%
- Inflation Rate MoM Prev. -0.1%
- Inflation Rate YoY Est. 2.9% vs. Prev. 3%
- March 26: The U.K.’s Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) releases its latest Fiscal and Economic Outlook. Later in the day, the Chancellor of the Exchequer will present her Spring Statement 2025 to the House of Commons.
- March 27: The U.S. Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on the nomination of Paul Atkins to the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Livesteam link.
- April 2, 12:01 a.m.: The Trump administration’s reciprocal tariffs plan goes live.
- March 24, 9:45 a.m.: S&P Global releases (Flash) U.S. March producer price index (PPI) data.
- Earnings (Estimates based on FactSet data)
Token Events
- Governance votes & calls
- Unlocks
- March 31: Optimism (OP) to unlock 1.93% of its circulating supply worth $28.21 million.
- April 1: Sui (SUI) to unlock 2.03% of its circulating supply worth $153.43 million.
- April 1: ZetaChain (ZETA) to unlock 6.05% of its circulating supply worth $14.14 million.
- April 3: Wormhole (W) to unlock 47.64% of its circulating supply worth $147.23 million.
- April 7: Kaspa (KAS) to unlock 0.59% of its circulating supply worth $12.5 million.
- April 9: Movement (MOVE) to unlock 2.04% of its circulating supply worth $21.53 million.
- Token Listings
- March 24: Nillion (NIL) to be listed on Binance, Bitget, MEXC, KuCoin, BitMart, Gate.io and HTX.
- March 31: Binance to delist USDT, FDUSD, TUSD, USDP, DAI, AEUR, UST, USTC, and PAXG.
Conferences
Token Talk
By Shaurya Malwa
- The newly issued ROUTINE token has become one of the biggest winners for microcap memecoin trades in recent weeks, flying from zero market cap to more than $17 million over the weekend.
- The token is a nod to a morning routine tutorial posted by fitness coach Ashton Hall, which bagged over 500 million views across X, Instagram and other social networks.
- The video went viral for showing Hall’s 4 a.m. start that includes wiping his face with a banana peel and constantly dipping it in a bowl of sparkling spring water from Saratoga.
- Aspects of the video birthed their own memecoins, themed after bottled water, sparkling water and even bananas.
- None, however, reached the apparent appeal of ROUTINE — which has captured $34 million in trading volumes over the past 24 hours and holds just over $600,000 in liquidity as of Asian afternoon hours Monday.
- The ROUTINE memecoin phenomenon is a textbook example of how internet culture and speculative trading intersect in the crypto space. Hall, known as ASH Fitness, has over 8.7 million Instagram followers, amplifying the video’s reach and contributing to ROUTINE’s rapid adoption among retail traders and the hope for gains in a little-changed crypto market.
Derivatives Positioning
- AVAX, SOL and BTC are the top three coins in terms of perpetual futures open interest growth in the past 24 hours. Funding rates held positive for most tokens, except OM.
- BTC and ETH 30-day implied volatility indices continue to drop, reaching levels last seen at the end of the February.
- Deribit’s BTC options market shows a neutral, wait-and-see stance, with calls trading at par with puts out to the May end expiry. That’s in stark contrast to the bullish call bias seen following Wednesday’s Fed meeting.
- ETH’s short- and near-dated puts continue to be pricier than calls, reflecting persistent downside fears in ether and the broader altcoin market.
Market Movements:
- BTC is down 3.39% from 4 p.m. ET Friday at $87,241.70 (24hrs: +3.2%)
- ETH is up 5.81% at $2,088.28 (24hrs: +3.98%)
- CryptoX 20 is up 4.31% at 2,783.86 (24hrs: +3.78%)
- Ether CESR Composite Staking Rate is down 6 bps at 2.92%
- BTC funding rate is at 0.0003% (0.0986% annualized) on Binance
- DXY is down 0.13% at 103.96
- Gold is up 0.51% at $3,033.50/oz
- Silver is up 1.35% at $33.74/oz
- Nikkei 225 closed -0.18% at 37,608.49
- Hang Seng closed +0.91% at 23,905.56
- FTSE is up 0.5% at 8,690.40
- Euro Stoxx 50 is up 0.44% at 5,447.70
- DJIA closed on Friday unchanged at 41,985.35
- S&P 500 closed unchanged at 5,667.56
- Nasdaq closed +0.52% at 17,784.05
- S&P/TSX Composite Index closed -0.37% at 24,968.50
- S&P 40 Latin America closed unchanged at 2,470.80
- U.S. 10-year Treasury rate is up 3 bps at 4.29%
- E-mini S&P 500 futures are up 2.86% at 5,778.25
- E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures are up 3.92% at 20,213.75
- E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average Index futures are up 4.76% at 42,674.00
Bitcoin Stats:
- BTC Dominance: 61.55 (-0.35%)
- Ethereum to bitcoin ratio: 0.02397 (2.83%)
- Hashrate (seven-day moving average): 819 EH/s
- Hashprice (spot): $48.31
- Total Fees: 5.97 BTC / $506,291
- CME Futures Open Interest: 150,100 BTC
- BTC priced in gold: 28.7 oz
- BTC vs gold market cap: 8.14%
Technical Analysis
- Ether’s weekly chart shows the cryptocurrency has bounced up from the trendline drawn off lows in March 2020 and late 2022.
- The positive turnaround from the macro bullish trendline may entice more buyers to the market, potentially leading to a sustainable price rise.
Crypto Equities
- Strategy (MSTR): closed on Friday at $304.00 (+0.64%), up 5.19% at $319.79 in pre-market
- Coinbase Global (COIN): closed at $189.86 (-0.27%), up 4.32% at $198.07
- Galaxy Digital Holdings (GLXY): closed at C$17.94 (-1.16%)
- MARA Holdings (MARA): closed at $12.38 (-0.96%), down 3.96% at $12.87
- Riot Platforms (RIOT): closed at $7.95 (+2.45%), up 4.28% at $8.29
- Core Scientific (CORZ): closed at $8.51 (-0.93%), up 4.58% at $8.90
- CleanSpark (CLSK): closed at $7.44 (-4%), up 3.09% at $7.67
- CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI): closed at $14.80 (-1.2%)
- Semler Scientific (SMLR): closed at $39.22 (+1.03%), up 6.91% at $41.93
- Exodus Movement (EXOD): closed at $49.52 (+2.08%), up 0.26% at $49.65
ETF Flows
Spot BTC ETFs:
- Daily net flow: $83.1 million
- Cumulative net flows: $36.13 billion
- Total BTC holdings ~ 1,123 million.
Spot ETH ETFs
- Daily net flow: -$18.6 million
- Cumulative net flows: $2.43 billion
- Total ETH holdings ~ 3.445 million.
Source: Farside Investors
Overnight Flows
Chart of the Day
- The dollar value of the total number of crypto assets locked in the tokenized real-world assets protocols has crossed the $10 billion mark for the first time.
- Continued adoption could help the so-called RWA tokens outperform major cryptocurrencies as the risk sentiment recovers.
While You Were Sleeping
In the Ether
