Bitcoin Is Facing a 'Critical' Test at $66,000 as ETH ETFs Approach
Plus, all the other big stories in crypto this week...
Bitcoin is holding onto critical support at $66,000 after being hammered by a more hawkish Federal Reserve and Chair Jay Powell. This week: Ethereum ETFs get an updated timeline of early July to likely begin trading, Web3 social app Lens eyes a $500 million valuation, and the head of the SEC’s crypto enforcement arm calls it quits.
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Bitcoin Holds On at $66K
Bitcoin has mostly been trading sideways to down the last couple weeks. After a more hawkish than expected shift in Fed policy, Bitcoin shed more than 2%. Relatedly, the Bitcoin ETFs notched their worst week since March with nearly $600 million in net outflows.
On a positive note, the crypto is still holding the trend line of support from its 10-week simple moving average. Macro analyst Tedtalksmacro noted, “For the upcoming week it's critical that Bitcoin maintains it's support at $66,000 USD - if broken, sellers could take a stronghold on the market and force quick liquidations out of the bulls,” he warned.
We’ll get a new initial jobless claims number out on Thursday. That could potentially shift the speed at which the Fed changes its policy.
Lens Seeks $500M Valuation
Web3 social project Lens Protocol is looking to strike while the Web3 social iron is hot. The founder of Lens is hoping to raise $50 million at a $500 million valuation, according to DL News — which both sounds like a lot, and would still only be about half the valuation fellow Web3 social project Farcaster just nabbed.
In case you missed it, Coinage covered why Web3 social would be huge last year. The groundbreaking possibility of open sourcing a social graph means the connection between friends could be monetized in different ways and theoretically power the ability to have a TikTok, Instagram, and X all live on the same rails.
The question is, do users actually care about that? So far traction has been pretty slow (at least slower than many say justify the valuations.)
ETH ETFs By The 4th of July?
Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas just updated his expectations for ETH ETFs to begin trading by July 2. That’s an interesting date because it falls pretty close to the Independence Day holiday and could potentially dampen trading activity. (Personally, we wouldn’t put it past the SEC to potentially be in favor of that.)
Last week, the other half of the Bloomberg ETF power duo told Coinage that early July was also his expectation for when the ETH ETFs might begin trading. The expecation is that they could attract as much as 20 to 25% of what the Bitcoin ETFs were able to pull in.
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce is slated to make another appearance on Coinage mid-July. We’ll be sure to track those developments as always.
SEC Crypto Asset Head Departs
Speaking of the SEC, the agency is losing another high-profile crypto regulator. After nine years with the SEC, David Hirsch, the head of the Commission’s Crypto Asset and Cyber Unit in the Division of Enforcement, announced he officially stepped down.
"During that time I had the opportunity to work on more complex, challenging investigations and issues than I ever imagined when I joined the agency as a staff attorney in the Fort Worth Regional Office," he wrote. "I'm particularly proud of the historic work done by the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit team I had the privilege to lead.”
Other Web3 Headlines:
MicroStrategy increases note offering to $700m to buy more Bitcoin
Tether Debuts New 'Synthetic' Dollar Backed by Tokenized Gold in Tokenization Push
Telecom Giant and T-Mobile Parent Deutsche Telekom Plans to Mine Bitcoin
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