Bullish Insights – Weekly Market Recap
Apr 6, 2023 • 2 min read
The Bullish Insights Weekly Market Recap includes curated industry news and analysis from the Bullish team for the week of April 3, 2023.
Bullish Exchange
This week’s peak exchange trade volume 24h: $448,647,157 (16,018 BTC)
This week’s headlines
- MicroStrategy announced they added another 1,045 bitcoin with an average cost price of $28,016 per BTC bringing its total bitcoin holding to 140,000 BTC.
- The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has removed Binance’s derivatives licence held by Oztures Trading Pty Ltd. The removal of the firm’s AFSL will commence on April 14 where customers will be unable to add to derivative positions and by April 21, all clients must close existing positions.
- Bitcoin miner, Marathon Digital Holdings recorded a 21% MoM increase in production setting a record-breaking production of 825 BTC for the month of March. It also recorded an all-time high for Q1 2023 of 2,195 BTC mined.
- After Twitter changed its iconic blue-bird icon to Doge, Elon Musk had also tweeted a meme on the change causing $DOGE to pump over 25% in the past 24 hours.
- Almost a month after Euler Finance’s $196mn exploit, the hacker has returned most of the funds with Euler closing the $1mn bounty.
- According to court filings, on March 14, the US government sold off 9,800 BTC that was connected to the silk road and will look to further sell 41,500 BTC. The sale will be broken in four batches and sold over a one-year period.
Equity markets
- US equity markets closed on a high note for the end of Q1 after a volatile three months.
- US equity markets saw mixed performance in Monday's session closing the first day of the quarter with the tech sector down and oil stocks up.
- US equity markets saw value stocks outperform growth in Wednesday's session as investors weigh in recessionary risks. The S&P 500 fell by 0.3%, the Dow advanced by 0.2%, and the Nasdaq Composite retreated by 1.1%.
Crypto market highlights
- Q1 has been a volatile month for the crypto market from Circle's de-peg to the removal of crypto-friendly banks and the collapse of SVB. The quarterly market cap change shows that Bitcoin gained the most up 70% QoQ, followed by Ethereum and USDT. While Tether gained in market share, USDC saw a 26% dip QoQ.
- In March, Bitcoin open interest options (BTC terms) rose to a new all-time high and while in USD terms was not record breaking, it still saw BTC open interest options rising to almost $13bn. The total volume of Bitcoin options reached over $32bn across the four exchanges (Deribit, Binance, OKX and Delta Exchange). March 2023 marked the second-highest month, which is $200mn shy of April 2021's all-time high.
- A review of Q1, 2023 indicates that Binance saw a 16% tumble in loss of market share for the quarter. While the exchange still maintains dominance at 54%, Korean exchange Upbit saw notable growth in trade volume when compared across the 17 exchanges. In the quarter Binance lost market share, the exchange saw a series of events unfold, from being sued by the CFTC to the removal of its BTC zero-fee trade program.