First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Drops to $65K to Start the Month

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Bitcoin (BTC) faced selling pressure early Tuesday as the cryptocurrency’s reward halving approaches. The leading cryptocurrency by market value fell 5.7% to $65,742 in a bearish resolution of the recent week-long consolidation between $68,000 and $72,000. Bitcoin’s halving event is approaching this month, expected on April 21. The event reduces the pace of BTC production by 50%. Some analysts say the event has already been well telegraphed by the market, limiting any major reaction. “As we come into this halving event, bitcoin has just put in a fresh record high and could be less inclined to be wanting to extend its record run before first going through an overdue period of correction and consolidation,” said LMAX Digital in a morning note. The broader crypto market also nursed losses, with ether (ETH), Solana’s SOL and dogecoin (DOGE) registering larger drops. The broader CoinDesk 20 index fell nearly 8%.

Ethena Labs, the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that offers the $1.3 billion yield-earning USDe, has opened claims for its new governance token, ENA. In a post on X on Tuesday, Ethena invited holders of USDe to claim their share of the airdrop of 750 million ENA tokens – 5% of the total supply – which is set to list on centralized exchanges. Following the commencement of the airdrop, ENA rose over 8% to trade at around 64 cents, with a market cap of close to $500 million, according to data by CoinGecko.

Deribit, the world’s leading crypto options exchange, said on Tuesday that its Dubai-based unit, Deribit FZE, has won a conditional virtual asset provider (VASP) license from the local regulator. The license allowing FZE to operate as a virtual asset exchange for spot and derivatives trading remains nonoperational until Deribit satisfies all remaining conditions and local requirements of Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA), Deribit said in the press release. Once operational, it will allow Deribit to serve institutional and qualified investors while continuing to serve retail investors through its Panama-based broker affiliate.

Chart of the Day

• The chart shows the list of layer-1 and layer-2 blockchain projects by analyzing smart contracts, the number of unique active wallets (UAW), decentralized applications and other metrics.

• In the past seven days, NEAR has seen the biggest increase in unique active wallets, followed by Solana and Polygon. The BNB Chain has slipped to the fourth place, with Ethereum at number 12.

• Source: DappRadar

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