First Mover Asia: Bitcoin Crosses $31K After Spot BTC ETF Issuers Begin Refiling

Good morning. Here’s what’s happening:

Prices: The market is optimistic that re-filed bitcoin ETF applications have legs.

Insights: Crypto majors are up in a big way during the first half of 2023 as the market repairs the damage from last year’s catastrophes.

Bitcoin Crosses $31K After Bitcoin ETF Issuers Begin Refiling

While many parts of the U.S. are off for an extended long weekend, market action has been tame.

Bitcoin began the Tuesday business day in Asia past the $31,000 mark at $31,153 as the world’s largest digital asset rallied on Monday after a few prospective bitcoin ETF issuers re-filed their applications.

“Enthusiasm for bitcoin is growing, propelled by efforts to revive spot bitcoin ETF applications,” Rachel Lin, CEO and co-founder of SynFutures, told CoinDesk in a note. “Its commanding presence in the crypto market is increasingly evident, making up nearly half of the industry’s $1.2 trillion market cap, the most dominant it’s been in over two years.”

Meanwhile, prices of NFTs seem to be becoming disconnected from the price of ether as trading volume plummets.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s NFT collection hit a new low since October 2021 with a floor price dropping below 30 ETH ($58,700), an effective halving since April, reflecting a broader slump in the NFT market. But considering ether’s continued performance, there seems to be more confidence in the protocol than this use case.

Last year was a rough year for crypto, a saga that began with rising interest rates, and continued through the year with the crash of Do Kwon’s LUNA, Three Arrows Capital’s collapse, and finally, FTX.

Data from Messari shows that 2023 has fared much better.

During the first half of the year, crypto majors – meaning the 43 tokens with a market cap of over $1 billion – were up an average of 34%. In comparison, this same group of tokens declined an average of 56% for the same period last year.

So far this year, bitcoin is up 84.6% compared to a falloff of nearly 60% for the first half of 2022.

But of all the major assets, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) performed the best, up a whopping 203% so far this year. As CoinDesk has previously reported, technical improvements to the protocol and the introduction of a framework that would allow for the development of dApps has likely pushed up investor interest in the asset class.

Other stand-out performers for the period include liquid staking platform Lido DAO (LDO), which rallied in February on comments from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler’s about a staking ban and then on the shuttering of Kraken’s staking service.

Solana is also up 93% during the first half of the year, raising prospects for the layer-1 protocol, whose total value soared at the height of the 2021 bull market but then plummeted with the rest of crypto during 2022’s dark days.

Architect CEO and former FTX US president Brett Harrison joined “First Mover” to discuss the recent flurry of spot bitcoin ETF applications in the U.S. and his outlook on the intersection of artificial intelligence with financial services. Plus, Coinbase Institutional head of research David Duong shared his crypto markets outlook for July. And, Superstate CEO Robert Leshner discussed plans to create a short-term government bond fund using the Ethereum blockchain as a secondary record-keeping tool.

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