First Mover Asia: Bitcoin, Ether Open Asia’s Trading Week Flat

Good morning. Here’s what’s happening:

Prices: The Consensus 2023 festival brought builders and investors to Austin, and wrapped up Friday night with attendance records that broke expectations. But Bitcoin is opening the trading week in Asia flat.

Insights: Crypto developers and other industry stalwarts attending Consensus remain upbeat about the industry’s future, but U.S. regulatory missteps remain an obstacle, CoinDesk journalists noted from Consensus 2023.

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As the region opens the trading week, crypto’s major tokens are largely flat.

Bitcoin is up 0.7% to $29,404, while Ether is down 0.5% to $1,892.

“Bitcoin has remained below $30,000, which is a key resistance level, but has not had to test any major supports just yet,” Joe DiPasquale, CEO of BitBull Capital, told CoinDesk in a note. “For now, the market is expecting a 25bps rate hike in the FOMC this week, but we are likely to see price swings following the Fed’s post-release commentary.”

“The attempts to breach $30,000 this week have failed to make a higher high, which should be concerning for the bulls,” DiPasquale also wrote in his note to CoinDesk. “In general, we would not be surprised to see the market leader testing $25,000 in the coming days, particularly after the FOMC.”

Meanwhile, other crypto majors were also flat, including Layer-1s Solana and Avalanche – the latter seeing its AVAX token fall 1.2%.

5 Consensus 2023 Takeaways

CoinDesk’s yearly Consensus conference ended Friday, and hearing all the fascinating discussions that arose from its many speakers and panels was exciting and informative.

Members of CoinDesk’s editorial team assembled on Twitter Spaces as the event was winding down to assess the big picture at Consensus 2023 and share their takeaways on critical issues that will shape how the industry continues to evolve.

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Nick Baker, CoinDesk deputy editor-in-chief

Being a Consensus newbie this year, I am like a small-town yokel blown away by how big and impressive this event has been. Here are a couple of my takeaways:

One, the level of optimism people have about crypto is very high, which is a surprise given just how bad the regulatory outlook is. And I know it’s partly self-selection bias at work: People who are going to pay a lot of money to attend this event are going to be optimistic about the space. Still, that juxtaposition of existential questions and lots of optimism is striking to me.

Two, the people I know best are from traditional finance and they, too, remain quite high on the future of crypto and moving TradFi stuff to crypto or crypto-adjacent infrastructure. Now, of course, they’ve been trying for years to show progress along those lines and have little to show for it. But they’re undeterred. This point rhymes with my first point.

Ben Schiller, head of Consensus Magazine

Something that really struck me arose from what Kate Brady, head of communications for Web3 at PepsiCo, said on stage. As you know, PepsiCo is a very mainstream American brand. It’s not part of the crypto industry by any means, but it’s looking to get into Web3. And one of the things she said on stage was that she was being stymied in her work and PepsiCo has been stymied in its work by the lack of regulatory clarity, and I thought that was interesting because obviously this is something the industry says a lot that we need to do. There are guidelines from Washington, D.C., from lawmakers and from policymakers. And we think that that conversation or that that issue only affects people in the relatively small world of crypto.

Read the full story here:

On the third day of Consensus 2023, “First Mover” guests included a16z crypto head of policy Brian Quintenz, Yuga Labs CEO Daniel Alegre, Fidelity Digital Assets Research Analyst Jack Neureuter, and Blockchain Australia Chair Michael Bacina.

Bye-Bye Bitcoin Bear: No investor or financial advisor has a crystal ball that can predict the movement of an asset, including bitcoin, with total certainty. But past bitcoin halvings can provide clues on what we could potentially expect.

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