Bitcoin Tops $66K as Interest-Rate Cuts Loom

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Bitcoin is priced around $66,200, up nearly 6% in the last 24 hours, following its best day in two months. BTC rose more than 7.5% on Wednesday after US inflation data raised the possibility of a Fed rate cut in the coming months. Like other risk assets, BTC is sensitive to expected changes in the monetary policy of major central banks and rises when the cost of borrowing is predicted to fall. Markets also expect the Bank of England and the European Central Bank to cut interest rates in June. The broader digital asset market is up over 6% in the past 24 hours, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20).

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) plans to introduce spot bitcoin trading in response to demand from customers, according to the Financial Times. CME, currently the top Bitcoin futures exchange, aims to compete with exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase, which dominate the spot market. “Crypto exchanges may lose some business with the potential launch of the Bitcoin spot market on CME, a global derivatives giant, as the current bull run is particularly driven by institutions preferring to trade on regulated routes,” said founder Markus Thielen. 10x Research stated that its spot trading business can be conducted through the EBC foreign exchange trading center in Switzerland.

ShibaSwap, the decentralized exchange associated with the meme coin Shiba Inu, has expanded to Ethereum layer 2 Shibarium. Users can now create new liquidity pools on Shibarium, allowing investors to swap tokens on the network and deduct transaction fees for providing liquidity. The developers said that increased use of the Shibarium blockchain for transactions will result in a higher burn rate for the SHIB token and the supply will decrease. The SHIB price has increased by 8.8% in the last 24 hours, in line with the broader bounce in the market. “The more transactions are executed on the Shibarium blockchain, the more the protocol will burn base gas fees, which will impact the overall burn rate of $SHIB,” they said.

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The chart shows that the dollar value locked in the number of open PEPE perpetual futures contracts on Binance rose to $285 million on Wednesday. Futures are 1,000 PEPE in size per contract.

Data shows fast money is again trailing meme cryptocurrencies as weak US data increases investors’ appetite for risky assets.

Source: Coinglass

-Omkar Godbole

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