Morning‌‌ ‌‌Update — February 1st — Macro and Crypto Markets

Last week was important on many levels, we passed 100 million virus cases, President Biden pushed plans to attack fossil fuel harder than oil producers probably anticipated, the GameStop battle between retail investors and hedge funds took place with massive losses on both sides, and more.

The piece of news that excited me most, though, was Elon Musk changing his Twitter bio to simply show: “#bitcoin”. 

Frankly, I’m surprised it didn’t generate a lot more bullishness. Don’t get me wrong, prices jumped 15% within an hour, touching on $38,500… it’s just that they went down relatively quickly. The idea of Tesla allocating just a small percentage of their balance sheet to BTC should push us much further.

Just as an interesting note, while that was happening, we saw about $57 million short positions liquidated on Binance... within 10 minutes!

Maybe one has to take into account the fact that traditional markets slumped at the open with equities globally losing about 2%, but still.

A friend of mine saw this as a positive, suggesting that markets are now strongly institutionalised and that therefore that type of news and the retail enthusiasm may just have less effect, compared to more sophisticated ways of investing. 

While this was happening, it’s great to see that alts held up very well. Naturally, during the explosive move on Friday, they were losing relative to BTC but, now, the BTC Dominance Index is back down, at 63. Was it helped by a surprising XRP pump?

Amidst the jump in price, one could’ve expected large investors to deposit coins on exchanges and sell. The opposite happened. The alters on CryptoQuant and Glassnode both showed significant withdrawals from exchanges to private wallets, suggesting that quite a lot of buying took place and is now being taken away to be ‘hodled’.

While those withdrawals are taking place, exchange reserves of stablecoins are rising. I’ll let you put two and two together.

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