Market Update - March 22, 2024

22 mar

1. BTC drops below 61K for the first time since the start of March: Investor confidence dwindled as the market saw the first consecutive negative outflow days for the Bitcoin ETFs this month, with Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) experiencing its biggest outflow since launch of 642.5M on Monday, followed by another sizeable 443.5M outflow on Tuesday.
   
   
2. Fed keeps interest rates unchanged: The US Federal Reserve held interest rates at the May FOMC meeting, but is still anticipating three cuts by the end of the year. This was widely celebrated by markets as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq set a new all-time high and bitcoin reclaimed 67K.
3. Hope for ETH ETF approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dwindling: The price of Ether (ETH) experienced a fairly dramatic fall this week from 3.64K to as low as 3.06K on Wednesday morning. The fall was in response to a recent sentiment shift around the possible ETH ETF approval in the coming months. Recent SEC delays to proposals from VanEck, Ark, Hashdex and Grayscale, along with comments from prominent ETF analyst James Seyffart suggesting the SEC will decline these approvals, have lowered confidence among investors.
   
   
4. SOL defies market downward trend and breaks above $200: For the first time in two years, Solana (SOL) broke above $200 this week, with analysts suggesting this could be linked to the large surge in activity on the Solana network, which has been driven by a frenzy for newly launched Solana-based memecoins.
   
   
5. AI fascination continues as NVIDIA AI conference kicks off this week: The conference caused a short-lived rally in AI tokens, despite the overall downward market trend in the market this week, with Render (RNDR), Akash (AKT), Fetch.AI (FET) and Bittensor (TAO) all posted double-digit gains.
   

🌸 Topic of the Week: The Solana Blockchain

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