First Mover Asia: Asia Pushes Bitcoin Past $25K

High Buying Pressure Pushes Bitcoin Past 25K

Most major digital assets are in the green as Asia starts its business day.

Bitcoin is up 5.3% in the last 24 hours to $25,703, while ether is up about 2.8% to $1,697. Binance’s BNB token is up 8.7% to $331.

Kaiko’s Director of Research Clara Medalie said on a recent CoinDesk TV appearance that this mini-crypto rally is because of low liquidity in the market and high buying pressure. Binance converting $1 billion of BUSD to bitcoin, ether, BNB and other tokens was the fuel for the fire.

“This is a huge amount of buy pressure on the markets,” she said. “As the markets aren’t that liquid, any significant buying pressure is likely going to have a considerable impact on prices as a whole.”

Medalie also says that Europe and Asia have a chance to be a magnet for liquidity orphaned by the collapse of Silvergate and Signature.

“There are quite a few crypto companies actually based in Europe or APAC that have maintained their banking relationships, so it actually presents a pretty big opportunity for these regions to accept crypto businesses,” she said.

Taiwan’s Maicoin, for instance, maintains a relationship with a large bank in Taiwan to act as its fiat pipeline.

Medalie also notes that the correlation between stocks and crypto is breaking, pointing to the divergence between crypto and equity markets at the start of the year and during this most recent rally.

“It flipped this week. We see crypto markets rallying, while equity markets have completely collapsed,” she said. “The divergence in these markets have flipped, and that’s being maintained, which is creating this decreasing correlation for both Nasdaq’s tech stocks and Europe’s 600 index.”

Shiba Inu Community Debates the Origin Story of Shibarium

What’s in a number?

For the community around the SHIB token and Shibarium blockchain, it’s the difference between code that has been plagarized and open-source code that’s been recycled.

The drama began Thursday Asia time where an established member of its Discord pointed to the Shibarium chain using the same Chain ID number, 917, as the Rinia Testnet chain.

While Discord members were quick to generate their own explanations for the similarity, with some panic-selling the token, pushing it down 10%, the explanation from developers behind the Shibarium chain is something far more benign.

“Few chain IDs were picked randomly – 417(Alpha), 517(Staging), 917(pre-pod/beta) and these chains were not registered anywhere at that time, I made a mistake to not recheck when the puppynet network was launched,” tweeted Kaaldhairya, one of the pseudonymous developers.

Kaaldhairya tweeted that they were going to be “redeploying a new version of BETA network with a new chain ID.”

“Fresh deployments will be rare in the future but are possible because we will still be in BETA phase,” he continued.

Others pointed to similarities in code found on Github, a code repository.

Coders often re-use each others’ work for mundane and benign tasks. These pre-written blocks are known are libraries, and are available as open-source code. That is, code that’s intended to be copied and reused.

Andrew Angrisani, a member of the project’s Telegram community as well as its Discord, and a crypto security engineer, explained the code similarities to both Rinia and Shibarium using the same open-source code.

“Both Rinia TestNet and Shibarium copied open-source code for their block explorers called Blockscout and likely both were lazy in their implementation,” he said.

Another high-ranking community member, JesusM, called this all a “minor mistake made on beta.” JesusM said that this is the point of the beta process.

“Mistakes in it get tested and then fixed,” they said.

Angrisani speculated that part of this could be a ploy to drum up free marketing for Rinia and an upcoming project.

“The Rinia Testnet chain Dev is launching an [initial coin offering] for Firechain called a Shib Killer on March 31. They could be using this mud in the water to drum up free marketing since the ChainIDs were the same,” he said. “It may be an artifact of copying source code from an open-source project.”

This is also not the first time accusations have flown around. In February, questions on the Discord were being raised about similarities between Shibarium and Rinia.

“At the end of the day, Shibarium is likely still far off, Open Source code is being used (which is okay – other projects do it), Unification Fund is still working on Shibarium, and the Firechain/Rinia dev is using this to market their upcoming ICO,” Angrisani concluded.

While the SHIB token has regained some of its losses since the initial selloff, it’s still down 8% on the day.

2023 South by Southwest (Austin, Texas)

6:00 p.m. HKT/SGT(10:00 UTC) Eurozone Core Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (YoY/Feb)

10 p.m. HKT/SGT(14:00 UTC) Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (March)

In case you missed it, here is the most recent episode of “First Mover” on CoinDesk TV:

Bitcoin Dips Below $25K; Prospective Signature Bank Buyers Reportedly Must Agree to Give Up All Crypto Business

Bitcoin funds were bleeding coins even as U.S. bank failures fuel expectations of an early Federal Reserve pivot in favor of liquidity easing. Kaiko Director of Research Clara Medalie shared her crypto markets analysis. Plus, Signature Bank is on the market after being shuttered by state regulators on Sunday, but any potential buyer reportedly has to agree to a major caveat: no crypto. (The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Friday denied the report.) Jason Brett, Key Bridge Advisors Managing Director and former U.S. Regulator at the FDIC, shared his reaction. Besu Protocol Engineer Justin Florentine also joined the conversation.

Arbitrum to Airdrop New Token and Transition to DAO: The long-awaited ARB token will grant holders the ability to vote on changes to the leading Ethereum layer 2 network.

U.S. Banking Crisis Could Strengthen Crypto Long Term, Experts Say: Some digital-asset firms may move to countries that are more receptive to new financial technology, one observer said.

Bitcoin Held in Funds Drops to Lowest Since October 2021, ByteTree Data Shows: Wealth management industry globally is very light in both bitcoin and gold, one observer said.

Plagiarism, Fork or Simple Mistake? Shiba Inu Community Debates the Origin Story of Shibarium: SHIB is down 8% and millions have been unstaked over allegations that the Shibarium code was stolen.

Google Searches for Arbitrum Soar Amid Airdrop Announcement: The Arbitrum token will be airdropped to users next Thursday.