First Mover Americas: Altcoins Lead as BTC Struggles to Stay Above $21K

Good morning, and welcome to First Mover. I’m Lyllah Ledesma, here to take you through the latest in crypto markets, news and insights.

Altcoins are taking the lead Tuesday, with Polygon’s MATIC up 11%, Solana’s SOL by 9.5% and Near Protocol’s NEAR by 9%.

Bitcoin (BTC) was up 2.6% on the day and hovering around the $21,000 mark. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is 20% higher compared to the 2022 lows around $17,000 reached over the weekend.

This short and sharp downward movement was triggered by liquidations and some miners selling positions around $20,000 to re-enter at a lower price, according to Pablo Jodar, financial products manager at Storm Partners, a systems provider for the cryptocurrency space in Europe.

Although bitcoin is seeing some consolidation towards $23,000, it still needs to break that resistance to start considering a higher movement towards $30,000, said Jodar. The $19,000 level is still the key support level.

“If the $23K level is broken, we might have a bull summer for cryptos and potentially a good end of the year, but volatility remains quite high to make such an assumption,” Jodar said.

Another reliable metric to test market sentiment is the in-and-out transfers from exchanges to private wallets, according to Jodar. The metric provides insight into what whales (individuals or entities that hold large amounts of cryptocurrency) are doing with their funds.

Over the last month, there were many inflows in exchanges from whales liquidating their positions, but this has started to change, with big outflows spotted Monday from exchanges to private wallets, according to data from Glassnode.

“You see tremendous outflows when BTC came down to $17.6K, and then net flows being less negative now,” said Jodar.

“This means that some big investors have bought back again and expect to HODL the coins,” said Jodar. “HODL” is crypto jargon for the practice of holding assets for the long term with no intent to sell even if the price crashes.

By Shaurya Malwa

A large wallet at the center of the governance drama at Solana lending protocol Solend started to move millions of dollars of cryptocurrencies this morning, Solend said in a tweet.

The move potentially averts the risk of contagion in case of a liquidation that could have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

The anonymous wallet had deposited 95% of Solend’s pool of SOL tokens and represented 88% of USDC borrowing, but came close to a margin call last week as the SOL price dropped more than 40% to as low as $27.

The protocol would have automatically liquidated up to 20% of the whale’s collateral if SOL hit $22.30, and potentially led to damage in the broader Solana ecosystem. A governance vote was floated by protocol developers to take control of the account and take adequate risk management steps.

The wallet’s actions Tuesday came as the SOL price rose by 12% over 24 hours to hit $37. This means the liquidation levels are far below current levels, allowing the wallet’s user to take necessary steps to prevent unforeseen damages in the case of liquidation.

Today’s newsletter was edited by Bradley Keoun and produced by Nelson Wang.