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BitcoinBTC and cryptocurrencies have rocketed higher over the last week as the Silicon Valley Bank-led banking crisis sparks worrying hyperinflation fears.

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The bitcoin price has added almost 50% since early March, helping the ethereum price and other cryptocurrencies rally, due to rising expectations the Federal Reserve will pivot from its hawkish stance in the face of slowing inflation and bank collapses.

Now, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has waded into the debate, sending a warning to U.S. president Joe Biden after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates again.

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"The banks are melting," Musk replied to a Twitter post by Biden that referenced his administration's climate change achievements over his first year in office.

Three U.S. banksSilicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and Silvergate Bankhave all collapsed this month, partly due to interest rate rises wiping out the value of the bonds they held. Both Silvergate and Signature were friendly toward bitcoin and crypto companies, fueling speculation their demise was somehow triggered by their involvement in the crypto space.

Meanwhile, shares in First Republic BankFRC have crashed 90% over the last month, falling again this week on reports it may need to raise more funds being thrown a $30 billion lifeline by larger rivals. In Europe, long-time basketcase Credit Suisse has been hastily sold to rival UBS in a deal that values it at a fraction of what it was worth just weeks ago.

This week, speaking after the Fed raised interest rates for a ninth-consecutive time, chair Jerome Powell described Silicon Valley bank as an "outlier" and that the financial system in general remained strong.

The bitcoin and crypto market has crashed along with stock markets since the Fed said in late 2021 it would begin hiking interest rates and tightening monetary policy slow inflation. The bitcoin price crashed to lows of under $20,000 from a peak of almost $70,000, while the ethereum price and other major cryptocurrencies saw similar declines.

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"After the collapse of Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the Fed reduced its aggressive rhetoric, which was a positive signal for financial markets despite the sharp drops in bank stocks," Ilya Volkov, the chief executive of Swiss-based international fintech platform YouHodler, said in emailed comments, adding bitcoin and crypto prices have held up well recently.

"The positive impact is also clearly seen in the bond market. The yield spread between 2-year and 10-year U.S. treasuries, the main indicators for financial professionals, significantly decreased lately. So a future 25 basis point increase by the Fed is already in the price."

I am a journalist with significant experience covering technology, finance, economics, and business around the world. As the founding editor of Verdict.co.uk I reported on how technology is changing business, political trends, and the latest culture and lifestyle. I have covered the rise of bitcoin and cryptocurrency since 2012 and have charted its emergence as a niche technology into the greatest threat to the established financial system the world has ever seen and the most important new technology since the internet itself. I have worked and written for CityAM, the Financial Times, and the New Statesman, amongst others. Follow me on Twitter @billybambrough or email me on billyATbillybambrough.com.Disclosure: I occasionally hold some small amount of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

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Banks Are MeltingElon Musk Sends Warning To Joe Biden And The Fed Amid Wild Bitcoin, Ethereum And Crypto Price Swings - Forbes

As Circles $USDC has lost ground, Tether-issued $USDT is now the dominant stablecoin on both Ethereum and Polygon.

Regulatory FUD from U.S. authorities has helped to catalyze a regime change in the world of cryptocurrency stablecoins, as $USDC has lost its dominant position to $USDT on both the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains.

The March 11 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank certainly shook crypto holders faith in the stability of $USDC (at least in the very short term), as it was disclosed that $USDC issuer Circle had more than $3 billion in reserves stored at the failed financial institution. $USDC suffered a major but brief de-peg, and it regained its $1 value a few days later, when Circle executives were able to reassure investors that the SVB collapse did not impact its ability to maintain the 1:1 backing for the stablecoin.

The apparent irony is that U.S. regulators statements and actions against stablecoins (notably $BUSD) have incentivized crypto holders to abandon stablecoins from U.S.-regulated issues (such as Paxos and Circle) in favor of issuers like Tether who are not subject to U.S. regulations.

According to DefiLlama, $USDC lost its dominant position on Ethereum to $USDT on March 18, a week after the SVB debacle. $USDc had accounted for the plurality of stablecoins on Ethereum since the beginning of 2022. However, $USDT rose to the top spot as it benefitted from investors switching out of $USD and, since December 2022, $BUSD.

The narrative on Polygon is different but has the same result: $USDT has surpassed $USDC as the dominant stablecoin on the Ethereum sidechain.

The wrinkles in the story, however, are that $BUSDs market share on Polygon was never significant; $USDC had always been the dominant stablecoin on Polygon; and $USDTs ascent came at the expense of $USDC and $DAI.

Perhaps most importantly, $USDT surpassed $USDC on Polygon on March 2, according to DefiLlama, more than a week before SVBs failure accelerated the abandonment of $USDC.

Overall, $USDT has strengthened its grip on the entire USD stablecoin marketplace, increasing its share of stablecoin holdings on all blockchains from less than 50% to nearly 60% since the beginning of the year.

The Tether-issued stablecoin accounts for almost all stablecoin holdings on Tron and is rapidly gaining even more ground on BNB Chain as $BUSD is being phased out.

One area where $USDC has maintained its edge over $USDT is on the fast-growing Arbitrum blockchain, where $USDC has 63% of the stablecoin market.

Ethereum is an open-source, distributed computing platform based on blockchain technology that can execute smart contracts - that is, the terms written in the contract will be executed transparently, automatically when the previous conditions are satisfied, and no one can interfere. At the same time, Ethereum also allows developers to build decentralized applications (DApps) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO).

Website | Twitter | Documentation | Whitepaper | Reddit | Discord | Youtube | GitHub | Ethereum Foundation Blog |

Polygon is a sidechain scaling solution that runs alongside the Ethereum blockchain allowing for speedy transactions and low fees. MATIC is the networks native cryptocurrency, which is used for fees, staking, and more. The effectiveness of Polygon as an alternative to Ethereum has seen existing projects such as Aave and Curve adopting its chain.

Website | Twitter | GitHub | Reddit | YouTube

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Circle FUD Fallout: Tether's USDT Surpasses USDC on Ethereum ... - BSC NEWS

Its no secret that crypto wallets need a makeover, and fast. But as the pieces and players leading this makeover emerge, so too is a fight over what to call the effort.

Some call it account abstraction, others call it EIP-4337.

We call it a smart wallet," Argent cofounder and CEO Itamar Lesuisse told Decrypt. "Its as simple as that.

Argent, along with Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe), is at the forefront of the account abstraction movement, making crypto wallets easier, and smarter, to use.

The story of account abstraction, or smart wallets, dates back as far as 2016 with Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-86, and there have been many other related EIPs along the way.

It's a movement that's attempting to change the current wallet standard, called Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) like Metamask, to a smart contract-based one. Whenever you go about your crypto business, you currently need to sign your EOA wallet each and every time you execute a transaction. It's also risky, due to the unique demands of private key management.

Account abstraction provides far more flexibility for crypto wallets. Instead of individually signing 10 different transactions, for example, a smart contract wallet could batch all of these transactions into one click.

These new types of wallets could also mean adding features like recurring payments or, in the case of crypto, recovering lost private keys. Argent solved for this in 2018 with something called social recovery. Wallet users would tap friends or family members to help get back their wallets back should they lose the keys.

Like the smartphone, Lesuisse and his team mean to bring crypto wallets out of the landline era and into the world of programmable money. Another analogy that the Argent chief uses is (ironically) when people first began moving the cash in their wallets into bank accounts.

Suddenly, there was a piece of software that could do stuff for us to make it easier to transfer or make it more secure, he said.

Like banking, smart wallets refer to just about anything that we can program our money and accounts to do without needing our intervention.

The trend is also turning heads at payments giant Visa.

In a new deep dive report on self-custodial crypto wallets, Visa wrote that Ethereum is designed for push payments rather than the more intuitive and automated pull payments.

The former refers to manual payments made by the account holder and the latter to payments by which money leaves an account automatically, like auto-payments for student loans or paying your mortgage every month.

Smart wallets would essentially usher in more of those programmable pull payments to crypto, and make it look a lot more like how we use money in the bank.

It's like blockchains took all these sensibilities away that we were fully expecting and using non-stop in the world. Blockchain sort of ripped off all that from the developer's toolbox, StarkWare co-founder and CEO Uri Kolodny told Decrypt. Account abstraction is saying, guys, can we please have those very sensible tools back in our hands?

Kolodnys team is behind StarkNet, a speedy layer-2 network built on Ethereum, and rolled out a wallet browser extension back in 2021 with Argent called Argent X.

As part of its tinkering in the smart wallet space, Visa also turned to the layer-2 solution to experiment with so-called delegable accounts.

The most beautiful thing about the Visa project is that we only became aware of it when they first posted their amazing research, StarkWare co-founder and president Eli Ben-Sasson told Decrypt. They looked around, and realized that they needed to start from a place both where they will have a global scale needed for their customer base and also has the account abstraction or, as we like to call it, smart wallets, out of the box.

A delegable account, per Visas research, would essentially integrate auto-payments into a crypto wallet and could come with a series of constraints, such as making the payments monthly or putting a limit on how much can be pulled from the wallet.

Beyond the traditional use cases like those that Visa has in mind, smart wallets would also be supremely useful in the world of on-chain gaming.

If you play games, you probably wouldn't want to sign a transaction every five seconds, every time you are killing a player, winning new updates, and then paying for the transaction, said Lesuisse. With account abstraction, you can program what we call a session key and say, hey, I will let that game sign for me for the next hour.

Its still early days, of course, and custodial wallets like Coinbase Wallet or the original crypto wallet MetaMask still dominate the space.

But as the idea of account abstraction (or simply smarter wallets) gains more attention among users as a viable alternative, the Web3 heavyweights could face some serious competition.

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Making Ethereum Wallets Smarter Is the Next Challengeand Visa Is Among Those Working on It - Decrypt

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Polygon (MATIC) price was a clear proof that global market concerns are and can influence cryptocurrency performances. The nearly 5% drop MATIC underwent when US Fed Chair Jerome Powell and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen were speaking is a telling sign that needs to be factored in going forward. With their dire message, the current longer-term recovery rally will take a small dip and search for support with the first focal point nearby at $0.96 or 15% lower.

Polygon price sees its recovery rally from March broken as the sentiment has turned since last week. After its peak at $1.25, Polygon bulls have been giving up on holding important levels such as the 55-day Simple Moving Average (SMA), the pivot level at $1.187 and no new highs being printed for this week. A much more telling sign that clearly another bank collapsing or more turmoil means MATIC traders are pricing in a higher risk premium.

Cryptocurrency traders have been erroneously pumping a dead token called ARbit, causing it to rise 2000% in the past eight days from $0.00024 to a peak price of $0.027. The uptick came as traders confused it for Arbitrum, whose airdrop is slated for later today at 17:00 GMT.

However, the value of ARbit dropped after traders realized it was the wrong token, but it is still 109% up compared to its market value 24 hours ago, trading at $0.01356 at the time of writing. Its trading volumes are also relatively high over the same time frame, considering the mistake, with a reading of $10,430 on CoinMarketCap. This is a 12% increase in its 24-hour trading volume.

The narrative of Ethereum Layer 2 solution tokens is heating up with the shift in focus to altcoins. Bitcoin and Ethereum price rallies grinded to a halt after the recent rate hike announcement by The Fed. Typically, this shifts focus to altcoins and token holders can benefit from the alt season and upcoming L2 airdrops.

Polygon Networks native token MATIC and MetisDAOs METIS have witnessed accumulation since March 12. This coincides with the time when market participants were hit by the global banking crisis. Typically, accumulation by token holders fuels a bullish thesis for the asset.

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Cryptocurrencies Price Prediction: Polygon, Arbitrum & Ethereum ... - FXStreet

The Ethereum [ETH] network, despite its popularity, has been known to drive away users due to the high gas fees required to make transactions on the network.

Is your portfolio green? Check out the Ethereum Profit Calculator

However, in recent days, gas fees on the network has dropped significantly, hitting a one-month low of 29.390 GWEI. This has renewed interest in Ethereum [ETH] from the crypto community, as evidenced by the spike in NFT activity on the network.

Over the past 24 hours, there has been a total of $58 million worth of transactions in the Ethereum NFT market, with 71,700 trades conducted.

Most of this activity (around 70%) took place on the Blur platform, where the average trade amount was $1,206. The remaining 16% of the volume was on OpenSea, where the average trade amount was $335.

The interest in Ethereum is not limited to users alone. Validators on the network have also shown an interest, with their numbers increasing by 6.22% over the past week. This increase in the validators has resulted in a 24.27% rise in revenue generated by them during this period.

Despite this, according to data provided by Dune Analytics, 55% of Ethereum stakers remained unprofitable at press time.

However, the same cannot be said for addresses holding ETH, as the high MVRV ratio suggests that most addresses on the network are profitable. The high profitability of the ETH addresses could incentivize new users to buy ETH going forward.

Realistic or not, heres ETH market cap in BTCs terms

On the other hand, the concentration of whales holding their ETH has increased materially over the last month.

This could make ETH vulnerable to large price fluctuations if these whales decide to sell. This could be one reason why short positions against ETH have increased tremendously over the last few days, according to data from Coinglass.

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What can Ethereums [ETH] declining gas fees mean for the protocol? Analyzing - AMBCrypto News