Stripe Advances Crypto Efforts with Avalanche, Friend.Tech Airdrop Set for This Week
Market Update
- Investors will have a lot to digest this week, including various data releases such as consumer confidence, ADP Employment, JOLTS, and non-farm payrolls. Likely more important is the FOMC meeting and Treasury Quarterly Refunding Announcement (QRA), both set for Wednesday. Equities are gaining to start the week with the SPY 1.14% and QQQ 1.54% both up approximately 0.30% as the DXY 0.00% (-0.44%) slides after the BOJ intervened to support the Yen against the dollar. Crypto assets are struggling so far today, with BTC 6.06% (-0.51%) briefly falling below $62k before recovering to $62.8k and ETH 3.29% (-2.85%) trading at $3,170 after surpassing $3,350 yesterday. AVAX 4.58% is displaying strength today, rising 3.33% following news of a new partnership with payments giant Stripe.
- As highlighted in Friday’s market update, Stripe has introduced stablecoin crypto payments across the Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon networks. In addition, Stripe and Avalanche have struck a partnership to enable the functionality of the Avalanche C-Chain and to directly integrate Stripe’s fiat-to-crypto on-ramp into popular Avalanche dapps through Avalanche’s Core Wallet. Avalanche users will be able to fund their wallets via the Stripe widget and purchase assets via ACH, debit, or credit cards. Stripe will handle all the KYC, payments, fraud, and compliance functionalities and should help Avalanche dapps avoid the “cold start problem” where users don’t have enough funds to complete on-chain transactions. Many of the leading ecosystem protocols are set to utilize the integration, including GoGoPool, The Arena, Shrapnel, and Avvy. A common complaint within crypto is the clunky experience of purchasing assets through a centralized exchange and sending them to another wallet or bridging across chains to access specific apps. The Avalanche and Stripe integration should help bridge the gap between web2 and web3 and provide better usability.
- Crypto social app Friend.tech is expected to launch its v2 platform this week as investors await the upcoming FRIEND airdrop. Friend.tech allows users to trade shares of different social media personalities, and shareholders get access to private chats with influencers. Friend.tech was extremely popular last summer but attention has since died down. The v2 launch and airdrop anticipation have helped revitalize the platform, and v2 will introduce new features like shared treasuries, NFT mints, a native DEX, and a new point system. Additionally, there will be UI updates like visual themes, GIFs, editing messages, and adding polls or raffles into chats. The friend.tech Twitter account announced that the snapshot for FRIEND has been taken, and the airdrop will take place on Thursday at 1:30 ET after a delay to add functionality for users to share FRIEND tokens with their key holders.
Daily Technical Strategy
Mark L. Newton, CMT
Head of Technical Strategy
EOS has slowly but surely begun its bottoming process following last month's rise to multi-month highs, reaching the highest peaks since last Spring 2023. While April's consolidation has given up much of March's progress, EOS rise has still positively affected momentum and commonly watched indicators like MACD turned back to positive months ago on a monthly timeframe. This minor pullback to $0.80 looks attractive to consider EOS for gains back to 2022 highs initially. While a lengthier uptrend will take time, it's bottoming process looks complete, and I expect the start of higher highs and higher lows as its uptrend gets underway. Only a weekly close back under $0.50 would serve to thwart its current rally prospects, and I find EOS to be an appealing laggard to consider which has started to show some mean reversion.
Daily Important Metrics
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All metrics as of April 29, 2024 2:28 PM
All Funding rates are in bps
Crypto Prices
| Symbol | Market Cap | Last Price | Daily Change | Year to Date | Relative to BTC YTD |
 BTC | $1.24T | $62,946 | ↓ -1.23% | ↑ 49% | |
 ETH | $387B | $3,169 | ↓ -4.61% | ↑ 39% | ↓ -9.76% |
 SOL | $60B | $135 | ↓ -5.41% | ↑ 33% | ↓ -16% |
 DOGE | $20B | $0.1420 | ↓ -5.52% | ↑ 59% | ↑ 10% |
 ADA | $16B | $0.4546 | ↓ -3.14% | ↓ -23% | ↓ -72% |
 DOT | $9.5B | $6.60 | ↓ -4.03% | ↓ -19% | ↓ -68% |
 LINK | $8.2B | $13.88 | ↓ -1.63% | ↓ -7.24% | ↓ -56% |
 NEAR | $7.2B | $6.78 | ↓ -5.67% | ↑ 88% | ↑ 39% |
 MATIC | $6.9B | $0.6996 | ↓ -5.14% | ↓ -27% | ↓ -76% |
Exchange Traded Products (ETPs)
| Symbol | Premium to Nav | Last Price | Daily Change | Year to Date | Relative to BTC YTD |
| BITW | ↓ -32% | $32.27 | ↓ -3.21% | ↑ 38% | ↓ -11% |
| ETHE | ↓ -24% | $22.67 | ↑ 0.89% | ↑ 17% | ↓ -32% |
News
QUICK BITS
CoinDesk Bitcoin Trades At Slight Premium in Yen Terms Amid Suspected BOJ Intervention The Japanese yen swung wildly on Monday, recovering 500 pips from over three-decade lows on suspected BOJ intervention. |
MARKET DATA
The Block Crypto investment products see third consecutive week of outflows totaling $435 million The outflows are the largest since a record of nearly $1 billion during the third week of March as bitcoin fell back from its all-time high. |
FUNDRAISING AND M&A
CoinDesk Tether Buys $200M Majority Stake in Brain-Computer Interface Company Blackrock Neurotech The investment will fund the roll-out and commercialization of the company's medical devices. |
MINING
The Block Lone bitcoin miner beats the odds to win full $219,000 block reward The bitcoin miner earned $218,544 in total rewards for mining block 841,286 using CKpool in a solo mining configuration. |
HIRING
The Block BlackRock’s adds Moonpay Chief Legal Officer Lindsey Haswell to fund’s board Haswell has years of crypto experience at Blockchain.com, MoonPay, and as a founding team member of the Core blockchain. |
PRODUCT UPDATES AND PARTNERSHIPS
Decrypt.co Friend.tech V2 Goes Live as Hype Builds for 100% Airdrop of FRIEND Token As Friend.tech launches its version 2, hype builds among the community for its new points system and FRIEND token airdrop. |
Decrypt.co Payments Giant Stripe Expands Crypto Return With Avalanche Integration Stripe's new Avalanche integration means that users can buy AVAX directly through the mobile app—without having to go through an exchange. |
HACKS, EXPLOITS, AND SCAMS
The Block Solana-based DePIN io.net CEO claims network was attacked in detailed postmortem Users on X had raised questions about the number of GPUs available on Io.net's platform, leading the protocol's executives to respond. |
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