First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Holds $43K

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Bitcoin stood its ground above $43,000 during the European morning on Friday, maintaining gains of around 2% in the last 24 hours. The CoinDesk 20 Index, which provides a weighted performance of the top digital assets, is up over 3.2%, with Chainlink's LINK leading the charge. LINK reached a 22-month high above $18 having gained nearly 30% in the last week, comfortably beating major cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH. The rally marks a bullish breakout from the three-month range that's seen it stuck between $13 and $17, and signals a continuation of a comeback from June 2023 lows near $5.

AI crypto tokens enjoyed a rally in the last 24 hours after Meta's quarterly earnings beat analyst expectations. The technology giant formerly known as Facebook announced a significant revenue increase and an additional $50 billion stock buyback on Thursday, sending artificial intelligence tokens up in its wake. CoinDesk Indices’ Computing Select Index (CPUS), which holds AI tokens like Render (RNDR) and Fetch.ai (FET), is up nearly 10% over the last 24 hours, compared to the major crypto assets which have gained nearly 3%, as per the CoinDesk 20 Index. Since CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would be pivoting to AI around a year ago, its stock has more than doubled.

Binance froze $4.2 million worth of XRP tied to this week's $120 million exploit. CEO Richard Teng said in an X post that XRP Ledger developers had flagged the exploit to exchanges and asked them to look out for deposits related to exploiter wallets. The tokens were apparently stolen from a wallet earlier this week. The wallet was later confirmed to belong to Ripple Labs Executive Chairman Chris Larsen. Larsen said that there had been a breach to his "personal XRP accounts," but not of Ripple itself. In a Wednesday post, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT claimed that 213 million XRP tokens had been siphoned out of a large wallet on the XRP Leger blockchain. The funds were subsequently laundered through multiple exchanges including Binance, Kraken and OKX.

Chart of The Day

• The chart shows the number of bitcoin held in wallets associated with miners.
• The tally has dropped to 1,814,691 BTC, the lowest since July 2021.
• Miners seem to be running down their inventory ahead of Bitcoin's fourth reward halving, due in April.
• Source: Glassnode

- Omkar Godbole

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