First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Trades Below $65K Following Wednesday's Drop

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Bitcoin BTC$90,130.77 struggled to stay above $65,000, after falling below $64,000 during Wednesday's American trading hours. After briefly retaking $65,000, BTC drifted toward the $64,500 mark, down around 1% on 24 hours ago. The CoinDesk 20 Index is about 2.4% lower. The halt in Wednesday's rally followed an equity market sell-off, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq index dropping 2.7% and the S&P 500 falling 1.3%. Joel Kruger, a market strategist at LMAX Group, said that the crypto rally might stall if the stock market sell-off turns into a correction, but over a longer time frame may provide a haven for investors fleeing stocks.

The chances of President Joe Biden dropping out of November's election hit 68% on crypto-based prediction market platform Polymarket. Biden announced he had been diagnosed with Covid-19 on Wednesday, having previously said he would re-evaluate whether to run "if [he] had some medical condition." The president has thus far given a poor showing during the campaign, most notably during a debate with Donald Trump, who is considered the significantly more pro-crypto candidate. Trump's perceived chances of victory have become a metric for the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin's rally to over $65,000 this week followed the assassination attempt on Trump, which was seen as a boost to his prospects of retaking the White House.

Several cryptocurrencies experienced significant losses after a malicious attack on Indian crypto exchange WazirX. The platform's native token WRX traded 15% lower at just over 14 cents while meme coin SHIB$0.0₅8440 slumped nearly 10%. The WazirX attacker walked away with more than $230 million in customer funds, including $100 million in SHIB and $52 million of ETH. Other tokens have been relatively stable in dollar terms while suffering significant losses in Indian rupee-denominated pairs. The bitcoin-rupee pair declined by 11% to 5.1 million rupees ($60,945), a massive discount to rival exchange CoinDCX. Meanwhile, the USDT-INR pair on WazirX has slipped by 8%.

Chart of the Day

• The chart shows CME's share in global notional open interest in the standard futures market tied to bitcoin and ether.
• The global derivatives giant accounts for 83% of total BTC futures open interest and 65% of ETH open interest.
• The numbers represent growing institutional participation in the crypto market.
• Source: Glassnode

- Omkar Godbole

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