Crypto conglomerate DCG launches new altcoin-mining business

Ethereum jumped 6.4% to trade at the $2,170 level on Monday morning, resulting in $208 million worth of liquidations in the last 24 hours with over 60% coming from short positions. 

That said, traders are not convinced the token has enough fuel to climb above $2,500. Prediction market-implied odds of ethereum trading above $2,500 in March have increased from 6% to 23% this morning, but the probability was 70% seven days ago. 

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

Rather, the bearish mood remains, with traders pricing in an implied 67% probability the price of ethereum slips as low as $1,750 this year.

The price action comes as ethereum ETFs registered their first weekly outflow in March, as $59.9 million exited the investment funds last week, per SoSoValue. 

Elsewhere, the largest ethereum treasury firm, BitMine Immersion Technologies, announced acquiring 65,341 tokens last week worth around $141.8 million at current prices, bringing the value of its total ethereum holdings to $10.1 billion. The firm also stated it is the largest staking entity in the world, with over 67% of its ethereum stockpile contributing to the network’s security, according to a company press release.

“As many have noticed, crypto and particularly ETH have outperformed the broader market since the Iran war commenced, with ETH rising 18% and outperforming equities,” BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said in a statement. Lee added, “This is a marked contrast to Gold (a traditional store of value), which has fallen more than 15%. Crypto is demonstrating itself to be a good ‘war time’ store of value.” 

BitMine’s unrealized loss on its ethereum purchases currently stands at nearly $7 billion, per DropsTab data.

Non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies have seen their trading volume plummet in the past five months. The combined trading volume of ethereum, XRP, solana, dogecoin, SUI, and chainlink has decreased by 60% since crypto’s October 10 liquidation event, according to Thomas Probst, a research analyst at crypto markets data provider Kaiko.

For all altcoins, spot trading volume on Binance has declined between 80% and 85% to $7.7 billion, while altcoin volume on other exchanges has dropped to $18.8 billion, down from a range of $63 billion to $91 billion in October, a Friday report from Decrypt found, citing data from CryptoQuant.

“This trend may be explained by a contraction in market liquidity over the same period,” Probst told Sherwood News. “This phenomenon is also reflected in the average 1% market depth, which stood at approximately $2.6 million before the October 10 crash and is now closer to $1.7 million when aggregated across ETH, XRP, SOL, SUI, and LINK.” 

Market depth is used by investors and traders to gauge the scale of liquidity in a market. 1% market depth refers to the amount of liquidity needed to move the market by 1%. 

CoinGlass’s Altcoin Season Index, a measure to assess the performance of non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies, has been sitting above 50 this week, suggesting that the current market is neither in a bitcoin dominant phase nor an altcoin season.