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Tariff turmoil doesn’t deter corporate bitcoin buys

Liberation Day (or as some have dubbed it, Obliteration Day) wreaked havoc on crypto-adjacent stocks. In comparison to the S&P 500, bitcoin’s price is steady, hovering around $82,000 this Friday morning, about where it was at this time last Friday.

As Strategy CEO Michael Saylor put it, “There are no tariffs on Bitcoin.”

Tariffs didn’t seem to deter companies from adding to their bitcoin reserves. Some like Metaplanet even doubled down, buying 690 bitcoin earlier in the week, and then another 160 bitcoin later. The Japanese company now holds 4,206 bitcoin.

Yesterday, MARA Holdings announced it increased its bitcoin holdings to 47,531 in March, producing 829 bitcoin, a 17% increase from February.  

Riot Platforms said it produced 533 bitcoin in March, bringing its reserve to 19,223 bitcoin.

Monday, Strategy said that it bought 22,048 bitcoin for $1.9 billion, bringing its total stash to 528,185.

A new addition to our watchlist, Chinese bitcoin mining company Cango increased its bitcoin reserve, producing 530 bitcoin in March. It now holds 2,475 bitcoin.

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Altcoin trading activity has lost its mojo

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.

Main Altcoins Trading Volume in USD
The trading volume of ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, SUI, and LINK.

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.

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Payward, parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, puts plans for IPO on hold

Payward, crypto exchange Kraken’s parent company, has paused its plans for an initial public offering until market conditions improve, according to a report from CoinDesk that cited two people with knowledge of the matter. 

Since the firm announced in November its preparation for an IPO of its common stock, the total market capitalization of the crypto industry has shed around $652.2 billion, from $3.2 trillion to $2.5 trillion as of Wednesday, data from CoinGecko shows. 

The news comes two weeks after Kraken received approval for a master account from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, allowing the crypto exchange to connect to the Fed’s payment infrastructure used by traditional banks and credit unions. 

Last year, Kraken raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation from institutional investors such as Jane Street and Citadel Securities.

The news comes two weeks after Kraken received approval for a master account from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, allowing the crypto exchange to connect to the Fed’s payment infrastructure used by traditional banks and credit unions. 

Last year, Kraken raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation from institutional investors such as Jane Street and Citadel Securities.

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