'Meme coin' Dogwifhat surpasses Avitrum to become 31st largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization
Bitcoin held steady at $71,000. Ethereum also gained despite the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's indirect negative comments on the approval of an ethereum spot exchange-traded fund (ETF). Bitcoin was trading at $70,111.75 (average price on major exchanges), up 1.5% from the previous day, according to cryptocurrency statistics site CoinGecko.
Bitcoin, which hit a record high of $73,097.77 on March 13, temporarily weakened on profit-taking and macro issues, but gained nearly 6% over the week ahead of its halving. Ethereum was up 3.0% to $3,625.22, while Binance Coin was down 0.2% to $605.01. Other cryptocurrencies gaining were Solana +3.0%, Ripple +1.2%, Ada +0.5%, Dogecoin +8.0%, Sivainu +1.5%, Avalanche +0.4%, Polkadot +1.6%, Tron +0.2%, Uniswap +0.9%, Polygon +2.1%, Litecoin +2.7%, Cosmos -0.1%, and OKB +0.5%.
With U.S. markets closed for Good Friday, the crypto markets saw significant gains in Bitcoin and major altcoins ahead of the halving. Analysts attributed the gains to the U.S. markets being closed on April 20, when Bitcoin's mining halving is scheduled to take place. "The U.S. stock market closure prevented outflows from the Grayscale Bitcoin Spot ETF GBTC," said Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, a blockchain technology developer, "and also prevented the circuit breaker for Coinbase stock from being triggered due to low volume."
Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, is optimistic about the bull run. "We expect Bitcoin's strength to continue in the second quarter of the year," said David Duong, head of institutional crypto research at Coinbase, according to the Daily Hoarder. "In addition to halving, we continue to see large institutional entry," he said. "Typically, institutions go through a three-month trial period before offering financial products such as bitcoin spot ETFs to their clients, and the trial is expected to end on April 10 (local time). Institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, UBS, and Goldman Sachs may offer spot ETFs to their clients, and we may see this happen outside of the U.S. as well."
Among the major altcoins, Dogwifhat, a Solana-based meme coin, surged 62.9% over the week to rank 31st with a market capitalization of $4.6108 billion, surpassing the market capitalizations of large Layer 2 projects Avitrum and Mantle. Dogwifhat, a meme coin that exploded in demand alongside Bitcoin's rise earlier this year, went public last December.
As part of its community marketing strategy, Solana airdropped meme coins such as BONK to users in the ecosystem, and as a result of the tremendous growth rate, the meme coins were issued in a 'presale' method, such as Book of Memes (BOME) and Slurp (SLERF). The success of the meme coin led to a wave of pre-sales in the Solana ecosystem. As the craze intensified, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko personally shared a case of fraud and rug-pulling through meme coin pre-sales to raise awareness of the risks.
Meanwhile, investor sentiment indicators showed "extreme greed. Cryptocurrency data provider Alternative's self-estimated Fear-Greed Index rose four points to 79, indicating "extreme greed". The index indicates extreme fear in the market when it is close to zero, and extreme optimism when it is close to 100. The Fear-Greed Index is calculated based on volatility (25%), trading volume (25%), social media mentions (15%), surveys (15%), Bitcoin market capitalization (10%), and Google searches (10%).
