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Mooners & Shakers: Crypto market eyes China’s economic wildcard as Conflux, Filecoin surge again

China seems to be in the hopium trade, with hints it might reintroduce liquidity to markets, including crypto – thereby boosting the sector.

Rob Badman
4 min read
11:53AMMarch 02, 2023.
Updated 1:21PMMarch 02, 2023
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Could this be the trump card we're looking for? Picture: Getty Images
Could this be the trump card we're looking for? Picture: Getty Images

Bitcoin and the crypto market is awash in a turbulent sea of macroeconomic data and narratives flip-flopping about unconvincingly.

And it has been for some time.

January was generally a great month for Bitcoin and the Cryptoverse.

And February was okay, with BTC only just closing out a green month. Which way will the tide take us in March? Difficult to say.

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Chinese economic data boosts markets

We’re able to observe one thing for sure, though, and that’s some rising hopium based around China reintroducing liquidity into markets, including crypto.

Er, yep, despite the ongoing ban on crypto trading and mining over there.

There’s also no small amount of hope, too, for the concept of Hong Kong developing into a China-backed crypto-trading hub.

The founder of cryptocurrency Tron and a leading stakeholder with the Huobi exchange, Justin Sun is certainly encouraged by Hong Kong’s new licensing rules, which are set to boost institutional crypto trading and open up retail crypto trading in the region, as of June.

Meanwhile, the idea of more liquidity in global finance from a zero-Covid-policy-relaxed China could well mean a price rise in volatile, risk assets … in theory.

In any case, Bitcoin and the crypto market had a little pump overnight. And, while the market is still widely seen as correlating with the daily, weekly and monthly fortunes of US stocks and inversely correlated to the US Dollar Index, Chinese economic data and stocks performance is throwing a wildcard into the mix.

As Stockhead’s Eddy Sunarto reported earlier today in his excellent Market Highlights roundup, which you should definitely clock into every single morning, China recorded quite impressive manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) data overnight.

MORE FROM STOCKHEAD: February crypto winners | Illuvium DAO votes down NFT contest | Enter a ‘zombie-killing casino’

The index reportedly rose to 52.6 in February – the highest level in more than a decade, and indicating expanded economic activity within the eastern superpower.

This is potentially easing global financial growth concerns and giving certain commodities (oil, gold) a boost, as well as increasing risk appetite in markets.

It seems to have increased risk appetite slightly in Bitcoin and some of the crypto majors over the past 24 hours, but more so in “Chinese cryptos”, such as Filecoin and Conflux. Let’s take a gander …

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at $US1.13 trillion at the time of writing, up about 2 per cent since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Source: CoinGecko
Source: CoinGecko

Amid the overall green scene on the daily time frame in the majors, there a couple of standouts – Ethereum (ETH) and Polygon (MATIC).

Ethereum (ETH) might be one of the better-performing cryptos in the top 10 today on the back of news its blockchain has already deployed its “account abstraction” feature, often touted by co-founder Vitalik Buterin as a positive enhancement for the network.

As CoinDesk reports, the upgrade, known as ERC-4337, is designed to make it easier for users to recover their crypto if they lose private keys to an online wallet.

“Account Abstraction is a concept that turns users’ wallets into smart contract accounts, in order to make Ethereum wallets more user-friendly and to prevent any loss of crypto keys,” reads the report.

Meanwhile, Polygon’ MATIC token price has lifted out of its early-week doldrums. Guess you can’t keep a good “zk-rollups” Ethereum scaling-solution narrative down for too long.

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about $US10.2 billion to about $US480 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

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DAILY PUMPERS

  • Conflux (CFX), (market cap: $US503 million) +23 per cent
  • Maker (MKR), (mc: $US839 million) +17 per cent
  • Filecoin (FIL), (mc: $US2.9 billion) +12 per cent
  • SingularityNET (AGIX), (mc: $US656 million) +12 per cent
  • Fetch.ai (FET), (mc: $US462 million) +2 per cent

Conflux and Filecoin. We’ve covered both a little bit recently.

The former is apparently China’s only fully regulated, government-backed public blockchain. And it’s been making a few partnership and funding waves just lately, including a deal to build blockchain-based SIM cards with China’s second-biggest wireless carrier – China Telecom.

Also, this – a hefty chunk of funding from Singaporean investment firm DWF Labs:

Meanwhile, like Ethereum and its suite of impending upgrades, Filecoin is making some noise over at the ETHDenver “innovation festival” as it gears up to launch its Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) – which will bring smart-contract user programability to the Filecoin network, much like Ethereum.

DAILY SLUMPERS

  • Osmosis (OSMO), (market cap: $US510 million) -1 per cent
  • ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: $US895 million) -1 per cent

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

Feel like we’re not giving bearish views enough of a say here? Okay, here’s impartial trader/analyst Justin Bennett with something negative for traders and investors to consider …

But then there’s this, from another popular analyst, Rekt Capital:

This content first appeared on stockhead.com.au

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/stockhead/mooners-shakers-crypto-market-eyes-chinas-economic-wildcard-as-conflux-filecoin-surge-again/news-story/ae423f5c61403092b1474ff129a4202d