Cryptocurrencies extend rally while stocks falter 

Bitcoin started another record-setting week Monday, hitting a price of $72,846.65 according to Coinbase

article-image

Shutterstock-Pixelsquid/Shutterstock and Adobe Stock modified by Blockworks

share

Bitcoin and ether continued their historic price run Monday while equities posted a mild correction ahead of next week’s interest rate decision. 

Bitcoin broke yet another record Monday afternoon in New York, hitting a price of $72,846.65, according to Coinbase. The largest cryptocurrency is up close to 5% today and more than 8% over the past week. 

Bitcoin (BTC), which lost 11% last week after clocking an all-time high, managed to hold steady Monday, trading just under $72,300 at time of publication, per Coinbase. 

Read more: Bitcoin sets another all-time high Monday flirting with $72,000

Bitcoin’s rally has spurred a number of liquidations in the derivatives market that exacerbated the volatility, analysts from Kaiko said in a Monday note. Bitcoin perpetual futures open interest hit a multi-year high last week of $15 billion while market depth surpassed $600 million, according to Kaiko. 

“However, looking at the breakdown between bid and ask depth, we observe a strong mismatch,” Kaiko analysts wrote. “The quantity of asks far surpasses bids within 2% of the mid price for the longest period since early 2021. This suggests that traders have been taking profit as BTC hits new highs.”

Ether (ETH) was also on the rise Monday, rallying 4% over 24 hours to trade around $4,000. While bitcoin has been breaking records in recent days, ether has yet to post a new all-time high. Its last record price of $4,721 was set in 2021. 

Read more: Ethereum hits $4K for first time since December 2021

The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee convenes next week for their policy-setting meeting. Markets overwhelmingly expect central bankers to hold interest rates, according to data from CME Group. 

Stocks pared gains from last week, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes closing Monday’s session 0.1% and 0.4% lower, respectively. 

Investors are still parsing through the “mixed bag” jobs report released on Friday, which showed the US economy added 275,000 jobs in February, more than the 200,000 new positions expected, Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research said. 

“Since unemployment is exceptionally low, it makes it harder to know whether rising joblessness is truly worrisome or simply the return to a more-sustainable long run average,” Colas said. “This is a potential problem for the Fed’s ability to read the US labor market/economy, and Chair Powell has discussed it at past post-FOMC press conferences.” 


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 18 - 20, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

recent research

LTIPPanalysis.png

Research

This report is a retroactive analysis of Arbitrum's Long Term Incentives Pilot Program (LTIPP). We collect relevant data at a protocol level and review bi-weekly updates to analyze recipients, their strategies, and the impact of the incentives on high level growth metrics. In particular, we want to highlight outperformers and underperformers, and glean any best practices or lessons learned for protocols distributing ARB incentives in the future. The overarching goal is to synthesize lessons learned that the DAO can reference as it begins thinking about future incentives programs–namely, the working group for incentives that is being actively discussed–especially as Timeboost introduces new conditions for trading and economic activity.

article-image

Sponsored

AI project Zerebro intersects the spheres of artificial intelligence, finance, art, music, and culture

article-image

Allmight is focused on furthering the United States’ leadership in crypto

article-image

The conditions Charles Schwab is waiting for before jumping headfirst into crypto could take shape soon

article-image

The FCA’s director of payments and digital assets shared some takeaways from chats with crypto companies and law firms

article-image

Let’s take a look at how US equities typically perform this time of year and what we might see in the coming days

article-image

Lumina introduces transparency and permissionless integration via an OP stack-based optimium, challenging traditional oracle designs