Cheatsheet: Coinbase flips Ford, General Electric as bitcoin pumps

This is Cheatsheet, a primer on what’s happening in crypto today.

Bitcoin is again the best performing crypto mega-cap over the past day and now threatens to break $60,000 for the first time since its all-time high in November 2021.

XRP trailed very slightly second-best with 4.1% gains to bitcoin’s 4.1%, as of 7 am ET. Ether (ETH) had stayed flat.

Bitcoin (BTC) is again giving cover for memecoins to do their thing: PEPE trumped practically everything at the top end of the crypto market over the past 24 hours after pumping 45%.

Blockchain-powered storage protocol arweave (AR) followed with 40%. Upstart layer-1 Aptos (APT) is third with 18%, then memecoins ORDI and BONK, which added 16% and 14%.

What’s happening on-chain

DeFi is blowing up alongside bitcoin and ether: There’s now nearly $90 billion in crypto locked across thousands of apps, up 10% since yesterday and by more than half from the start of the year.

• It’s the highest total value locked (TVL) since May 2022, one of two peaks from the 2021 bull market (which began with 2020’s “DeFi summer”).
• More than 61% is on Ethereum, the most since Halloween 2021, when crypto was near all-time highs.
• Tron and Binance Smart Chain are still second and third with 11.11% and 5.36% TVL dominance right now, per DeFiLlama.

Solana’s DeFi space has been energetic, pushing its share of TVL from under 1% in November to more than 2.5%. Liquid staking platform Lido otherwise makes up over one-third of all TVL across all blockchains, per DeFiLlama.

That means Lido’s flagship Ethereum staking token, lido staked ETH (stETH), is technically the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, ahead of XRP and behind solana (SOL).

Lending and debt apps Maker and Aave on Ethereum and JustLend on Tron are also big draws. But in under a year, re-staking app EigenLayer has quickly rivaled them all, now with $9.2 billion TVL to Maker’s $9.3 billion.

Read more: EigenLayer TVL soars after deposit cap removed

• DEX derivatives hit their second-highest volumes on record with $11.66 billion, up 22% from the previous day ($15.16 billion in Feb. 2022 is still the highest).
• Ethereum users paid $18.5 million in fees to use the chain yesterday — the second-biggest daily spend in almost nine months.
• The NFT market is percolating: $55.3 million was traded yesterday, up 44% from the daily average at the start of the month (CryptoPunks, Bored Apes and Pudgy Penguins were the hottest, according to CryptoSlam).

Crypto business

Bitcoin’s current rampage is still converting to serious gains for major crypto stocks.

• Core Scientific, the miner fresh from bankruptcy, saw the most with 10.5% before the bell and another 4.61% after hours.
• MicroStrategy rallied about the same across both sessions, leading Coinbase, which made nearly 9% altogether.
• Mining rig maker Canaan performed the worst during the day session, slipping 11.2% before reclaiming most of it after hours, as bitcoin postured to hit $59,000.

Coinbase is set to open today’s session at $211.30, which would be its highest share price since March 2022. 

At around $50 billion market value, Coinbase is the largest publicly-traded crypto company by far — now eclipsing Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block (formerly Square), which has long incorporated bitcoin in its Cash App.

Coinbase has even now flipped vehicle manufacturers Ford and General Motors after adding more than a quarter to its share price over the year to date (for scale, the AI-adjacent Nvidia is up 63%).

Read more: Coinbase CEO fulfills pledge to sell 2% stake — now he could sell another 5%

• Protocol treasuries are booming due to rising token prices, now at an all-time high of $40 billion, up $2.5 billion over the past week, per DeepDAO.
• Ethereum layer-2s Optimism and Arbitrum boast the biggest with nearly $8 billion a pop, although their own governance tokens make up most of those funds.
• The Ethereum Foundation (a non-profit, not a DAO) has the most out of treasuries with only bitcoin and/or ether, worth over $1 billion after gaining $300 million this month due to rising ether prices.

On the ground

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