The price of Bitcoin surged to almost $28,500 amid fears of another global financial crash.
BTC is up almost 25% in a week and has a market cap of $534 billion, with the overall value of the crypto market now standing around $1.16 trillion.
The collapse of several banks – Silvergate, Signature and Silicon Valley – seems to be eroding trust in the fiat system, with the UK arm of the latter, a large-scale liquidity provider to the tech sector, bought by HSBC for just £1.
Over the weekend, investment bank Credit Suisse was rescued by UBS Group in a proposed $3.25 billion deal which significantly undercut its $8bn market cap on Friday. As part of the agreement, the Swiss National Bank committed to providing up to $110 billion in liquidity to UBS.
Signature’s deposits and loans are now set to be sold to Flagstar Bank, a subsidiary of New York Community Bancorp, but crypto-related deposits will not be part of the deal.
Other regional banks in the US are reportedly at risk of failure, leading to fears of hyperinflation.
Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan is so confident that people will flock to crypto as an alternative monetary system that he has made a $2m Twitter bet with James Medlock that BTC will reach $1m within 90 days. Other Twitter users are said to have set up a smart contract with the betting terms.
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Meta has shuttered its Instagram NFT business only seven months after launching globally.
Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun has spun his Layer 1 blockchain startup Avail out of the Ethereum scaling protocol. Avail is a modular blockchain optimised for data availability.
Global Bitcoin ATM manufacturer General Bytes has closed its cloud services after an attacker gained access to users’ hot wallets and sensitive information including passwords and private keys.
Crypto prices
The overall market cap of the 22,800 coins is at $1.16 trillion at the time of writing (7am UK), a 0.5% increase in the last 24 hours.
For valuations of the top 100 coins by market cap in US dollars, plus 24-hour price change, see below.