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Crypto Daybook Americas: Gold’s Historic Rally Brings Back BTC’s ‘Store of Value’ Debate
By James Van Straten (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)
The recent market turmoil might have given gold the bragging rights of being the «store of value» while «digital gold» struggles, at least for now.
Gold futures for April delivery have surpassed $3,000 an ounce for the first time ever, marking a historic milestone for the precious metal. Spot gold is consolidating just below $3,000 an ounce, up 15% year-to-date, while its digital counterpart, bitcoin (BTC), is struggling—down 12% this year and hovering around $80,000.
This divergence underscores gold’s role as the ultimate safe-haven asset in the current economic environment.
Since mid-February, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs have experienced only three days of inflows, causing total net inflows to decline from $40 billion to approximately $35 billion, according to Eric Balchunas, a senior Bloomberg ETF analyst.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has entered correction territory, falling over 10% and struggling to reclaim its 200-day moving average amid escalating geopolitical tensions. Further tariffs imposed by former President Trump and stalled ceasefire negotiations between President Putin and Ukraine have exacerbated global uncertainty.
Andre Dragosch, Head of Research at Bitwise in Europe, attributes gold’s record highs and the U.S. equity sell-off to rising short- and medium-term inflation expectations, coupled with declining consumer confidence.
“The recent rally in gold to new all-time highs likely reflects both increasing inflation expectations and a broader flight to safety,” Dragosch explains. “In fact, both short- and medium-term inflation expectations in the University of Michigan consumer survey have risen to multi-decade highs. U.S. consumers are growing increasingly concerned about inflation, likely due to the Trump administration’s new tariff policies.”
He further notes, “Meanwhile, U.S. equities have been selling off due to mounting economic uncertainty driven by these trade policies, as well as rising recession risks amid a slowdown in the labor market. Both factors have significantly buoyed the price of gold.”
What to Watch
Crypto:
March 15: Athene Network (ATH) mainnet launch.
March 15: Reploy will close its V1 RAI staking program to new users as it transitions to a fully automated revenue-sharing protocol.
March 17: CME Group launches solana (SOL) futures.
March 17: Ethereum (ETH) testnet Hoodi goes live. The Pectra upgrade will be applied to this testnet on March 26 and to the mainnet “30+ days after Hoodi forks successfully, pending infra and client testing.”
March 18: Zano (ZANO) hard fork network upgrade; this activates “ETH Signature support for off-chain signing and asset operations.”
March 20: Pascal hard fork network upgrade goes live on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) mainnet.
March 21, 1:00 p.m.: The U.S. SEC’s Crypto Task Force hosts a roundtable, which is open to the public, that will focus on the definition of a security.
Macro
March 14, 8:00 a.m.: The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) releases January producer price inflation data.
PPI MoM Prev. 1.48%
PPI YoY Prev. 9.42%
March 14, 10:00 a.m.: The University of Michigan’s March (U.S.) Consumer Sentiment (preliminary) index Est. 63.1 vs. Prev. 64.7.
March 14, 3:00 p.m.: Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics and Census releases February inflation data.
Inflation Rate MoM Est. 2.4% vs. Prev. 2.2%
Inflation Rate YoY Est. 66.8 vs. Prev. 84.5%
March 16, 10:00 p.m.: The National Bureau of Statistics of China releases February employment data.
Unemployment Rate Prev. 5.1%
Earnings (Estimates based on FactSet data)
March 14: Bit Digital (BTBT), pre-market, $-0.05
March 24 (TBC): Galaxy Digital Holdings (TSE: GLXY), C$0.38
Token Events
Governance votes & calls
ApeCoin DAO is discussing the establishment of an APE base in Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. It’s also discussing the creation of ApeSites, which aims to provide the BAYC community an “easy-to-use tool to create personalized websites.”
Aave DAO is discussing the launch of Horizon, a licensed instance of the Aave Protocol to allow institutions to “access permissionless stablecoin liquidity while meeting issuer requirements.”
Balancer DAO is discussing the deployment of Balancer V3 on OP Mainnet.
March 14: CoW DAO’s vote on the incorporation of a 4-entity legal structure for the organization ends.
March 14, 10 a.m.: Representatives from Lombard, Etherfi, Coinbase and Curve to participate in an X Spaces session
Unlocks
March 14: Starknet (STRK) to unlock 2.33% of its circulating supply worth $11.15 million.
March 15: Sei (SEI) to unlock 1.19% of its circulating supply worth $10.06 million.
March 16: Arbitrum (ARB) to unlock 2.1% of its circulating supply worth $32.29 million.
March 18: Fasttoken (FTN) to unlock 4.66% of its circulating supply worth $79.80 million.
March 21: Immutable (IMX) to unlock 1.39% of circulating supply worth $12.91 million.
March 23: Metars Genesis (MRS) to unlock 11.87% of its circulating supply worth $102.6 million.
March 23: Mantra (OM) to unlock 0.51% of its circulating supply worth $31.2 million.
Token Listings
March 18: Paws (PAWS) to be listed on Bybit.
March 31: Binance to delist USDT, FDUSD, TUSD, USDP, DAI, AEUR, UST, USTC, and PAXG.
Conferences
CoinDesk’s Consensus is taking place in Toronto on May 14-16. Use code DAYBOOK and save 15% on passes.
Day 2 of 2: Web3 Amsterdam ‘25
March 16: Solana AI Summit (San Jose, Calif.)
March 18-20: Digital Asset Summit 2025 (New York)
March 18-20: Fintech Americas Miami 2025
March 19-20: Next Block Expo (Warsaw)
March 24-26: Merge Buenos Aires
March 25-26: PAY360 2025 (London)
March 25-27: Mining Disrupt (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)
March 26: Crypto Assets Conference (Frankfurt)
March 26: DC Blockchain Summit 2025 (Washington)
March 26-28: Real World Crypto Symposium 2025 (Sofia, Bulgaria)
March 27: Building Blocks (Tel Aviv)
March 27: Digital Euro Conference 2025 (Frankfurt)
March 27: WIKI Finance EXPO Hong Kong 2025
March 27-28: Money Motion 2025 (Zagreb, Croatia)
March 28: Solana APEX (Cape Town)
Token Talk
By Oliver Knight
In an otherwise muted day for altcoins, HyperLiquid’s native token is leading the pack, having risen by 9.5% in the past 24 hours. The boost comes as the decentralized exchange topped $1 trillion in cumulative volume this month, with $4.8 billion worth of derivatives in the past day alone.
The same cannot be said for other DeFi tokens like AAVE, LIDO and PYTH, which have all been between 19% and 21% down over the past seven days after failing to recover from a market-wide plunge over the weekend.
One trader profited a cool $108k after buying Base memecoin doginme on Thursday only for Coinbase to list the token on Friday, spurring a 150% rally.
Derivatives Positioning
Earlier this morning, the price of Bitcoin bounced to $82,895 from levels below $80,000, hitting a cluster of short liquidations leverage worth $52.1mn, according to CoinGlass. The next significant liquidations leverage level is $79,760, holding liquidations worth $41.9mn.
Among the assets with over $100mn in open interest, Chainlink saw the highest 1D percentage gain, rising 35.8% to $409.5mn. PNUT, Near Protocol, Stellar and Trump complete the top five, with their open interest rising 19.7%, 15.8%, 14.8% and 11.8% on the day. Layer-1 Network Sei (SEI) saw the highest decline in open interest, falling 17.2% to $101mn.
In the bitcoin options market on Deribit, call options at a $100,000 strike price hold the highest open interest, with a notional value of $1.5 billion, followed by $1.35 billion in open interest at the $120,000 strike. However, the Put-to-Call ratio, currently at 0.52, signals significant put-side interest, with the largest put contracts holding $800 million and $700 million in open interest at strike prices of $80,000 and $75,000, respectively.
Market Movements:
BTC is up 2.93% from 4 p.m. ET Thursday at $82,739.17 (24hrs: -0.57%)
ETH is up 2.38% at $1,890.23 (24hrs: -0.55%)
CoinDesk 20 is up 3.36% at 2,592.81 (24hrs: -0.14%)
Ether CESR Composite Staking Rate is down 17 bps at 2.99%
BTC funding rate is at 0.0025% (2.79% annualized) on Binance
DXY is unchanged at 103.88
Gold is up 0.71% at $3,000.95/oz
Silver is up 0.83% at $33.97/oz
Nikkei 225 closed +0.72% at 37,053.10
Hang Seng closed +2.12% at 23,959.98
FTSE is up 0.49% at 8,584.53
Euro Stoxx 50 is up 0.69% at 5,365.00
DJIA closed on Thursday -1.3% at 40,813.57
S&P 500 closed -1.39% at 5,521.52
Nasdaq closed -1.96% at 17,303.01
S&P/TSX Composite Index closed -0.9% at 24,203.23
S&P 40 Latin America closed +0.73% at 2,343.21
U.S. 10-year Treasury rate is up 2bps at 4.3%
E-mini S&P 500 futures are up 0.67% at 5,564.75
E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures are up 0.9% at 19,421.50
E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average Index futures are up 0.42% at 41,036.00
Bitcoin Stats:
BTC Dominance: 61.82 (0.26%)
Ethereum to bitcoin ratio: 0.02288 (-0.48%)
Hashrate (seven-day moving average): 825 EH/s
Hashprice (spot): $47.3
Total Fees: 5.55 BTC / $456,716
CME Futures Open Interest: 144,785 BTC
BTC priced in gold: 27.7 oz
BTC vs gold market cap: 7.86%
Technical Analysis
Bitcoin has rebounded off its weekly 50-day EMA, a historically significant support level during past uptrends. In previous cycles, this touchpoint often led to a consolidation phase lasting 6 to 9 weeks before resuming momentum.
For bulls, maintaining a weekly close above the 50-day EMA is crucial, as sustained price action below this level could signal deeper weakness. Additionally, reclaiming the yearly open—aligned with previous range lows—would strengthen bullish conviction.
Without this reclaim, any short-term bounces may risk turning into bearish retests, reinforcing the breakdown in market structure on the weekly timeframe.
Crypto Equities
Strategy (MSTR): closed on Thursday at $263.26 (+0.27%), up 3.34% at $272.04 in pre-market
Coinbase Global (COIN): closed at $177.49 (-7.43%), up 2.89% at $182.62
Galaxy Digital Holdings (GLXY): closed at C$16.62 (-5.03%)
MARA Holdings (MARA): closed at $12.16 (-7.25%), up 3.37% at $12.57
Riot Platforms (RIOT): closed at $7.31 (-6.88%), up 2.74% at $7.51
Core Scientific (CORZ): closed at $8.66 (-3.24%), down 2.89% at $8.91
CleanSpark (CLSK): closed at $7.69 (-5.06%), up 3.25% at $7.94
CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI): closed at $14.57 (-4.71%)
Semler Scientific (SMLR): closed at $32.62 (-2.92%)
Exodus Movement (EXOD): closed at $26.08 (-4.92%), down 3.6% at $25.14
ETF Flows
Spot BTC ETFs:
Daily net flow: -$135.2 million
Cumulative net flows: $35.35 billion
Total BTC holdings ~ 1,115 million.
Spot ETH ETFs
Daily net flow: -$73.6 million
Cumulative net flows: $2.58 billion
Total ETH holdings ~ 3.545 million.
Source: Farside Investors
Overnight Flows
Chart of the Day
With Gold reaching a new all-time high of $3,000, the Gold/BTC ratio has reached 0.037, the highest level since the U.S. elections on Nov. 5th.
While You Were Sleeping
Russia Leans on Cryptocurrencies for Oil Trade, Sources Say (Reuters): Some Russian oil firms reportedly use cryptocurrencies to bypass sanctions and streamline converting yuan and rupees from China and India into rubles.
BofA Says US Stocks Rout Is Correction, Not Start of Bear Market (Bloomberg): Strategist Michael Hartnett suggests buying the S&P 500 if it nears 5,300, provided investor cash reserves rise above 4%, bond risk premiums widen, and stock sell-offs accelerate.
Trump-backed World Liberty Financial (WLFI) Completes $590M Token Sale (CoinDesk); Despite early reports of sluggish sales, the Trump-associated crypto project raised $590 million in a token sale restricted to accredited investors, with Justin Sun’s investment helping to boost demand.
AI’s Lead Over Crypto for VC Dollars Increased in Q1’25, But Does This Race Really Matter? (CoinDesk): AI funding this quarter nears $20 billion, led by Databricks’ $15.3 billion raise, while the largest crypto deal so far is Binance securing $2 billion in funding.
A New Hope for Europe’s Ailing Economies: the Military (The Wall Street Journal): The European Commission’s €800 billion defense initiative could fuel technological advancements, stimulate job creation, and strengthen industrial capacity, particularly in sectors like robotics, satellite networks, and autonomous systems.
UK Economy Unexpectedly Contracted 0.1% in January (Financial Times): The British pound fell 0.2% against the dollar after weak GDP data. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to announce potential spending cuts in the March 26 Spring Statement.
In the Ether
Trading volumes for Cardano’s ADA token have exploded of late with daily figures averaging around $720 million in February while exceeding an average of $1.4 billion in March.
This rise was spurred by a social media post by U.S. President Donald Trump, who mentioned ADA as one of the tokens that would be included in the nation’s strategic crypto reserve.
Although Cardano is enjoying its moment of mainstream attention, the layer-1 blockchain has been quietly emerging as a crypto juggernaut since it went live in late 2017.
Adoption metrics
The ADA token has a market cap of $25.6 billion but what’s more notable is what’s under the hood; data from Google shows that the Cardano blockchain has more than 5 million unique wallets and 1.3 million delegators, with thousands of new wallets being created per day.
The blockchain also has $329 million in total value locked (TVL), although Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard believes that metric is overemphasized by crypto communities.
Instead, he points to «non-value transactions» associated with people conducting real-world – albeit non-financial – activities on blockchain rails: Minting a decentralized ID, tracking metadata, recording documents, that sort of thing. Cardano’s a hotbed of such activity, he said.
«I’m fighting to ensure that 50% of the activity is a non-value transaction,» Gregaard told CoinDesk.
One example of this is Cardano’s partnership with Veritree, which saw the Cardano community donate over 1 million ADA tokens to plant 1 million mangrove trees in Kenya, with each donation verified and tracked on the blockchain.
Last week, the Cardano Foundation also announced a deal with SERPRO — Brazil’s largest state-owned IT company – to accelerate blockchain adoption in South America. SERPRO processes 33 billion transactions annually for 90% of Brazil’s federal administration. Additionally, 8,000 employees will also receive blockchain training.
Cardano’s perspective differs from the likes of Solana and the slew of layer-2 networks like Base that pride themselves on total value locked (TVL) and hype-driven movements like memecoins and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
TVL on Solana grew from $2.2 billion to more than $10 billion in 2024, Cardano meanwhile zipped from a modest $445 million to $537 million in the same period.
DeFi on Cardano
Whilst Cardano Foundation’s CEO said his focus is on real-world use cases, the blockchain still boasts a bustling DeFi ecosystem under the surface.
Minswap is Cardano’s native decentralized exchange (DEX). Its cumulative trading volume hit $3.4 billion this month with December alone notching a near-record $271 million, DefiLlama data shows.
There are also a number of lending protocols including Liqwid, Lenfi and Optim Finance, with TVL across Cardano’s lending sector exceeding $116 million.
But the key part of Gregaard’s mission, he insists, is not to exceed that 50% level for financialized transactions. He sees it as staying in line with the Cardano Foundation’s non-profit ethos, even if it limits potential exponential growth of hype-fueled movements like memecoins.
Cardano Foundation vs Hoskinson vs Emurgo
Fulfilling that ethos has its own challenges, mostly because the blockchain is run by three main entities: the Cardano Foundation, Charles Hoskinson’s IOG and Emurgo. The latter two are commercial businesses, which can cause friction between them and the foundation.
«The intent of having a non-profit was that you can optimize decision-making based on 10 years, it’s different than if you optimize decision-making tomorrow,» Gregaard added.
Some of the friction was highlighted by an anonymous Cardano community member in December, who penned an email on a path forward and detailed how the entities running Cardano were at loggerheads.
«CF’s recent burst of activity is part of a larger strategic play—an attempt to undermine Charles, IOG, Intersect, and the broader governance roadmap,» the email read.
«It’s been a long and difficult road, but I do agree with some of the sentiments of the whistleblower,» Hoskinson wrote in response on X.
Gregaard, however, was more diplomatic about any potential rift.
«There’s no monetary exchange going on between us, but we do work very closely together,» he said.
«We sometimes go to [a conference] and we share a booth. So we come together and we sponsor booths together, that’s the closest you will get to any affiliates, which is very different compared to both the Ethereum foundation or Tezos foundation, where they basically control the Treasury and control the disbursements.»
«On the flip side, we [Cardano Foundation] are the liability umbrella for the community and the blockchain, which means that we are the one who interacts with the SEC and the CSDC and the FMA, and I negotiated MICA with the European Parliament.»
The Delaware bankruptcy court handling the FTX estate approved a petition on Thursday from Three Arrows Capital (3AC) to significantly expand its claim against the estate from $120 million to $1.53 billion, marking a major development in the ongoing fallout from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire.
3AC, once a dominant crypto hedge fund with over $3 billion in reported net assets, collapsed in 2022 while it still had deep financial ties to FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried’s soon-to-collapse crypto exchange. The hedge fund initially filed a proof of claim worth $120 million against FTX in July 2023 — adding its name to a long list of users and investors in FTX who lost money as a result of its sudden insolvency.
In November 2024, 3AC’s liquidators amended their claim after discovering new evidence suggesting that FTX had liquidated $1.53 billion in 3AC’s assets just two weeks before the hedge fund commenced its own liquidation proceedings two years prior. They argued that FTX’s liquidation of 3AC’s funds was carried out to satisfy a $1.3 billion liability to FTX, an obligation that 3AC claimed was not sufficiently substantiated.
FTX’s bankruptcy said the $1.3 billion liability represented collateral for a loan FTX made to 3AC, but the court ruled in favor of 3AC, finding insufficient evidence to support FTX’s loan claim.
The ruling allows 3AC to pursue a significantly larger portion of FTX’s remaining assets, potentially reshaping creditor payouts.
FTX, which began distributing funds to creditors in February 2025, said the expanded claim should have come sooner, arguing that it would burden other creditors and complicate its reorganization plan. The court, however, determined that 3AC’s delay was justified, given that the liquidators only uncovered the full extent of their claim in mid-2024 due to missing financial records from FTX and a lack of cooperation from 3AC’s founders, Zhu Su and Kyle Davies.
3AC, founded in 2012, had grown into one of the most influential financial firms in the cryptocurrency industry by 2022. Its collapse was among the first and largest dominoes to fall before the broader crypto market imploded in 2022, which ultimately set off the chain of events that revealed fraud in Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire.
Bankman-Fried is currently pursuing an appeal of his criminal conviction and 25-year prison sentence. Following the collapse of 3AC, Su was detained in Singapore and sentenced to four months in prison for failing to cooperate with 3AC’s liquidators. Davies did not face any charges connected to the hedge fund’s collapse.
The 3AC founders reunited in 2023 to launch a short-lived crypto exchange called OPNX — designed to allow users to trade bankruptcy claims of failed crypto companies — which shut down in February.
With the court’s decision, 3AC’s liquidators now have a significantly larger position in the FTX. bankruptcy proceedings, raising questions about how the expanded claim will impact distributions to other creditors. The ruling also underscores the lack of transparency at both FTX and 3AC — further complicating efforts to untangle both firms’ assets and obligations.
It was a week of red in crypto and traditional markets, with bitcoin plummeting below $80K on March 10 and ETH falling to $1,821 the same day. So much for the “Trump Bump.” With the new administration on a tariff-tear this week, the markets were spooked about a recession and crypto was not immune.
Still, progress in digital assets was all around, and our reporters reported it all with alacrity. BlackRock’s bellwether BUIDL fund topped $1 billion and tokenized treasuries hit $4.2 billion, Kris Sandor reported. MoonPay, a payments aggregator, made an important stablecoin acquisition, Will Canny wrote. Ripple won a payments license in the UAE (Shaurya Malwa). OKX won a license to operate in Europe, Camomile Shumba reported. Coinbase announced plans to offer 24/7 futures trading in the U.S., Helene Braun reported.
There was also big regulatory news. The U.S. House voted to overturn the IRS’s controversial “broker rule” in a big win for DeFi operators. And a Senate committee voted to send the GENIUS stablecoin bill to the floor, ahead of probable approval there.
The Trump Family continued to be front-and-center in the crypto news. World Liberty Financial completed a $590 million token sale (for accredited investors for now), with an assist from adviser/investor and TRON founder Justin Sun. The Wall Street Journal reported that a Trump family representative also explored buying a stake in Binance.US, through World Liberty Financial.
From our Asia team, Sam Reynolds examined how the latest draft of the GENIUS act aims to split stablecoin regulation between state and federal authorities.
Parikshit Mishra reported on Coinbase returning to India after a two-year hiatus, setting off discussion about the future of crypto in India.
Shaurya Malwa continued his excellent reporting on XRP, pushing out multiple reports on Ripple. Malwa also reported on the implications of over-leveraging in the crypto market, as Hyperliquid lost $4 million due to a massive leveraged trade in ETH.
Market maven, Omkar Godbole, pushed out a timely piece on bitcoin’s bullish signal ahead of the U.S. CPI report, and was also early to spot how Eric Trump’s tweet on crypto were setting up short-term traders for disappointment.
Meanwhile, Tom Carreras had an excellent feature on how Bitdeer, a Singapore-based miner, hopes to shake up the mining machine market.
Hopefully next week brings better news in the markets. But, either way, our reporters will be there to cover what matters.
Cardano: Deep Dive on the Trump Reserve Token Whose Blockchain Ignores TVL
Court Approves 3AC’s $1.53B Claim Against FTX, Setting Up Major Creditor Battle
Weekly Recap: Regulatory Wins, Market Doldrums
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