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Crypto Daybook Americas: LIBRA Fallout Weighs on Crypto Markets While FTX Repayments Are Set to Start
By Francisco Rodrigues (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)
While bitcoin (BTC) is little changed over the past 24 hours, down just 0.7%, the broader market is in a bearish mood following the Libra token debacle, which has led to accusations of fraud and calls for the impeachment of Argentina’s President Javier Milei.
The CoinDesk 20 Index is down around 2.3% over the past day, and the near- to medium-term market movement probably hinges on how the U.S.-Russia negotiations in Riyadh go. The talks are focusing not only on ending the conflict in Ukraine, but also on “normalization” of ties between the countries.
An additional layer of uncertainty comes from FTX Digital Markets, the Bahamas-based subsidiary of FTX, which starts repaying creditors today. In total, FTX’s repayment program will be around $16 billion.
The liquidity injection will come in the form of stablecoins. First up are creditors with claims under $50,000, who will receive roughly 119% of their adjudicated claim value, with 9% annual interest accrued since November 2022.
The effect the repayments will have is unclear. While some analysts say the amount being repaid now is “too small to move the needle,” others suggest that FTX’s historic interest in the Solana ecosystem means some of these funds will flow toward it.
Investors have recently turned their attention to ether. U.S.-listed spot ETFs offering exposure to the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization are seeing a cumulative net inflow of $393 million this month. That compares with a net outflow of $376 million for spot bitcoin ETFs.
These inflows come ahead of Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade entering its testing phase on the Holesky testnet. Pectra should bring a number of improvements to scalability and security and will let users pay for gas fees with tokens other than ether.
Elsewhere, individual investors are bearish amid trade-war threats, reduced interest-rate cut expectations, and consistent inflationary surprises. A survey from the American Association of Individual Investors found that bearishness among investors is at a two-year high, the Wall Street Journal reports.
This pessimism, however, is often a contrarian indicator. Institutional investors’ risk appetite has also dropped this month over the potential effects of a potential trade war amid the lowering odds of a Fed rate cut. Stay alert!
What to Watch
Crypto:
Feb. 18, 10:00 a.m.: FTX Digital Markets, the Bahamas-based subsidiary of FTX, will start reimbursing creditors.
Feb. 19: High-performance blockchain Monad’s public testnet starts up.
Feb. 19, 11:00 a.m.: The first official State of Sei (SEI) livestream.
Feb. 19, 1:00 p.m.: Hedera (HBAR) mainnet upgrade to v0.58.
Feb. 21: TON (The Open Network) becomes the exclusive blockchain infrastructure for messaging platform Telegram’s Mini App ecosystem.
Feb. 24: At epoch 115968, testing of Ethereum’s Pecta upgrade on the Holesky testnet starts.
Macro
Feb. 18, 10:20 a.m.: San Francisco Fed President and CEO Mary C. Daly delivers a speech in Phoenix. Livestream link.
Feb. 18, 1:00 p.m.: The Fed’s Michael S. Barr took, vice chair for supervision, gives a speech titled «Artificial Intelligence in the Economy and Financial Stability» in New York. Livestream link.
Feb. 19, 2:00 p.m.: The Fed releases minutes of the Jan. 28-29 FOMC Meeting.
Earnings
Feb. 18: CoinShares International (CS), pre-market
Feb. 18: Semler Scientific (SMLR), post-market
Feb. 20: Block (XYZ), post-market, $0.88
Feb. 24: Riot Platforms (RIOT), post-market, $-0.18
Feb. 25: Bitdeer Technologies Group (BTDR), pre-market, $-0.53
Feb. 25: Cipher Mining (CIFR), pre-market, $-0.09
Feb. 26: MARA Holdings (MARA), post-market, $-0.13
Token Events
Governance
Compound DAO is discussing evolving Compound Sandbox into Compound V4 to introduce streamlined governance, dynamic market parameters, enhance the liquidation mechanism, and improve cross-chain reward distribution.
Aave DAO is discussing expanding the AAVE governance token integration on the platform by adding AAVE collateral option to Base.
Uniswap DAO is discussing funding liquidity incentives for Uniswap V4 on the Unichain network to attract liquidity providers and traders to the protocol.
Unlocks
Feb. 21: Fast Token (FTN) to unlock 4.66% of circulating supply worth $78.6 million.
Feb. 28: Optimism (OP) to unlock 1.92% of circulating supply worth $34.23 million.
Token Launches
Feb. 18: Ethena (ENA) to be listed on Arkham.
Feb. 18: Ronin (RON) to be listed on KuCoin
Conferences:
CoinDesk’s Consensus to take place in Hong Kong on Feb. 18-20 and in Toronto on May 14-16. Use code DAYBOOK and save 15% on passes.
Day 1 of 3: Consensus Hong Kong
Feb. 23-March 2: ETHDenver 2025 (Denver)
Feb. 24: RWA London Summit 2025
Feb. 25: HederaCon 2025 (Denver)
March 2-3: Crypto Expo Europe (Bucharest, Romania)
March 8: Bitcoin Alive (Sydney, Australia)
Token Talk
By Francisco Rodrigues
Donald Trump supporters are set to receive around $50 worth of the official TRUMP tokens if they bought merchandise from the websites associated with the U.S. president.
The token was unveiled just days before Trump took office and have lost more than 70% of their value since then.
Solana-based decentralized exchange Jupiter has started accumulating USDC using 50% of the collected protocol fees to buy back JUP tokens. The buybacks haven’t yet started.
JUP’s price is down more than 12% over the last 24 hours over the protocol’s apparent involvement in the LIBRA cryptocurrency debacle.
Derivatives Positioning
SOL’s price may continue to fall, seeing that perpetual futures open interest has risen by 5% in the past 24 hours, accompanied by a negative cumulative volume delta (CVD). This combination indicates net selling pressure in the market.
The CVD for most major tokens is negative, indicating a bearish sentiment.
BTC and ETH front-dated or short-term puts continue to be pricier than calls on Deribit. The sentiment is bullish after February expiry.
Block flows featured an April expiry bitcoin bull put spread, involving strikes $85K and $100K and outright longs in puts at $94K and $90K strikes. Ether bull call spreads crossed the tape as well.
Market Movements:
BTC is down 0.69% from 4 p.m. ET Monday to $95,802.76 (24hrs: -0.57%)
ETH is down 2.88% at $2,698.31 (24hrs: -1.89%)
CoinDesk 20 is down 2.23% to 3,161.95 (24hrs: -3.03%)
Ether CESR Composite Staking Rate is up 27 bps to 3.18%
BTC funding rate is at 0.0078% (8.5541% annualized) on Binance
DXY is up 0.36% at 106.94
Gold is up 0.97% at $2,922.9/oz
Silver is up 0.70% to $32.99/oz
Nikkei 225 closed 0.25% at 39,270.4
Hang Seng closed +1.59% at 22,976.81
FTSE is up 0.18% at 8,783.43
Euro Stoxx 50 is unchanged at 5,520.7
DJIA closed Friday -0.37% at 44,546.08
S&P 500 closed unchanged at 6,114.63
Nasdaq closed +0.41% at 20,026.77
S&P/TSX Composite Index closed -0.84% at 25,483.2
S&P 40 Latin America closed +2.12% at 2,490.30
U.S. 10-year Treasury rate was up 3 bps at 4.51%
E-mini S&P 500 futures are up 0.1% to 6,151.5
E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures are up 0.21% at 22,282
E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average Index futures are down 0.15% to 44,676
Bitcoin Stats:
BTC Dominance: 61.17 (0.85%)
Ethereum to bitcoin ratio: 0.02813 (-1.71%)
Hashrate (seven-day moving average): 790 EH/s
Hashprice (spot): $53.47
Total Fees: 6.93 BTC / $663,706
CME Futures Open Interest: 174,200 BTC
BTC priced in gold: 32.8 oz
BTC vs gold market cap: 9.31%
Technical Analysis
The chart shows the market dominance of Tether’s USDT, the largest dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Its dominance rate seems to have bounced off the March 2024 low, teasing a bullish double bottom pattern.
In other words, USDT could become more dominant, which usually happens during market-wide price corrections.
Crypto Equities
MicroStrategy (MSTR): closed on Friday at $337.73 (+3.94%), down 0.6% at $335.76 in pre-market.
Coinbase Global (COIN): closed at $274.31 (-7.98%)
Galaxy Digital Holdings (GLXY): closed at C$27.65 (-2.54%)
MARA Holdings (MARA): closed at $16.90 (-0.06%)
Riot Platforms (RIOT): closed at $12.27 (+0.33%)
Core Scientific (CORZ): closed at $12.51 (-0.24%)
CleanSpark (CLSK): closed at $10.50 (-1.59%)
CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI): closed at $23.40 (+0.52%)
Semler Scientific (SMLR): closed at $49.67 (+0.44%)
Exodus Movement (EXOD): closed at $50.00 (unchanged)
ETF Flows
The data below is as of Feb. 14. U.S. markets were closed on Feb. 17.
Spot BTC ETFs:
Daily net flow: $70.6 million
Cumulative net flows: $40.12 billion
Total BTC holdings ~ 1.180 million.
Spot ETH ETFs
Daily net flow: $11.7 million
Cumulative net flows: $3.15 billion
Total ETH holdings ~ 3.791 million.
Source: Farside Investors
Overnight Flows
Chart of the Day
While bitcoin remains listless below $100,000, Wall Street’s tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 has jumped close to record highs.
If BTC’s historical positive correlation with the tech stock is any guide, BTC could soon pick up a strong bid.
While You Were Sleeping
Bitcoin Is Coiled Like a Spring, a Breakout of This Range Is Coming: Van Straten (CoinDesk): Bitcoin has traded in the $91K–$109K range since late November. According to Glassnode, BTC’s 2-week realized volatility has fallen to just 32% on an annual basis.
Ether ETFs Register $393M in Inflows This Month as Crypto Investors Turn Their Back on Bitcoin (CoinDesk): Data on U.S. spot ETFs shows investors pivoting their attention to ether from bitcoin. Analysts say they expect ETH to rise as Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade draws closer.
Milei Denies Wrongdoing in His First Defense of Crypto Debacle (Bloomberg): Argentina’s President Javier Milei defended his promotion of a memecoin called libra — which spiked before crashing — as an effort to support economic growth.
Investors Haven’t Been This Pessimistic About Stocks Since 2023 (The Wall Street Journal): A survey shows 47.3% of U.S. investors expect stock price declines over six months — the most bearish sentiment since November — amid trade war and inflation concerns.
U.S. and Russia Meet for Talks on Ukraine War (Reuters): On Tuesday, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia to discuss ending the war in Ukraine and restoring relations between the two superpowers.
Australia Cuts Interest Rates for First Time in More Than 4 Years (Financial Times): Australia’s central bank cut its cash rate by 0.25 percentage points to 4.10%, providing mortgage relief while signaling caution about future rate cuts amidst economic uncertainty.
In the Ether
The Bybit hacker, supposedly a North Korean entity, is now one of the world’s largest ether holders, which may have bullish implications for the cryptocurrency’s spot price.
According to data from Arkham Intelligence and Coinbase executive Connor Grogan, this malicious actor holds 489,000 ETH, valued at approximately $1.34 billion, constituting about 0.4% of ether’s total supply, making it the 14th-largest Ether holder globally. That puts the hacker ahead of the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum’s CEO Vitalik Buterin and Fidelity.
It’s important to note that the addresses linked to this entity are being closely monitored and backlisted by exchanges, which means the hacker will likely struggle to offload these coins in the market.
In simpler terms, the hacked ether supply is likely lost permanently. Furthermore, Bybit, which has reportedly secured a bridged loan from unnamed partners to cover nearly 80% of the ether lost in the Friday hack, will likely need to purchase coins in the market.
«As far as this supply is concerned, it’s essentially gone. No OTC desk or exchange will facilitate the movement of such a large amount. Meanwhile, Bybit is short 402k ETH. The bridge loan may cover immediate needs, but purchasing will still be necessary,» Vance Spencer, co-founder of the crypto VC firm Framework Ventures, said on X.
That probably explains why ether has bounced 2.6% to $2,730 from the overnight low of around $2,614. Funding rates in perpetual futures tied to ether remain positive, implying a bias for long positions, according to data source Coingecko.
Crypto exchange Bitget has transferred 40,000 ether (ETH), worth $105 million, to Bybit, offering crucial support to its industry counterpart in the wake of the over billion-dollar hack suffered by the exchange.
The funds transferred are from Bitget’s own reserves, not user deposits, which remain securely stored on the platform and can be cross checked through the proof of reserves, the exchange’s CEO, Gracy Chen, said in a note shared with CoinDesk, while assuring more support if needed.
«At Bitget we strongly believe in supporting the community and everyone contributing towards the growth of crypto,» Chen said.
A suspected North Korean entity drained approximately $1.4 billion in ether from Bybit on Friday. The hack prompted an unprecedented wave of withdrawal requests from users, with the exchange successfully processing 99% of them, effectively facing a significant market stress test.
Part of the stolen funds started to move during Asian afternoon hours on Saturday with over 5,000 ETH moved through eXch mixer — a service that masks wallet address — before being sent to bridge protocol ChainFlip where the stash was converted to bitcoin (BTC).
In an X post, ChainFlip said it couldn’t block fund movements as it was a fully decentralized applications that relies on automated smart contracts, but that it had «turned off some frontend services to stop the flow.»
On the other hand, Bitget has blacklisted wallets tied to the hacker that drained ether worth millions from Bybit on Friday.
«We will block any transactions flowing in from illicit addresses to the exchange once it has been monitored. Our team of security, and researchers, are currently tracking these activities,» Chen said.
Despite the hack, Bybit had managed to process over 350,000 withdrawal requests and has since restored normal withdrawal operations, per an X post.
Arthur Hayes, BitMEX co-founder and major ether (ETH) holder, asked Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to rollback the network in order to assist hacked exchange Bybit, which lost nearly $1.4 billion in ether (ETH) on Friday.
«@VitalikButerin will you advocate to roll back the chain to help @Bybit_Official. My own view as a mega $ETH bag holder is $ETH stopped being money in 2016 after the DAO hack hardfork. If the community wanted to do it again, I would support it because we already voted no on immutability in 2016 [wh]y not do it again?» Hayes said on X.
Buterin was yet to reply as of time of publication.
The Bybit hack came into light on Friday when on-chain analyst ZachXBT noted suspicious outflows of over $1.4 billion from the exchange, with the attacker quickly swapping mETH and stETH for ether through a decentralized exchange.
The attacker then split 10,000 ETH to 39 different addresses and another 10,000 ETH to nine addresses, Gautham Santhosh, co-founder of Polynomial.fi, explained on X.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou said that the hacker «took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address.» Zhou confirmed that the exchange «is solvent even if this hack loss is not recovered.»
One of the potential ways to address hacking is to roll back the blockchain. It involves reverting the blockchain to a state before the occurrence of a specific event, in this case, the hack. That way, malicious transactions resulting from the hack can be erased, effectively restoring lost or stolen funds. Implementing a rollback requires consensus from the network participants.
For instance, in 2016, the Ethereum network was rolled back using a hard fork to reverse a theft of $60 million in ether from The DAO (30% of all ETH in circulation back then). The hard fork split the chain into two – Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
In 2019, Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao and his team considered pushing for a rollback on the Bitcoin network following a $40 million hack. However, the Bitcoin mining community criticized the idea of going back against the principle of decentralization and immutability, which are fundamental to blockchain technology.
Immutability is a security feature that prevents data from being changed after it’s added to the blockchain to make it trustworthy and tamper-proof. There are similar concerns regarding a potential Ethereum rollover.
«I wish we could roll back for the Bybit hack, I’m not against the idea. But the DAO hack was 15% of ETH with a clean recovery path. Today, a rollback would break bridges, stablecoins, L2s, RWAs and so much more. ETH ecosystem is just too interconnected now for a clean solution like 2016,» Santhosh said.
Sina 21st Capital explained that Ethereum is now stuck between a rock and a hard place.
«Ethereum is toast. They can roll back the chain and destroy what is left of the decentralization claim or allow North Korean baad actors to keep $1.4B of ETH and unleash an eternal internal battle. Either way, it is terrible,» Sina 21st Capital said on X.
Ether has dropped nearly 3% in 24 hours, but continues to trade rangebound between $2,600 and $2,800, CoinDesk data show.
Ether Supply Squeeze? Bybit Hacker Emerges as World’s 14th-Largest ETH Holder
Crypto Exchanges Start to Fill Bybit’s $1.4B Hole as Hackers Move Stolen Funds
Arthur Hayes Proposes Rolling Back Ethereum Network to Negate $1.4B Bybit Hack
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