March was a month packed with macro headwinds. The systemic contagion risk in the banking sector, instigated by the collapse of the 16th largest lender in the US, sent the crypto market cap in the opposite direction touching $1.2T in market value. Even with the regulatory crackdown on Coinbase and Binance in the US, the total crypto market cap increased by 10.83%. As shown in Figure 1, Bitcoin was the outlier this month, increasing by 20.66%, while Ethereum increased by 9.62%. Metis and Maker suffered the most from last month’s rally, decreasing by 23.15% and 25.76%, respectively.

Figure 1: Price and TVL Development of Major Crypto Sectors

Source: 21shares, Coingecko, DeFi Llama. Data as of March 31 close.

Key takeaways from this report

Despite adversary developments, the crypto market stands strong; Nasdaq eyes crypto custody and Microstrategy has bought over 6K BTC over the past month.

ETH withdrawals are about to go live on April 12, Account abstraction is now natively supported on Ethereum, and a new era of scalability solutions led by zkSync and Polygon is taking place.

Ticketing giant Ticketmaster allows Avenged Sevenfold, a popular metal band, to offer special access to concert and event tickets for eligible NFT owners.

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Spot and Derivatives Markets

Figure 2: Demand for Bitcoin options increases

Source: Coinglass

Investor appetite for Bitcoin options contracts has increased to levels we haven’t seen since 2021, recording a volume of $14.5B on March 30 alone, with Deribit enjoying the lion’s share of ~$12B. This could mean that investors resort to cryptoassets as a hedge against inflation and the default contagion risk going around in the banking sector. In terms of price movements, Bitcoin is yet to break through the major $29.5K resistance level, while $27.5K may be for the moment serving as a support. On the other hand, looking at the daily chart, Ethereum needs a breakout of the $1,850 key level. Otherwise, we would expect a revisit of $1,700.

On-chain Indicators

Figure 3: Ethereum balance on exchanges

Source: Glassnode

ETH balance on exchanges has reached an all-time low not seen since 2018. In fact, the trend amplified since the beginning of the year on the back of the collapse of FTX as users searched for safer venues to store their ETH. In addition, the move indicates that users have been migrating to non-custodial solutions like liquid-staking derivatives. They may also be getting ready for withdrawals by taking their ETH off exchanges to stake it, as the liquidity constraint concerns should be resolved following April 12.

We at 21Shares, released our Ethereum Withdrawal Simulator (EWS) to help investors gauge the waiting time to get their ETH back. In addition, we went one step further and built a dashboard so that the community could see the behaviors of all validators on the Ethereum network in real time.

Next Month’s Calendar

Source: 21shares, Forex Factory

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Research Newsletter

Each week the 21Shares Research team will publish our data-driven insights into the crypto asset world through this newsletter. Please direct any comments, questions, and words of feedback to research@21shares.com

Disclaimer

The information provided does not constitute a prospectus or other offering material and does not contain or constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy securities in any jurisdiction. Some of the information published herein may contain forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties and that actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. The information contained herein may not be considered as economic, legal, tax or other advice and users are cautioned to base investment decisions or other decisions solely on the content hereof.