Crypto prices steady, Arbitrum DAO drama and what's coming down the line in markets

Markets
• April 2, 2023, 3:43PM EDT

Crypto prices shrugged off the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s case against Binance early in the week as bitcoin clocked its best quarter since 2021.

Bitcoin was trading at $28,200, up about 2.6% over the past week, according to Coinbase data via TradingView. The first quarter of the year saw bitcoin jump more than 70% as risk assets rallied, leading to its best quarter since the first of 2021.

Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao are being sued by the CFTC for allegedly violating federal laws and not registering the exchange in the U.S. The regulator’s move caused crypto prices to dip at the top of the week before shrugging off the news. The BNB coin fell about 3% to $314 over the past week.

Ether was up about 3.2% over the past seven days, trading around $1,800. Ripple’s XRP added around 18% following news from its case with the SEC, although a verdict is still some time off. Cardano’s ADA added over 8%, and dogecoin jumped 7.5% in the same period.

DAO-rama

The price of ARB fell to $1.18, down 7.2% over the past 24 hours, according to data via CoinGecko.

The drop followed the news that the Arbitrum Foundation had begun selling ARB tokens for stablecoins before the community had formally ratified its budget.

ARBUSD price chart by CoinGecko

“The Arbitrum Foundation set aside nearly $1 billion worth of ARB tokens and utilized some of it before its governance proposal was ratified without disclosing how the tokens were utilized,” Eden Au, a research director at The Block Research, said.

This left the community to speculate whether the foundation had sold some of its tokens before voting, he said.

Arbitrum’s long-awaited airdrop went live on March 23 with governance tokens given to users of the Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. Over one billion ARB tokens were allocated to nearly 300,000 wallets, creating a decentralized autonomous organization, the ArbitrumDAO.

What’s coming up

With the first quarter of 2023 over and done with, several key economic indicators lie ahead in April for the U.S. Traders and the Fed will keenly watch next Friday’s U.S. jobs report. Any signs of a softening labor market could impact interest rate expectations.

Inflation data for March on April 12 will also prove pivotal to any potential Fed pivots or pauses. An advanced estimate of first-quarter GDP will be released on April 27.

There’s no Fed decision in April, with the next FOMC interest rate decision expected on May 3. The CME’s FedWatch tool shows markets are split on whether the Fed will pause or increase by 25 basis points again.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Source: https://www.theblock.co/post/224434/crypto-prices-steady-arbirtrumdao-drama-whats-coming-markets?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss