Bitcoin Back Above $50k as Crypto Market Beats Inertia

Bitcoin hit $50k for the third time this year and DeFi starts flowering again.

By Tim Hakki

If crypto markets showed signs of stabilizing yesterday after a nasty slump, they’re boasting healthy growth again today. Bitcoin in particular leaped 5% overnight to cross the $50k threshold for the third time this year. It’s now sitting at a price of $50,700.

Despite Bitcoin’s extreme volatility recently—on February 21 it tanked from $58k to $49k overnight—achart shared by Glassnode reveals that new Bitcoin buyers didn’t panic sell during the correction, indicating growing confidence in the currency’s long-term prospects. 

And this weekend, crypto HODLers had their confidence restored when US cloud and data analytics firm MicroStrategy continued its bullish Bitcoin buying spree in spite of sinking share prices, buying up a further $10 million and taking its total BTC holdings to $4.4 billion.

DeFi is in the green

The rest of the crypto market is healthy today, too. Ethereum is up almost 7% from yesterday. At $1,667, it’s still 17% shy of its ATH of over $2k only a fortnight ago. Excitement over the forthcoming EIP-1559 upgrade could be one of the factors keeping its price buoyant. It trades 20% higher than last weekend. 

And decentralized finance (DeFi) coins are on the up, too. Uniswap’s UNI observed the highest growth in the top 10 coins by market capitalization. The native token of the world’s largest decentralized finance exchanges surged over 12% overnight to trade at $31.41. That makes for a seven-day growth of 40%. 

Meanwhile, the coin that powers decentralized lending protocol AAVE also boasted similar growth. Aave’s token grew 10% overnight to land at a price of $404.95. That’s still almost 30% down from its all-time high of $559.12 this time last month.

The surge comes days after Aave CEO Stani Kulechov laid into the practice of yield farming in an interview with Coin Briefing, calling current yield farming practices “pretty much printing money.”

What’s yield farming? It’s a catch-all term for a wide variety of practices and strategies, but in short, it’s the practice of lending crypto around marketplaces using smart contracts, (automated blockchain contracts that work just like any IRL contracts), and receiving crypto back in the form of fees and loyalty tokens.

On Friday, Kulechov announced that he will join crypto venture firm Variant Fund as a partner. 

After a turbulent start to the month, crypto is sailing smoothly again.