There’s not quite blood in the streets, but things are looking mighty red for crypto.

Ethereum’s fancy new blobs, while a gamechanger on many levels, have done little to prop up its price amid a healthy correction this morning.

Bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) are both down 7% over the past day, now at their lowest points since the end of March’s first week.

Only four cryptocurrencies in the top-100 are still ahead since this time yesterday: China-focused layer-1 conflux (CFX) and AI-styled fetch (FET) are up 6.5% and 2.1%.

Bitfinex’s LEO and trading-focused blockchain Sei (SEI) follow closely behind and could fall into the red if bitcoin and ether continue to slip. 

Bitcoin SV (BSV) performed the worst, losing more than 20% on the back of a London court verdict, which found its spokesperson Craig Wright is, in fact, not Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Solana memecoin bonk (BONK) is doing only marginally better, having lost 16.2%.

On-chain mail

The Bitcoin Ordinals craze has officially died down — at least for now — turning the network back into a venue primarily for financial transactions.

• 88% of Bitcoin blockspace over the week to date was used for traditional BTC transfers.
• 38% in the second-last week of November was either inscriptions or BRC-20s.
• Fees spent on inscriptions is on track for its lowest week since October: $1 million in the past five days compared to $4 million in the previous seven.

There were moments over the past few months where Bitcoin was the number-one blockchain for trading digital collectibles. 

A 50% drop in weekly sales volume (now $89 million) has however again placed Bitcoin second behind Ethereum’s $137 million, with Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie’s generative NFT collection Peplicator leading. Solana is in third place with about $62 million.

Are Ordinals over? Almost certainly not. Inscriptions may benefit immensely from a continued bull market. But at least for now, user attention appears laser-focused on bitcoin, the currency. 

• Meanwhile, BananaGun, the Telegram bot built for sniping new token launches, is still burning more ETH than layer-2 Arbitrum: 1,021 ETH to 836.5 ETH over the past week.
• BananaGun also operates on Solana, where it hit a new daily trading volume record near $7.4 million.
• One set of Telegram bots were responsible for nearly $80 million in DEX trading volumes last week, a near record high and the most since last July, per a Dune dashboard.

Crypto business

Bitcoin’s current correction has pulled crypto stocks into a sea of red, with only one gaining ground across both yesterday’s day session and pre-market trade as of 7:30 am ET: Griid.

• Bitcoin miner Griid is set to open Friday 3% higher after slipping 0.75% yesterday.
• Argo, Coinbase, Marathon and CleanSpark are the worst off, all falling a combined 12% before and after the bell.
• MicroStrategy and Coinbase are now the only crypto stocks in the green over the past month — still up 129% and 56%, respectively.

Those two aside, crypto stocks are on average down by 26% over the past month, which seems counterintuitive considering bitcoin has gone almost 30% in the opposite direction.

Bitcoin’s halving next month is the culprit, analysts say, with markets apparently skittish about the cost of BTC production immediately doubling. 

That’s despite the price of bitcoin still sitting quite a way above the post-halving production cost, which some suggest could be just over $50,000 per coin for most outfits (vertically-integrated miners with their own power sources may have lower costs).

• Coinbase short interest was down 18.5% as of the end of February: 12.92 million shares or 7.63% of the float, the lowest over the last year at least.
• MicroStrategy’s was also down slightly but still above where it was in November.
• Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust is trading at its worst discount since October as ETF hopes dwindle: now 18.2% below NAV.

Source: David Canellis – blockworks.co