Decentral Block Post

The United States equities markets tumbled on March 15 after Saudi National Bank, Swiss Bank Credit Suisse’s largest investor, said it will not be able to provide any more funding to Credit Suisse due to regulatory limitations.

Investors are nervous because Credit Suisse, which has large U.S. and global operations, warned on March 14 that it had found “certain material weaknesses” in its financial reporting processes for 2021 and 2022. Shares of Credit Suisse plummeted to an all-time low on March 15.

After the events of the past few days, the S&P 500 has given back all its gains for the year and is trading flat. In comparison, Bitcoin (BTC) is holding on to a large part of its gains and is up nearly 47% in 2023.

Trezor Bitcoin analyst Josef Tětek believes the banking crisis could be positive for Bitcoin as it could emerge as a safe haven asset.

Capriole CEO and founder Charles Edwards said that Bitcoin has formed a “bump and run reversal pattern,” which has a target objective of $100,000 and higher. However, Edwards cautioned traders that the pattern could fail, hence it should not be used for building a trading or investment plan.

The previous six months should have been extremely beneficial to Ether's (ETH) price, especially after the project's most significant upgrade ever in September 2022. However, the reality was the opposite: between September 15, 2022, and March 15, 2023, Ether underperformed Bitcoin (BTC) by 10%.

The price ratio of 0.068 ETH/BTC had been holding since October 2022, a support that was broken on March 15. Whatever the reason for the underperformance, traders currently have little confidence in placing leverage bets, according to ETH futures and options data.

But first, one should consider why Ether's price was expected to rise in the previous six months. On September 15, 2022, the Merge, a hard fork that switched the network to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, occurred. It enabled a much lower, even negative, coin issuing rate. But, more importantly, the change paved the way for parallel processing that aimed to bring scalability and lower transaction costs to the Ethereum network. 

The Shapella hard fork, expected to take effect on the mainnet in April, is the next step in the Ethereum network upgrade. The change will allow validators who previously deposited 32 ETH to enter the staking mechanism to withdraw in part or in full. While this development is generally positive because it gives validators more flexibility, the potential 1.76 million ETH unlock is a negative consequence.

However, there is a cap on the number of validators that can exit; therefore, the maximum daily unstake is 70,000 ETH. Moreover, after exiting the validation process, one may choose between Lido, Rocket Pool, or a decentralized finance (DeFi) application for yield mechanisms. These coins will not necessarily be sold at the market.

Bitcoin (BTC) kept bears sweating near $25,000 on March 15 as encouraging macroeconomic data combined with concerns over banking crisis contagion.

PPI offers "great signs" on Fed pivot

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD recovering from a 24-hour comedown to see highs of $25,273 on Bitstamp.

The pair reacted positively to the latest United States producer price index (PPI) data, which came in far lower than expected.

Prior to the release, the Binance order book showed principal bid and ask liquidity parked at $22,000 and $26,000, respectively.

“Time will tell if enough bid liquidity is there to insulate $22k from getting hit,” on-chain monitoring resource Material Indicators wrote in part of accompanying commentary while uploading the data to Twitter.