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Bitcoin (BTC) was marginally positive in February even though the S&P 500 index (SPX) fell by 2.61%. On the first day of March, Bitcoin has started on a positive note while the United States equities markets are struggling. This shows that Bitcoin is trying to decouple from the U.S. equities markets.

A positive sign is that retail traders seem to have made the most of the crypto bear market. Instead of panicking and selling their holdings, traders have purchased at lower levels. Glassnode data shows that wallets holding at least one Bitcoin have consistently risen and are nearing the 1 million mark for the first time ever.

Historically, March has been a mediocre month for Bitcoin. Coinglass data shows that Bitcoin closed the month of March with double digit gains only twice in the past ten years, in 2013 and in 2021. Therefore, the possibility of continued consolidation in March remains high.

What are the critical levels that may act as major roadblocks for the recovery in Bitcoin and altcoins? Let’s study the charts of the top-10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

BTC/USDT

Bitcoin’s $22,800 level has been acting as a solid support in the past few days, which is a positive sign. This indicates that the sentiment remains bullish and traders are viewing the dips as a buying opportunity.

The price of Ether (ETH) declined 9.8% between Feb. 19 and Feb. 25 after the price resistance at $1,725 proved stronger than expected. Still, the correction was insufficient to break the 6-week-long ascending channel and did not cause Ether derivatives metrics to turn bearish.

Ether's price resilience can be partially explained by the operational failure of some of its smart contract blockchain competitors. For instance, Solana (SOL) faced a 20-hour-long outage on Feb. 25, which was only resolved after a network upgrade coordinated by validators. The network restart also involved purging some of the latest slots, although Solana developers said that "no confirmed user transactions were rolled back or impacted."

NEM (XEM) experienced a "chain halt" on Feb. 27 that lasted for 15 hours, causing multiple exchanges to halt deposits and withdrawals and developers promised to release an update to prevent further misbehavior. Curiously, the latest post from the official NEM account on Twitter, excluding a Merry Christmas greeting, was a "Please Stand By" image posted in July 2022.

The regulatory environment remains shady for cryptocurrencies, and the latest victims were global payment processing companies Visa and Mastercard. According to a Reuters report published on Feb. 28, the firms are delaying the launch of new partnerships with crypto firms until market conditions improve and a more transparent regulatory framework is established.

In more positive news, Ethereum's Sepolia testnet was successfully hard forked on Feb. 28 in preparation for the Shanghai upgrade. The much-anticipated mainnet update expected for March should finally allow validators to withdraw their staked Ether from the Beacon Chain. Developers are now prepping the Goerli testnet to enter a similar stage.

Stacks is one of the first blockchains to enable a way for minting Bitcoin (BTC) Ordinals, which puts it in an excellent position to benefit from the hype. However, Ordinals have invoked an issue from the past where Bitcoin maximalist ideologies will be tested if the NFTs lead to network congestion.

On top of that, Stacks has yet to deliver all the functionalities required to support an NFT trading ecosystem and it faces competition from projects in other blockchain ecosystems. The fundamental and technical analysis of the project suggests that the price surge might have reached overbought conditions and may correct in the near term.

Ordinals development is unpredictable for now

The recent focus on inscribing NFTs on the Bitcoin network peaked in the last month after Casey Rodarmor inscribed an Ordinal on Jan. 29. While the trend took off to an overwhelming start, the minting is limited to technical users with a Bitcoin node and trading primarily takes place through OTC channels.

In comparison to Ethereum NFT marketplaces, the infrastructure for Bitcoin NFT trading remains significantly underdeveloped in regards to complex activities like decentralized trading. Many investors have expressed their belief that there needs to be a way to spin up marketplaces and NFT minting platforms for Ordinals.

The Bitcoin developer community has previously discouraged using the network for anything other than payments because it clogs the space and increases transaction fees. In the bull run of 2020 and 2021, many Ethereum (ETH) users paid hundreds of dollars in fees per transaction as user activity on it exploded. On the other hand, Bitcoin’s fees stayed at optimum levels throughout the bull run, but the usage and earnings of the protocol lagged behind Ethereum.

The month of February was filled with investors’ hope that an earlier-than-expected Federal Reserve policy pivot would occur, but this sentiment faded as the inflation and employment data came in hotter than expected. While the start of the month was bullish for the crypto market, Bitcoin (BTC) retraced 60% of the move from February’s low at around $21,500 to the peak of $25,250. 

Nevertheless, some narrative-driven rallies still caused significant price growth in some altcoins. The leading narratives were Bitcoin NFTs, liquidity staking derivatives (LSDs) on Ethereum and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects.

Let’s review the top performing coins of the month.

Stacks (STX)

Stacks gained much attention as the hype over Ordinals kicked off at the start of the month. Gamma, a Stacks-based project, enabled the creation of Bitcoin Ordinals. However, full functionality in trading and public minting of Ordinals on Stacks is still in development.

Meanwhile, Stacks faces competition from other blockchains like Ethereum, where developers are working toward enabling Bitcoin NFT trading on Ethereum. Yuga Labs, the leading NFT firm, announced a 300-piece generative collection on Bitcoin on Feb. 27. The auction (or minting) will likely be held on Ethereum due to the lack of infrastructure on Bitcoin. Thus, as Stacks delays its development of making Ordinals accessible, more liquid chains are taking advantage of other solutions.

The recent weakness in the crypto market has not invalidated the six-week-long ascending trend, even after a failed test of the channel's upper band on Feb. 21. The total crypto market capitalization remains above the psychological $1 trillion mark and, more importantly, cautiously optimistic after a new round of negative remarks from regulators.

As displayed above, the ascending channel initiated in mid-January has room for an additional 3.5% correction down to $1.025 trillion market capitalization while still sustaining the bullish formation.

That is excellent news considering the FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt — brought down by regulators regarding the cryptocurrency industry.

Recent examples of bad news are, a United States District Court judge ruling that emojis such as the rocket ship, stock chart and money bags infer "a financial return on investment," according to a recent court filing. On Feb. 22, a federal court judge ruling on a case against Dapper Labs denied a motion to dismiss the complaint alleging that its NBA Top Shot Moments violated security laws by using such emojis to denote profit.

Outside of the U.S., on Feb. 23, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued guidance on how countries should treat crypto assets, strongly advising against giving Bitcoin a legal tender status. The paper stated, "while the supposed potential benefits from crypto assets have yet to materialize, significant risks have emerged."

This week on The Market Report, the resident experts at Cointelegraph discuss the recent fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) around the popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance and what the CEO of Solana had to say about recent outages. 

We kick things off with this week’s top stories

Binance CEO responds to Forbes claims: ‘They don’t know how an exchange works’

In the aftermath of the FTX collapse, Forbes published an article focused on the recent “shuffling” of funds by the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. However, the following day on Feb. 28, Binance co-founder and CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao took to Twitter to respond. Our experts weigh in on what CZ had to say and also what exactly the FUD surrounding Binance was. If you are a Binance user, should you be worried?

Solana CEO hoses down claims network outages caused by on-chain voting

Universities in the United Kingdom have started offering cutting-edge research programs, courses and practical experience in various aspects of blockchain technology, including cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, privacy, security and scalability. Students who graduate from these programs will be well-equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to become leaders in the field of blockchain technology and drive innovation and adoption in various industries.

Here are top five universities to study blockchain in the United Kingdom.

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, and its Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) is a leading research center in the field of alternative finance, which includes research on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. 

The CCAF conducts research on various aspects of blockchain technology, including adoption, regulation and policy. Postgraduate students at Cambridge can take blockchain courses such as “Distributed Ledger Technologies: Foundations and Applications” at the department of computer science and technology. In this 16-hour course, concepts such as consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, Bitcoin (BTC) and its variants, Ethereum and other permissionless decentralized ledger technologies are covered.

In addition, the Cambridge Digital Assets Program is a multi-year research program that intends to shed light on the quick digitalization of assets and value-transfer systems. It builds on the solid foundations of the CCAF’s prior work and current ties. It is centered around three workstreams, including:

Crypto ATM installations have seen a steady decline across the world over the past several months. While some ATMs have been taken out of operation due to geopolitical tensions and revenue decline, some providers like Bitcoin Depot have started converting their physical Bitcoin (BTC) ATMs to software. 

Bitcoin Depot recently converted all of its 7,000 crypto ATMs and kiosks to a software-based offering powered by BitAccess. The software conversion drive came after Bitcoin Depot acquired majority equity in BitAccess back in November 2022. Months before the deal, Bitcoin Depot had revealed plans to go public in 2023 via an $885 million deal with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

The software conversion of the crypto ATMs, which vertically integrates Bitcoin Depot’s hardware and software, eliminates annual software licensing fees. The fees previously accounted for $3 million in annual operational costs.

In the first half of 2022, BitAcess enjoyed the position of a market leader. However, since July 2022, the company has seen a consistent decline in total ATM installations, confirms data from Coin ATM Radar.

As shown in the above graph, BitAccess is currently down to third position after Genesis Bytes and Genesis Coin, both of whom have increased their market share in the same timeline. Explaining the motive behind the move, Bitcoin Depot’s VP of BTM Operations, Jason Sacco, stated:

Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana Labs has downplayed claims that Solana's network outages were being caused by a high volume of validator messages and its on-chain voting system clogging its consensus layer.

While the Solana Foundation confirmed in a Feb. 27 post that the “root cause” of the recent 20-hour network outage is still not clear, the CEO responded to speculation that Solana’s decision to include on-chain votes as transactions is a “massive design flaw” that has led to its many outages.

The controversial thread in question was posted by Twitter user DBCryptoX earlier on Feb. 27 days after Solana's 20-hour network outage, suggesting that the high volume of validator messages and on-chain votes were clogging the network.

However, Yankovenko in a response Tweet some 20 minutes later called the theory as coming from “pure ignorance.”

In short, he explained that the votes — which are part of a “single giant quorum” — contribute to provide an “exceptional level of security and high throughput and low fees” simultaneously.

Bitcoin (BTC) and the United States equities markets are trying to start the week on a positive note but some analysts are skeptical about the short-term prospects of the markets. According to Bloomberg Intelligence senior macro strategist Mike McGlone, Bitcoin will face significant resistance at $25,000. McGlone believes that it “may be a while before buy-and-hold types gain the upper hand.”

It also looks like Bitcoin whales, unique entities owning 1,000 Bitcoin or more, are also not convinced of the recovery in the crypto markets. According to Glassnode, Bitcoin whale numbers have fallen to 1,663, which is well below the peak of 2,161 hit in February 2021.

It is difficult to catch the bottom in any market. Hence, traders should try to build a portfolio when they believe that the downtrend has ended and a basing pattern has begun.

Instead of buying the entire quantity at one go, they could gradually build a portfolio and aim to finish the purchases before the asset picks up momentum and shoots higher.

Could the strength in the equities markets pull Bitcoin and altcoins higher? Let’s study the charts to find out.

Blur, a NFT marketplace, has seen its trading volumes and total sell-side liquidity skyrocket since conducting an airdrop on Feb. 14, 2023. The reason for the spike could be the start of season 2 airdrops, where 10% of BLUR token’s total supply will be distributed to certain users based on their activity. The team allocated 12% toward an early user airdrop in the first season that ran from the marketplace’s gated launch in March 2022 to February 2023.

Blur has made a significant dent in OpenSea’s position as the leading marketplace. Analytics from data scientist Hildobby shows that Blur is eating into the market share of OpenSea and other aggregators like X2Y2. Blur's incentive program and advanced NFT trading features are causing users to shift from OpenSea to Blur.

OpenSea feels the heat 

Following Blur’s example, OpenSea discontinued its marketplace fee of 2.5% per sale. The fact that OpenSea LLC was willing to let go a significant chunk of its earnings—close to around $336.8 million for one year—suggests that Blur’s growth threatens it.

The two NFT giants also recently locked horns on the critical issue recently of creator royalties. By restricting the ability to earn full creator royalties on both platforms, creators have to choose between Blur and OpenSea to list collections.

Pacman, the founder of Blur, told Cointelegraph on Feb. 23 that OpenSea started the spat first. They were forced to retaliate with restrictive features like limited royalties on Blur if a collection is also listed on OpenSea as well. However, ideally, he would want both creators to be able to earn their royalties on both platforms without having to choose. It appears that Pacman wants OpenSea to succumb to the competition and instead of fighting Blur, it should accommodate the aggregator progressively.

Ukraine has received over $70 million in the form of cryptocurrencies since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, providing the nation with military equipment and humanitarian assistance.

The figures came from a Feb. 24 report by blockchain data platform Chainalysis, which found the majority of the funds to have come in the form of Ether (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC).

ETH donors led the way with $28.9 million given, while donors of BTC and Tether (USDT) chipped in $22.8 million and $11.59 million respectively.

Donations have also come in the form of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), such as UkraineDAO’s auction of a Ukrainian flag NFT which sold for $6.1 million.

Around 80% of the total $70 million donated came in the first few months of the war, with the speed of cryptocurrency payments fast-tracking the country’s ability to respond to the Russian invasion, Ukrainian deputy digital minister Alex Bornyakov explained in an interview with Yahoo Finance UK on Feb. 24:

The cryptocurrency markets and the United States equities markets witnessed profit-booking this week as the macroeconomic data hinted toward continued rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. Bitcoin (BTC) is down more than 4% and the S&P 500 fell 2.7% to record its worst week of the year. 

The CME FedWatch Tool shows a 73% probability of a 25 basis points rate hike by the Fed in the March meeting but after the hotter-than-expected inflation readings in two weeks, the probability of a 50 basis point rate hike has started to slowly gain traction.

During periods of uncertainty, some coins enter a deeper correction while a few buck the trend and continue to outperform the markets. Hence, it becomes important to select the right coins to trade.

A few coins that have witnessed a shallow correction or have bounced sharply off the support have been selected in this list. Let’s see their charts and determine the levels to watch out for.

BTC/USDT

Bitcoin plunged below the 20-day exponential moving average ($23,391) on Feb. 24 but the bears could not build upon this advantage and sustain the price below the strong support at $22,800.

United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stressed the importance of implementing a strong regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies during a G20 meeting on Feb. 25. 

Speaking to Reuters, Yellen said that it was "critical to put in place a strong regulatory framework." She also noted that the United States is not suggesting an "outright banning of crypto activities."

Yellen's remarks follow earlier ones from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, stating that banning crypto should be an option:

"There has to be very strong push for regulation... if regulation fails, if you're slow to do it, then we should not take off the table banning those assets, because they may create financial stability risk."

In addition, Georgieva pointed out to reporters that it is necessary to differentiate central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) from stablecoins and cryptocurrencies - which are issued by private companies. 

Bitcoin (BTC) is struggling to stay above $23,000 as the weekend approaches. The selling pressure increased after the personal consumption expenditures excluding food and energy rose 0.6% in January and 4.7% over the year, above market expectations of an increase of 0.5% and 4.4% respectively. 

This could trigger fears that the United States Federal Reserve may have to continue its rate hikes to bring inflation under control. Expectations of a rate hike could strengthen the U.S. dollar index further, which is already near a seven-week high, and that may put pressure on the cryptocurrency markets in the near term.

A drop in the cryptocurrency markets may start a discussion that the rally in January may have been a bull trap. However, the price action in Bitcoin and several altcoins show that a bottoming formation may have begun. The next dip may form a higher low before attempting a move higher.

What are the important support levels in Bitcoin and altcoins? Let’s study the charts of the top-10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

BTC/USDT

Buyers successfully held the 20-day exponential moving average ($23,440) for the past two days but the failure to sustain the rebound attracted strong selling on Feb. 24.

The price action of Optimism (OP) and Fantom (FTM) tokens have been quite identical since the last quarter of 2022. The difference is, volatility is slightly higher for OP, which surged 240% year-to-date, compared to the 180% gains seen in FTM.

The Fantom Foundation has made several improvements since Q4 2022, which have catalyzed an uptrend in the token’s price. However, Fantom’s ecosystem remains primitive while its competitors expanded to support new use cases.

On the other hand, Optimism has shown robust community and decentralized application (dApp) development thanks to the loyalty of Ethereum developers and the Optimism Foundation’s effective strategy in aligning token incentives with governance.

Fantom’s ecosystem development stalls

The Fantom ecosystem received an adverse blow in early 2022 due to the departure of leading DeFi architect Andre Cronje. The blockchain’s ecosystem development stalled after Cronje’s departure. At the same time, Fantom’s competitors, like Polygon (ATOM), Arbitrum and Optimism continued to host various popular applications.

Cronje rejoined Fantom development efforts in November 2022, however, it appears it was too late by then. The lack of sustainable yields in a bear market has restricted liquidity inflows to Fantom.