The crypto market pauses as Bitcoin holds firm

Market overview

The crypto market cap has fallen by 0.8% over the past 24 hours to $2.6 trillion, driven by pressure on altcoins, while Bitcoin has been pulling the market upwards, a relatively unusual situation. Leading the day’s gains with fairly modest figures were Bitcoin (+0.4%), Hedera (0%) and Aptos (0%). The corrective pullback is more pronounced, with losses of 5% for Dash, 4.9% for Theta and 4.8% for Basic Attention Token.

Sentiment continues to improve rapidly, with the corresponding index rising to 46 — a high not seen in over three months.

On Wednesday evening, Bitcoin briefly exceeded $79K, confirming our view of relatively weak resistance in the $75–86K range. This was the positive side of the close correlation with traditional financial markets. The flip side of this correlation was a pause in growth as key indices pulled back from all-time highs, causing the leading cryptocurrency to retreat to the $78K range. 

News background

The Volo liquid staking protocol on the Sui blockchain lost $3.5 million due to a hack. According to estimates by Memento Research, April was the worst month for the decentralised finance (DeFi) sector in terms of losses. The largest incidents involved the Drift and Kelp protocols, with combined losses approaching $600 million.

Within a few days of the Kelp hack, users withdrew $15.1 billion from the Aave lending protocol, notes EmberCN. Aave, the largest decentralised lending protocol, found itself at the centre of a systemic DeFi crisis after hackers used it to withdraw funds stolen from Kelp.

Tron founder Justin Sun has filed a lawsuit in a California federal court against Donald Trump’s family crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, claiming that his WLFI tokens were frozen without cause and threatened with destruction.

New York has sued crypto exchanges Coinbase and Gemini over contracts on the prediction market that violate gambling laws. The lawsuit follows several similar proceedings in other states. There is a possibility that the case will reach the US Supreme Court.

Trump’s nominee for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, expressed support for cryptocurrencies during his testimony before the US Senate. According to him, digital assets “have already become an integral part of the US financial services industry”.