Decentral Block Post

The official Arbitrum airdrop page crashed right after the claiming process began around 9 a.m. EST. Some users still managed to claim it through alternative methods like Arbiscan. In the first two hours, the market witnessed a massive sell-off of the token as its price declined from over $10.29 to lows of $1.

At ByBit, the token started trading for $7.50, but dropped to $1.50 within minutes. At the time of writing, the token was trading at $1.33.

Only one address successfully sold the token at $10.29 through the ARB/USDC pool on Uniswap, bagging $64,340 for 6,250 tokens. A few others were able to sell for $4.50, however, the price dropped quickly below $1.50 as more sellers arrived. 

Nansen data shows that out of 6.03 million ARB claimed by “smart money” wallets, $5.01 million were moved to a centralized or a decentralized exchange, most likely to sell. The analytics firm puts “smart money” tags on addresses that trade in significant size and are usually active.

While some smart money accounts added 3.45 million from DEXs. Overall, the amount moved to exchanges was 150% larger than inflows to the wallets, suggesting a massive sell-off.

Bitcoin (BTC) returned to near $29,000 on March 23 as bulls ignored news of a fresh United States regulatory crackdown.

Bitcoin shrugs off Coinbase, Do Kwon arrest

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD gaining almost 8% versus its overnight lows to challenge nine-month highs on Bitstamp.

The pair kept the volatility coming as the dust settled on the prior day’s interest rate decision and associated commentary from the Federal Reserve.

Despite Fed Chair Jerome Powell giving mixed signals over how and if rate hikes would continue, crypto market commentators argued that the sudden drop that Bitcoin witnessed had been over-the-top.

“Make sure to remember the panic and calls for lower next time you get a dip during a HTF uptrend,” popular trader Crypto Chase wrote in part of Twitter analysis.

Litecoin (LTC) emerged as one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies on March 23, surpassing its top-ranking rivals Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH). 

Litecoin attracts Bitcoin and Ethereum investors

LTC price rallied 5.5% to reach an intraday high of around $92.50. In comparison, the total crypto market capitalization (TOTAL) has risen 2.25% to $1.14 trillion, with BTC and ETH rising 1.79% and 1.42%, respectively.

The Federal Reserve's 25 basis points (bps) rate hike on March 22 appears to be the key driver behind Litecoin beating its crypto rivals over the past 24 hours.

Notably, LTC price rallied over 15% versus BTC and about 14.5% versus ETH since the Fed announcement.

One reason could be that Litecoin has relatively underperformed the cryptocurrency market in March, dropping over 6.5% month-to-date (MTD) versus the crypto market's 9.35% gains.

Ethereum’s native token, Ether (ETH), continues its multimonth downtrend against Bitcoin (BTC) in March, rising 5.5% versus the latter’s 19.5% gains on a month-to-date timeframe.

Bitcoin overshadows Ethereum amid banking crisis

As of March 23, the ETH/BTC pair was down about 9% month-to-date to 0.0633 while staying on course to record its worst month since September 2022, when it fell 11.75%.

From a fundamental perspective, traders preferred Bitcoin over Ether, hoping it would protect them from the ongoing banking turmoil in the U.S. and other parts of the world. The narrative gained momentum in recent weeks as Wall Street investors like Cathie Wood see Bitcoin as a potential “flight to safety” asset.

As a result of the growing speculation, Bitcoin outperformed traditional assets after March 8, when signs of trouble appeared at Silicon Valley Bank. In doing so, BTC also fared better than the altcoin market combined, including Ethereum.

ETH paints bullish fractal vs. BTC

However, from a technical perspective, Ethereum is positioned for a comeback versus Bitcoin.

Arbitrum developers announced an airdrop of its governance token, ARB, to eligible users and DAOs on the Ethereum Layer-2 platform. An average user received around 625 ARB tokens, which corresponds to around $625 to $1,250, according to pre-launch trading prices and popular estimations.

The prospect of earning free money has instilled excitement around users looking to hunt the next airdrop opportunity. The airdrop farming activity also benefits the protocols by attracting liquidity and usage to the platform. The strategy is working well for both protocol developers and users.

Moreover, the team's sale of a protocol’s token invokes securities laws, inducing significant legal risk for the developing teams. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that future protocols will use the same strategy to decentralize their protocols.

Here are five potential airdrop opportunities for this year.

zkSync Era

zkSync Era is a Layer-2 rollup on Ethereum based on the zero-knowledge (ZK) proof technology. Experts, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, have argued that zk-based EVM-compatible rollups could be a game-changer technology with high scalability and throughput, leading to mass adoption.

Ether's price (ETH) reached $1,400 on March 10, which proved to be a bargain as the cryptocurrency rallied 27.1% until March 21, at the time of writing. However, the three reasons that supported the price gain, including correlation with tech stocks, its increasing total value locked and its deflationary token economics, all suggest that the path to $2,000 is set in stone. 

There are numerous explanations for Ether's 19.4% decline over the past six months. The Shanghai hard fork upgrade was delayed from March to early April and after Shanghai, Ethereum's roadmap includes the "Surge," "Verge," "Purge," and "Splurge" updates. In reality, the longer these intermediate steps to achieve scalability take, the greater the likelihood that competing networks will demonstrate efficacy and possibly establish a competitive advantage.

Another potentially concerning issue on the minds of investors is the real chance of price impact when validators are finally able to unlock their 32 ETH deposits following the completion of the Shappela hard fork. While it is impossible to predict how many of the 16 million ETH currently staked on the Beacon Chain will be sold on the market. There is a compelling argument in favor of the transition to liquid staking platforms, as they can use liquid staking derivatives on other decentralized finance networks without sacrificing their staking yield.

Traders could construct a narrative based on regulatory uncertainty, especially after SEC Chairman Gary Gensler's September 2022 statement that proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies could be subject to securities laws. In February 2023, the SEC reached an agreement compelling the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken to cease offering crypto staking services to U.S.-based clients and the exchange also paid $30 million in disgorgement.

Correlation versus application-focused tech companies

To understand why Ether gained 15% in less than three days after briefly trading below $1,400 on March 10, traders must switch from a price-based analysis to a market capitalization comparison. On March 10, Ethereum’s market cap closed at $175 billion.

Bitcoin (BTC) saw heavy volatility on March 22 as the United States Federal Reserve hinted that it might stop interest rate hikes.

Powell on rates: “‘May’ and ‘some’ instead of ‘ongoing’”

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed sharp moves both up and down for BTC/USD as the Fed hiked by an anticipated 25 basis points.

During a press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell appeared to play down the ongoing U.S. banking crisis and its aftermath while hinting that the day’s interest rate hike may be the last.

In prepared remarks, Powell said that the Fed believes that “events in the banking system over the past two weeks are likely to result in tighter credit conditions for households and businesses, which would in turn affect economic outcomes.”

“It is too soon to determine the extent of these effects, and therefore too soon to tell how monetary policy should respond,” he stated.