Surge in Large-Sized BTC Transactions; Meta Opens Brick-and-Mortar Metaverse Store

Chart of the Day

On Monday, the broader crypto market enjoyed a swift recovery from the past few days of red in spite of the additional macroeconomic risks that had surfaced in recent days due to China's latest COVID outbreak, as well as the impending global recession. BTC managed to climb back to the $40k psychological level after rising by 3.7% in the last 24 hours. As of the time of writing, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap has broken above the bearish trendline on the hourly chart, and is poised to make a charge towards the overhead hurdles within the $40.8k to $41k zone. However, a failure to break above said levels may trigger further downside corrections to the $40k region. 

Meanwhile, the BTC Relative Transfer Volume Breakdown by Size chart reveals a notable change in the market structure — there has been a huge surge in BTC transactions that are bigger than $10 million in volume. Prior to October of 2020, large-size transactions only accounted for less than 10% of the overall transfer volume on a good day. However, said large-size transactions have now consistently been taking up around 40% of the daily volume. Interestingly, the dominance of large transactions has seen a further spike in recent months, reflecting a tangible growth in value settlement by institutional-sized investments and high net worth individuals. 

Within the altcoin market, ETH has been moving in lockstep with BTC, with the number two cryptocurrency by market cap managing to reclaim the $3,000 level after posting a 5.3% gain from 24 hours ago. Most major altcoins have also largely flipped green, with Dogecoin leading the pack after experiencing a staggering 25% surge on the back of Elon Musk's $43 billion Twitter buyout. In the NFT market, Moonbirds has become the latest project to attain blue-chip status, and is the first project to achieve such high levels of success in the aftermath of the NFT market slump. 

Talk of the Town

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has announced that it will be launching its first hardware retail store within its campus in California. The store will provide the full Meta virtual experience within the setting of a brick-and-mortar store. It will allow customers to interact with Meta's Portal videophones, virtual reality headsets, as well as the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses that debuted last year.