TIME to Say Goodbye?

Chart of the Day

In some good news, the U.S. economic growth figures in the final months of 2021 were revealed to signal the potential of a stronger-than-expected market recovery. This may just be the welcome shot in the arm that both the crypto and stock markets so desperately need. This has had a more than welcome positive effect on the crypto market. The number one cryptocurrency by market cap, BTC, is leading a crypto recovery charge from the vanguard after managing to regain some of its upside momentum to successfully reach the lower bound of the $37k region within the past 24 hours. ETH's modest 1% gain over the same time frame was also more than sufficient to buoy its price above the key $2,400 level, while most major altcoins have similarly flipped green. Additionally, the funding rates across major exchanges have mostly returned to neutral levels after nosediving into negative territories in the direct aftermath of the Fed's announcement (of the accelerated monetary policy tightening). However, the BTC-PERP liquidation map does reveal that several clusters at the $33k and the $38k-$42k ranges are still pretty vulnerable to potential shakeouts, so those are key levels that should be monitored very closely indeed.

Talk of the Town

Over the past 24 hours, the entire crypto community has been rocked by the shocking revelation that "Sifu", a core founding member of the very popular DeFi 2.0 protocol Wonderland (TIME), is actually a known serial scammer who has had several criminal convictions in the past for financial crime, and who was also deeply involved in the whole QuadrigaCX controversy. The Wonderland team has confirmed that 0xSifu/Patryn will be stepping down as their CFO, and a community vote has also been initiated to determine if Patryn will get to rejoin the team in any capacity. Wonderland's native token TIME has taken a huge hit from this, and is now a whopping 97% down from its all-time-high that was achieved a mere 2 months ago in November 2021. This ugly scandal has shaken most investors' faith in community-governed DeFi protocols, and even as we speak — many are already fleeing from the various related liquidity pools, triggering a significant liquidity exodus that may eventually lead to more devastating results like a stablecoin de-pegging that will greatly set the entire DeFi ecosystem back by quite a bit. This is definitely a situation to keep an eye on as it unfolds.