The Bull Is Back

The news from Planet Ruby—Friday, May 17, 2024

• Signal: $66k
• Noise: $56k

Wednesday's CPI data was a major event for the markets, following the uncertainty and concern about sticky inflation which has characterized recent months. The print came in at 3.4% year-on-year, down from last month and in line with expectations.

This was a bullish catalyst, causing the dollar to drop sharply and risk assets to push higher. The S&P 500 hit a new ATH, and gold isn't far behind. The two-month correction that has affected major markets has ended.

In other news, OpenAI released GPT-4o, to huge excitement. The new version prioritizes human-AI interaction across text, audio, and video, in real time.

And, in an echo of 2021, the Roaring Kitty Twitter/X account came back to life after three years of silence. A single cryptic post was enough to cause GameStop shares to soar over 100%. It's yet to be seen whether this will be the start of a new meme stock season.

Bitcoin Breaks Resistance

Thanks to that CPI print, bitcoin has reclaimed prior resistance at $65,500. This key level has since been retested as support and seems to be holding. That shifts the balance of probability towards $56k being the local low for this correction, and the bull market being back on.

Bitcoin Dominance is still trending higher, back towards levels not seen since April 2021. Memecoins remain popular, but a wider alts season remains on hold. In short, the picture is promising for BTC.

13-F filings have shown a surprisingly high level of investment in the bitcoin ETFs by institutional asset managers. This should reassure the market that it's not just Boomer retail investors who are picking up BTC through the new products.

In less positive news, US authorities' enforcement attempts continue. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has warned that the US government is going after Tether, the largest stablecoin in the world. USDT currently has a market cap of around $110 billion, and it would be fair to say that taking it down would be a systemic threat to the crypto ecosystem.

Coinbase took a much-earned rest and enjoyed yet another outage on Tuesday, no doubt practicing for the many outages it will need to take in the coming months.

And Vanguard has appointed Salim Ramji as its new CEO. The investment giant has made a point of refusing its customers access to the Bitcoin ETFs. Ramji just so happens to be the guy who oversaw BlackRock's IBIT launch, though he has explicitly said that customers shouldn't expect Vanguard bitcoin ETFs any time soon.

What's New In The SKALEVERSE?

Check out SKALE's Twitter/X feed for the latest news. This week, new games continue to deploy on the platform, bringing thousands of new users and tens of thousands of gas-free transactions!

Follow Ruby on Twitter, join us on Discord, and subscribe to the Ruby blog for regular updates.