First Mover Americas: Tokenized Treasury Notes Surpass $1B
The latest price moves in crypto markets in context for March 28, 2024.
Updated Mar 28, 2024, 3:18 p.m. Published Mar 28, 2024, 12:55 p.m.
This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter, putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.
Latest Prices
Top Stories
The market for tokenized U.S. Treasury debt is booming. The market value of Treasury notes tokenized through public blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Stellar and others has crossed above $1 billion for the first time, data tracked by Tom Wan, an analyst at crypto firm 21.co, show. Tokenized Treasuries are digital representations of U.S. government bonds that can be traded as tokens on the blockchain. The market value has risen nearly 10-fold since January last year and 18% since traditional finance giant BlackRock announced Etheruem-based tokenized fund BUIDL on March 20.
Bitcoin (BTC) prices were little changed over the past 24 hours after a volatile week. Prices briefly jumped above $71,000 on Tuesday, and have since retreated slightly to levels around $70,700 ahead of a major options expiry on Friday. Most major tokens posted slight losses. Meanwhile, bitcoin cash (BCH) zoomed 13% before an expected halving event on April 4. The current block reward of 6.25 BCH will be cut to 3.125 BCH. Open interest on BCH-tracked futures more than doubled to $500 million on Thursday from $213 million last week, showing an increase in levered bets on more expected price volatility.
BlackRock's first tokenized asset fund is off to a strong start, garnering a significant market share of the blockchain-based tokenized U.S. Treasury market just a week after its debut. Blockchain data shows that BlackRock's BUIDL raked in $245 million of deposits as of Wednesday. Its strong introduction propelled the fund into second place among peers, trailing only Franklin Templeton's Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), which has $360 million of deposits, according to rwa.xyz data.
Chart of the Day
- The chart shows shares in Nvidia (NVDA) are on track to register the first weekly loss of 2024.
- Since 2020, Bitcoin has closely tracked Nvidia prices. The 90-day and 52-week correlation coefficients between the two are greater than 0.80.
- Source: TradingView
Trending Posts
Lyllah Ledesma
Lyllah Ledesma is a CoinDesk Markets reporter currently based in Europe. She holds a master's degree from New York University in Business and Economics and an undergraduate degree in Political Science from the University of East Anglia. Lyllah holds bitcoin, ether and small amounts of other crypto assets.
Omkar Godbole
Omkar Godbole is a Co-Managing Editor on CoinDesk's Markets team based in Mumbai, holds a masters degree in Finance and a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) member. Omkar previously worked at FXStreet, writing research on currency markets and as fundamental analyst at currency and commodities desk at Mumbai-based brokerage houses. Omkar holds small amounts of bitcoin, ether, BitTorrent, tron and dot.
