GM Legends,

Boring Bitcoin is basically clueless right now after the Eth Denver sing song definitely dumped the market. Bitcoin and Ethereum are currently sitting in the $500 range… oooft, boring!

Let’s leave the Eth Denver sing song dump alone and get stuck into the top 5 Crypto Narratives for March. From the FED (oh, yes), Shibarium, Bitcoin DeFi ft Yuga Labs (sorry!) and plenty more that you’ll need to scroll down for.

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Here's what's inside today.

🔥 The big topic. Top 5 Crypto Narratives in March.

🗞 Hot crypto news. The Bank of Kraken launches soon, a Tornado Cash fork heads to Optimism, Vitalik “King of Memes” dumps his bags AND MORE.

👀 Updates across the bloc. Unstoppable DeFi’s $20,000 Twitter thread competition, Perpy Finances hard cap public sale March 16th, Sector Finance’s incentivised vaults go live AND MORE.

🛡 Chart of the day. $BTC is clueless!

🧵 Thread of the day. Crypto Shiro breaks down 5 narratives giving you bonus project ideas.

🔥 The big topic.

March Madness: Top 5 Narratives

Some say it was a big liquidation candle, but in my view, it was the shenanigans at Eth Denver that cause the Bitcoin dump last week.

I mean come on, Eth Denver was supposed to be full of alpha, announcements and project releases. Instead, we got this…

And then 24 hours later we had this… JFC, no wonder we didn’t get a weekend scam pump!

Thankfully, Eth Denver is over with March looking like a rocky month for the markets.

However… we sent the apes out to find the latest narratives worthy of your attention.

Here are our Top 5 March Narratives to keep an eye on.

And obviously do your own research, none of this is financial advice and all that jazz!

1) What the FED? Not again…

First, let’s get the FED out of the way before getting onto the JUICY bits.

The markets shrugged a lot off in Jan & Feb, but March provides uncertainty. And like me with marmite, the markets HATE uncertainty.

The FED has complete control over the markets and if they pump or dump, so it’s super important to look at (and make a note on the fridge) which events have the potential to either pump our bags or leave them rekt… again.

March 8th ECB President Lagarde Speaks.

• Why does it matter? She has a lot of power and influence over the Eurozone.

March 10th Unemployment Rate

• Why should I care? More unemployment = what Jerome Powell is doing is working.

March 14th CPI & Core CPI

• What should I look out for? We want the numbers to come down. Any surprise to the upside could lead to an even more hawkish FED.

March 16th ECB Press conference

• Why’s this significant? For our European readers, this can bring unexpected volatility during the Q&A section.

March 22nd FOMC projections, statements and press conference 

• And this relates to? We’ll find out what the FED will do based on the CPI numbers.

March 28th Consumer Confidence 

• What’s the relevance? We get to know if the Americans are still aping into everything!

March 31st Core PCE Price Index

• What should I look out for? The CPI shows consumer spending vs PCE, indicating the confidence of US businesses.

2) BSC Season Round 3?!

BSC gave the title up as the, you know [redacted], coin arena after we recently saw a surge in BSC DeFi with the likes of Thena and Level Finance performing exceptionally well.

Radiant Capital will be expanding onto BNB soon as well as launching V2. If that happens, and as an omnichain money market built on LayerZero, it could start to connect the dots between the BSC DeFi scene.

Projects to keep an eye on are: Thena ($THE), Level Finance ($LVL) pStake ($pSTAKE, LSD narrative as well) and Wombex Finance ($WMX).

Keep an eye on DeFi Llamas BSC DeFi Dashboard to spot trends.

3) Bitcoin DeFi, NFTs and Mt Gox

This a hot topic that we’ll look into in more depth over the coming weeks but it’s still a strong narrative.

From Ordinals to Badgers eBTC, to Mt Gox 

In February Ordinals came to a Bitcoin Blockchain near you giving the once archaic network some life.

Fast forward three weeks and the whole ecosystem is starting to pick up pace, with the likes of Bitcoin's first Layer 2 Stacks ($STX), Gamma.io & Ordinals.Market (NFT marketplace), Ordinals Wallet (as it says… an Ordinals Wallet), Xverse (BTC & Stacks wallet) and even the first meme coin Welsh Corgi.

Love or hate them Yuga Labs has already migrated to Bitcoin with their collection Twelvefold, which was minted yesterday.

BTC DeFi, who would’ve thought that was going to be a thing?!

Badger has been hard at work creating eBTC which is a collateralized asset soft-pegged to Bitcoin. It’s backed by Liquid Staked ETH (LSD) and designed to be the most centralised synthetic BTC in DeFi.

If I’ve read it correctly, bringing BTC to ETH… that's a pretty big thing. Full proposal here.

Mt Gox, yeah… they’re back and so are the unlocks starting on March 10th. Most likely a FUD event by the media and crypto Twitter as it’s likely creditors will continue to hodl their BTC. Why, you ask? Selling the lows after watching the cycles since 2014 wouldn’t make much sense.

You can check out NFP Studio to see how buzzing the Bitcoin ecosystem is.

4) Ethereum & LSD in Shanghai

Yeah, yeah, this again. But it’s important.

Due to a few minor bugs found during the Sepolia testnet update, devs are expecting to go live in the first week of April with the final dress rehearsal being marked in the calendar for March 14th on the Goreli testnet (gETH anyone?!).

It would make sense for this to be another buy the rumour sell the news event.

It’s worth keeping the big players on your watch list like $LDO, $SWISE, $RPL, $FXS and $pSTAKE and a few smaller wild cards like $PENDLE (assets on discount), $SD (ETHx update) and $yETH (soon to be launched by Yearn Finance $YFI).

5) The other important narratives

zkEVM, Polygon will be announced on March 27 the zkEVM which could spur on another run in zk coins. We saw $MINA, $DUSK, $SYS, and $LRC all make moves last time.

Optimism. It’s hard not to have $OP and CoinBase coins on a watch list. Optimism’s Bedrock upgrade is set to go live at the end of the month and projects are trickling over to CoinBase’s L2 testnet. Base testnet NFTs, anyone?!

The Optimism grant scheme is live and the governance forum is booming. Congrats to crypto Twitter’s Subli_DeFi for the grants he’s giving back to the community.

Shibarium, the soon-to-be meme chain. This feels like ADA where hearts are broken on a weekly basis with the promise of pastures new. However, that aside, 0xFitz breaks down the Shib ecosystem from the legit to the degen. Check out our previous article on memechains to find out $BONE, $LEASH, $SHIB and $SHI’s utility.

🗞 Hot crypto news.

🐮 Bullish News

BCB Group accelerates plans to plug the Silvergate Gap by having its dollar fiat-to-crypto rails in place, ready to go by Q2. BCB Group is a payments processor that links crypto companies to traditional bank systems.

The Bank of Kraken is “very much on track to launch, very soon” according to Kraken’s Chief Legal Officier in a recent podcast appearance on The Scoop with Frank Chaparro.

Privacy Pools, a Tornado Cash fork is set to be “regulatory friendly” as the mixer goes live on the Optimism testnet. Privacy Pools differs from the original Tornado Cash by using zero-knowledge proofs which can verify that the anonymous transactions are not connected to illegal activities.

🐻 Bearish News

FTX sues Grayscale and DCG over “exorbitant” management fees which “violated its trust agreements.” FTX Debtors claim the share of the Grayscale Bitcoin and Ethereum trusts are worth $500m. As for exorbitant management fees… FTX’s bankruptcy case cost $38m in January.

Binance hires Gary Gensler?! It looks like CZ and SBF had the same idea with SBF coming out on top. The WSJ reported that in 2018 Binance tried to hire Gensler as an adviser for “closer ties with US Regulators.” Imagine IF it were CZ that became chummy with Gensler and not SBF.

Vitalik, the King of Memes strikes back, this time offloading his “free meme bags” while leaving a moon bag of $CULT. Can we make a bold assumption that CoW Swap is Vitalik’s favourite dex?!

👀 Updates across the bloc.

Project Updates

AaveGotchi, is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s $GHST coming March 8th.

Beramonium Chronicles is the first Bera Themed RPG game with their genesis mint coming up today (March 7th) at 5 PM UTC. OG Bera holders, Blessed (community OGs) and Invictus (whitelist) will get to mint first.

McPepe’s crossed the 1,000,000 mark for generated McPepes. An NFT project that AI generates Pepes but there’s a twist. A limited edition collection of “BEST Pepes” will be hand-picked with an official curated series with exclusive traits.

Perpy Finance has released information about their up-and-coming hard-capped fixed-price public sale on Camelot Dex on March 16th.

Sector Finance’s Incentivsed Vaults launched yesterday. You can earn real yield ETH or USDC by depositing into either our Aggregator Yield Vaults or Single-Strategy Vaults.

Synapse will be moving their liquidity over to Balancer shortly with a 35,000 per week $SYN incentive reward (PS. Syn chain is coming soon) to $vlAURA holders.

Thena Finance subtly hints that V3 is coming and that “V3 = ά×γ” on Twitter. The team also announced new non-USD stablecoins are coming including new partnerships. Integration with OKX-Yield Aggregator went live yesterday.

Plus, for you Unstoppable threadoooors out there.

Newsletter exclusive and word on the street is to include “complete CEX replacement”, “LPing without IL” and “sleek UX with advanced types for traders” MIGHT help 👀

Governance Updates

Level Finance saw last week’s Remediation proposal declined. After a few tweaks, LGO holders have voted for the accumulated assets to be distributed to liquidity providers in the form of BTC/ETH/BNB/CAKE/BUSD/USDT. Eligible holders can now claim their tokens.

UniSwap snapshot to temperature check launching on Avalanche ends March 9th to front run UniSwaps V3 license expiry and a flood of forks that will undoubtedly happen.

Euler Finance is proposing to fast-track the withdrawal of $STG from the Euler reserves before the upcoming re-issuance of $STG. Re-issuance is due to Alameda having 10% of the supply which could lead to a large market dump.

🛡 Chart of the day.

$BTC is clueless

You heard it hear first, folks. Bitcoin, right now, has no idea what it wants to do. Ideally, we want to hold above the blue 50 EMA to make a move to the upside to recover the red vector candle.

However, J Powell speaks today and tomorrow with Mt Gox’s Bitcoin unlock beginning on March 10th (Friday).

Bull case. Hold above the blue 50 EMA and make a move back towards $23,500.

Bear case. J Powell comes at us with hawkish words whilst the Mt Gox unlocks see profit taking, tax harvesting and panic dropping us below the $21,500 mark and back into the unknown.

Coming up this week.

Oh dear…this feels like Boom or Bust, Rekt to Riches as the rest of the week is packed full of market-moving news.

🧵 Thread of the day.

An alpha hunting narrative newsletter needs an alpha threadooor to add even more to your watchlist.

But don’t worry, Shiro breaks down a number of interesting projects and categorises them in such a way you’ll never get lost.

And on that note, thanks for reading, catcha apes in the next edition!

blocmates team 🫡

🤝 A final word.

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