The Recovery Continues

Daily Updates:

• After some sideways movement over Friday and Saturday, BTC has continued its modest recovery, now trading at $87K amidst signs that President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs may be more targeted and focused than previously thought. 
• That slight increase in risk-on sentiment going into the final week of the month is being shared in equity markets too with S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq futures both up so far today. 
• The President stated that “there’ll be flexibility” on his reciprocal tariffs due on April 2, marking the date as America’s “liberation day”. That flexibility implies that some countries may be exempt from the bilateral tariffs which Trump has said will be applied to all countries and trade partners of the US that currently have tariffs and non-tariff trade duties on US imports. 
• Adding to the more narrow-focused approach, according to some news sources, Trump will also fall short of announcing sector-specific tariffs such as tariffs on autos, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors on the same date as he previously suggested that he would. 
• SOL is leading the current move amongst the top 10 crypto tokens by market-cap, up 6% today, with ETH and XRP both up 3%. 
• Front-end volatility for both BTC and ETH is at around 45% and 60% respectively, close to their lowest levels of the month. BTC’s  volatility smile has held a skew towards out-the-money puts for short-dated optionality over the weekend, but looks to be shifting towards calls — with the 7-day tenor now already slightly call-skewed.
• ETH’s front-end skew levels have also ticked up, indicating some renewed demand for out-the-money call options relative to OTM puts. That increase has happened as the left wing of the vol smile has decreased, suggesting a reduced demand for puts, whilst demand for calls has increased.

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• The U.S. Treasury Department has removed Tornado Cash, a protocol which lets users pool and withdraw crypto to different wallets, from its sanctions list following a January appeals court ruling that deemed the sanctions unlawful. 
• Trump-backed World Liberty Financial (WLFI), acquired 3.54 million MNT tokens for nearly $3 million, after Ethereum Layer 2, Mantle Network had a major upgrade to boost scalability and align with Ethereum’s upcoming Pectra update. This brings WLFI’s total portfolio holdings to over $340 million.

This Week’s Calendar:

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Charts of the Day: