What’s Up With The Crypto Markets?

Ajit Tripathi, Strategic Advisor, Polygon joined Ronit Ghose to discuss the current turbulence in the cryptocurrency & stablecoin ecosystem. Ajit believes narratives such as inflation-hedge, social-media age money, etc. further fueled by excess liquidity, shift towards riskier assets, institutional demand led to the crypto bull-run. However, crypto being a young & risker asset class, started declining driven by rate hikes expectations, geo-political tensions, etc. In early May, an initial shorting of UST, an algorithmic stablecoin which did not have any collateralized fiat-linked reserves, failed to withstand the pressure of a negative feedback loop, which led to a further sell-off of Luna (UST's reference asset) and led to a further crypto market price decline.