It's Monday, May 1st, 2023, and this is Markets Daily from CoinDesk.

I'm Adam B. Levine here again with Adrian Blast for your Daily News Roundup.

On today, we're talking Bitcoin, another bank failure, the latest headlines, and more.

And just a reminder, CoinDesk is a new source and does not provide investment advice.

Bitcoin, Ether, and most other top traded tokens are down in markets that are mostly red. The original cryptocurrency had challenged $30,000 at one point on Sunday afternoon, but a sudden

plunge later in the evening brought the price down to its current level, near the lower end

of our recent range.

BTC spent April changing hands between $27,4301,000 as investors weighed two conflicting forces.

Those would be, on the one hand, renewed hostility coming from U.S. regulators and several

key legislators towards Coinbase and cryptocurrency more broadly, while on the other, the monetary

policy-induced banking crisis of 2023 continues, which would be bullish, at least over the long

term, for anything not in the traditional financial sector. Over the weekend, First Republic Bank

was seized by the FDIC and immediately sold

to the biggest bank in the U.S., which would of course also be the go-to partner for banking

regulators, J.P. Morgan. It's not a good deal for anyone, especially FRC shareholders,

but from the perspective of authorities whose credibility, among other things are on the line,

it was the best that they could do, unsurprising in our

modern era. We'll discuss this more in the headlines. Investors will next be turning their

attention to the U.S. Central Bank's Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, two-day meeting,

which begins tomorrow. At that meeting, they'll engage in yet another round of performative

financial voodoo that may or may not result in another quarter of a percentage point rate hike. But regardless of what they do, markets think that

this is the end of the hiking cycle, since it's exactly that action, where the top U.S.

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