Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

United States Bitcoin ETFs saw over $35 billion in total net inflows for the year, averaging about $144 million per trading day. As Trump's inauguration on January 20th approaches, the market currently holds an optimistic outlook for Bitcoin prices in January and even February. The current hype around AI Agents is reflected in on-chain data, similar to the situation before the DeFi boom of 2020-2021. The market cap of Crypto AI is currently around $10 billion. Base and Solana have become the main battlegrounds, and $SOL flipped $BNB in market cap. 

Options Market

The market kicked off the year on a high note. The upcoming Trump’s inauguration certainly helped boost the bullish sentiment. On the volatility side, the realised volatility drifted lower followed by a lower implied volatility on the front. The back-end IVs remained rather steady. The positive volatility carry widened compared to last week. Skew moved more in favour of calls as outright calls and call spreads printed over the week both on BTC and ETH. ETH maintained a 10% volatility premium against BTC. Spot-wise, ETH/BTC rate reversed the downward trend with a minor recovery to 0.037.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• According to data compiled by the financial tracker PitchBook for TechCrunch, global Generative Artificial Intelligence companies raised $56 billion from venture capital in 2024, involving 885 transactions. This cash total set a new record for the sector. It represented a 192% increase compared to 2023.

   

• On January 5th, according to DefiLlama data, the total market value of stablecoins across the network surged past $206.8 billion, reaching a historical high, with a 0.87% increase over the past week. USDT holds a market share of 66.5%, with a current market value of $137.545 billion.

   

• According to monitoring data from Farside Investors, the US Ethereum spot ETF saw a net outflow of $38.1 million last week.

   

• Jesse Pollak, Head of Base and Coinbase Wallet, stated that the team is "exploring" the introduction of Coinbase stock COIN to the Layer 2 network Base, incubated by Coinbase, in 2025, although there are currently "no specific plans."

   

• According to official reports, MicroStrategy is seeking to raise $2 billion through the sale of preferred stock to advance its previously announced "21/21 Plan", aiming to raise $42 billion within three years to purchase Bitcoin.

   

• Ethena has released its 2025 roadmap "Convergence", with the next phase of Ethena's growth primarily driven by exporting products to traditional finance, and the launch of a new product "iUSDe" next month, intended to export sUSDe in a regulated form to the TradFi sector.

   

• BounceBit announced the launch of RWA trading functionality supporting tokenized securities on the BounceClub Quanto platform, with initial assets including MSTR (MicroStrategy), COIN (Coinbase), and BB (BlackBerry).

   

• The Seraph Foundation announced that it will officially launch its TGE on January 6, 2025, at 20:00 (UTC+8), concurrently introducing the S1 Genesis Season.

Macro

The major indices closed slightly lower for the holiday-shortened week: the DJIA lost 0.6%, the S&P 500 -0.5%, and the Nasdaq -0.5%. Chinese equities retreated from previous week’s gain: the Shanghai Composite Index lost 5.55%, the CSI 300 -5.17% and the Hang Seng index -1.64%.