Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

Jerome Powell noted that forthcoming tariffs and policy adjustments could raise inflation and slow growth, with uncertain impacts, and emphasized that the FED is in no rush to adjust monetary policy. The SEC delays decisions on staking ETFs until June as it assesses long-term digital asset regulations. Today's M2 expansion is mainly fueled by sovereign deficit financing and fiscal distortion, potentially delaying liquidity flow into Bitcoin, which is showing weakness in a defensive market.

Upcoming Macro Calendar - Source: Trading Economics

Options Market

The market consolidated in a tight range for the week. The realised volatility dropped significantly. One-week RV fell to 36% for BTC and 65% for ETH. The implied volatility drifted lower in tandem. This brought the volatility carry to be flattish. VIX also cooled off further to 29% but it is a rather elevated level for S&P risk, which suggests that the macro situation remains unravelling. Skew term structure flattened as the front-end skew shifted lower to neutrality with BTC undoubtedly having a more bullish view than ETH

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• According to data from BTC.com, Bitcoin mining difficulty adjusted at block height 893,088, increasing by 1.42% to 123.23 T, setting a new all-time high.

   

• According to on-chain data, the number of active addresses on the MegaETH public testnet has surpassed 24 million, with 9.5 million new addresses added in the past 7 days. On-chain transactions in the last 24 hours reached 55.82 million, with total transactions exceeding 685 million.

   

• On April 8, PancakeSwap initiated a proposal to discuss CAKE Tokenomics 3.0. The main points of the proposal include: achieving approximately 4% annual deflation for the CAKE token; removing CAKE staking, veCAKE, Gauges voting, and revenue sharing.

   

• Ondo Finance announced that its U.S. Treasury-backed token, USDY, is now available on the Stellar blockchain.

   

• Decentralized data storage protocol Walrus announced on social media that it will airdrop tokens to holders of the SuiPlay0X1 gaming handheld.

   

• Jupiter announced the launch of Juno, its next-generation trade aggregator, which includes multi-route aggregation from Jupiter, Hashflow, and DFlow.

   

• Eliza Labs launched auto.fun, a launchpad platform for creating, deploying, and monetizing AI agents through a "sustainable" token economy.

   

• DeFi protocol Ethena and asset tokenization firm Securitize announced they will use parts of Arbitrum’s technology and the data availability network Celestia to build an Ethereum-compatible blockchain focused on real-world assets (RWA), with the mainnet expected to go live in Q2 of this year

Macro

The stock market started the week with rallying as the White House signaled potential tariff exemptions on electronics. But the gain was then erased amid tariff and economic uncertainty when Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned that tariffs could raise inflation and slow growth. The market closed in red last week with S&P 500 down 1.5%, Nasdaq down 2.3% and Dow Jones down 2.6%.