Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

The SEC has announced the closure of their investigation into the Ethereum Foundation and ETH 2.0. ETH/BTC showed strength this week and it suggested ETH dominance in the current market. According to CryptoQuant, the long-term Bitcoin whales have been selling their BTC, making a profit of $1.2 billion over the last two weeks. Additionally, ETF net flows have seen negative activity, with outflows totalling $460 million during the same timeframe. There is a strong possibility that BTC may revisit its range lows, potentially leading to further challenges for alts.

Options Market

The realised volatility drifted lower on the market’s choppiness. BTC  briefly dipped below 64k support whereas ETH showed resilience to this downward trend on the closure of SEC’s investigation and the upcoming ETF flow. The implied volatility slowly creeped up - ETH’s implied volatility showed increased mid-term optimism. The desk saw decent clips of ETH Sep 4k Calls bought. ETH’s skew also suggested slightly more bullish positioning than BTC’s, with both vol smiles moving closer to neutral for shorter-dated expiries.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• Catizen announced that its total number of players on the chain has exceeded 1.25 million. At the same time, Catizen has ranked first in The Open League leaderboard for three consecutive seasons.

• Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Helius, a development platform for the Solana ecosystem, announced on the X platform that they are introducing ZK compression to Solana. The ZK compression will be performed directly on L1 without the need for L2.
• According to Etherscan data, the issuance of the stablecoin USDe, issued by Ethena Labs, has exceeded 3.5 billion tokens.
• According to The Block, Pantera Capital is raising a new fund to purchase more TON tokens.
• Bitcoin DeFi protocol Ordinox has completed a $1 million pre-seed funding round, with participation from UTXO Management, Digital Asset Capital Management, CMS Holdings, Sats Ventures, Hidden Street, STS Digital, and angel investors including Domo, the founder of BRC20.
• Meow, co-founder of Jupiter, announced the draft of the J4J (Jupiter for Jupiter) plan on social media, proposing to reduce the total supply of JUP by 30%. The team will voluntarily reduce 30% from their allocation and correspondingly reduce Jupuary emissions by 30%.
• Binance is launching a HODLer airdrop for BNB holders. Users who subscribe to Simple Earn using BNB will receive airdropped tokens from a project with a large token circulation that intends to list on Binance soon.
• The Arweave AO token has begun minting, and 33% of AO tokens will be proportionally distributed to AR holders. Users can deposit stETH to receive token rewards. Currently, over $100 million worth of stETH has been deposited into AO.

Marco

The major indexes recorded modest gains for the week: the DJIA added +1.5%, the S&P 500 added +0.6%, and the NASDAQ closed flat. The S&P 500 Index reached a new all-time high level. The confirmation for a rate cut later this year by the Fed officials seemed to bolster the market.