Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

Bitcoin wrapped up October 2024 with an 11.2% price increase, making it the third-best month for gains this year. This week BTC came within a few hundred dollars of a new all-time high, and the market experienced a record $843 million in ETF inflows. BTC dominance reached 60% for the first time in three years. During the last cycles, liquidity will flow up the risk curve from Bitcoin → Ethereum / Solana → Large Cap Alts → Small Cap Alts. Although it's impossible to pinpoint exactly when "Alt-season" will happen, the meme and AI sectors have already surged with year-to-date gains of +219% and +217%, respectively.

Options Market

The front-end implied volatility, the Nov 8 US election expiry in particular,  edges higher as we are now just days before the event. The 7-day volatility carry now is +36%, suggesting a quick volatility reset post-election. The current Straddle pricing on BTC indicates a 6% move on the election result. BTC leads the way in this rally as the market gains the confidence of a more crypto-friendly administration. Although BTC did pull back from just a few hundred bucks shy of a new ATH, the market positioning on the event stays intact. Front-end skew remains neutral-ish whereas the mid and long term skew continues to show a bullish view. ETH/BTC continues to drift lower to 0.0357 after another attempt of rebound.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• On November 3rd, the trading volume for the 2024 U.S. presidential election on the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket exceeded $3 billion.

   

• According to a report by Cointelegraph, the TON Foundation has introduced a new governance framework and a decentralized autonomous organization called Society DAO. Society DAO comprises four founding members: TON Core, TON Society, Wallet in Telegram, and the newly launched developer collective TON Studio.

   

• As per official announcements, BNB Chain completed its 29th BNB quarterly burn, totaling 1,772,712.363 BNB burned, with an approximate USD value of $1.07 billion at the time of the burn.

   

• According to the latest Q3 report released by Tether, Tether's Q3 net profit was $2.5 billion (reaching $7.7 billion for the year), with around $1.3 billion of the profit coming from the interest on U.S. Treasury holdings and another $1.1 billion attributed to unrealized appreciation from holding gold in the company's reserves.

   

• OpenAI announced a major upgrade to ChatGPT, enabling it to search the web and provide answers based on the information found. This upgrade makes OpenAI more similar to traditional search engines, directly competing with Google.

   

• The Bitcoin rollup project Citrea announced the completion of a $14 million Series A funding round, led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with angel investors such as Erik Voorhees and Balaji Srinivasan participating.

   

• AI data collection startup Sapien completed a $10.5 million seed funding round, led by Variant, with participation from Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Yield Game Guild, and HF0.

   

• Ondo Finance announced a partnership with Wellington Management to provide intraday redemption services for tokenized U.S. Treasury bond funds.

Marco

The major benchmarks closed lower for the week: the DJIA lost 0.1%, the S&P 500 lost 1.4% and the Nasdaq -1.5%. Chinese equities cooled down after consecutive weeks of rise: the Shanghai Composite Index fell 0.84%, the CSI 300 lost 1.68% and the Hang Seng index lost 0.41%.