Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

Bitcoin reached a historic milestone by hitting $100k for the first time. This prompted investors to open long positions on the breakout, causing a significant surge in funding rates, reaching approximately 100% APR. The market reversed, flushing out the breakout open interest, and price dropped below $90k on some exchanges. Despite macro indicators showing sustained bearish momentum, a Trump election win spurred a strong Bitcoin rally. A similar situation occurred in February when the ETF launch and flows kept BTC buoyant for another month. Memes have taken a backseat as tokens with utility and strong fundamentals gain prominence.

Options Market

The post-election rally continued as BTC printed a new ATH at 103.6k and ETH also gained some steam, popping up to 4k, a level that hasn’t been seen since March. ETH/BTC is retesting 0.04 resistance level. A breakout on this level could untap the upside potential on ETH. Nonetheless, BTC does not seem to be ready to hand over its reins yet. Front-end implied volatility briefly popped on the cascade flush and quickly normalised. The abrupt washout took out some of the high leveraged positions and the quick bounce suggested that the market view remained intact. Skew term structures still saw strong bids for calls. Gamma sellers kept being cautious as the volatility carry drifted to the negative zone again.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• Chain data. In November, the Tether Treasury added a total of 18 billion USDT. On the 3rd and 5th of this month, the Tether Treasury added 1 billion USDT to the Ethereum network in two separate occasions. Since November, Tether has cumulatively added 20 billion USDT.
• Varun Srinivasan, co-founder of Farcaster, posted on social media that Farcaster's social network's new data layer, Snapchain, will enter Alpha testing in December, with the goal of a full launch in the first quarter of 2025.
• Officially, EigenLayer announced on social media their plan to launch an upgraded version of Rewards v2, aiming to bring greater flexibility, efficiency, and customization to rewards within the ecosystem.
• On December 6th, stablecoin protocol Usual announced on social media that they have opened airdrop queries and will conduct a USUAL airdrop in mid-December.
• According to a report by Cointelegraph, David Sacks, the new crypto head appointed by the Trump administration, is a staunch supporter of Solana and an investor in the crypto investment firm Multicoin Capital.
• AI super-chain Swan Chain, led by Binance Labs, announced that the genesis event (TGE) of its native token SWAN will be held on December 16th at 23:00 (Beijing time).
• According to FOX Business reporter Eleanor Terrett, the SEC has notified at least two of the five potential issuers that they will reject their 19b4 applications for a SOL spot ETF.
• According to official sources, Pudgy Penguins have announced the launch of their native token PENGU with a total supply of 888,888,888,888 PENGUs, which will be launched on Solana.

Macro

The major indices closed mixed for the week: the DJIA lost 0.6%, the S&P 500 added +1.0% and the Nasdaq added +3.3%. Chinese equities continued rally on the expectation of new stimulus policies: the Shanghai Composite Index added +2.33%, the CSI 300 added +1.44% and the Hang Seng index +2.28%.