CMC Market Pulse delivers actionable market insights, giving you all the key narratives and developments you need in under 5 minutes.
Market Overview 📉
The week saw Bitcoin (BTC) continue from the week prior, with a fresh attempt at a new all-time high. However, the move could not sustain its strength, leading to a quick pullback across the board. However, despite the decline in BTC, the Total Crypto Market Cap continued its ascent, rising 2.3% to a new high of $3.49T.
Bitcoin (BTC) saw a decline of 2.45% across the week, while Ethereum (ETH) outperformed significantly, closing 7.29% higher from the week prior, due to strong ETF inflows.
Daily liquidations surged primarily on the longs, with long liquidations peaking at $415M on November 25. Shorts were not spared as well, with close to $200M liquidated on the recovery from the dip. Funding rates on BTC stayed mostly flat across the week, while ETH’s fell to 25% closer to the end of the week, despite a surge in price and interest in the asset.
📌 Michael Saylor announces the purchase of 55,500 BTC for ~$5.4B at an average cost of $97,862. This purchase comes after more than $6B in purchases from the prior two weeks. - Link
📌 Bitcoin mining firm, Marathon Digital, announces a purchase of 703 BTC after a $1B convertible note offering, bringing their total holding to 6,474 BTC. - Link
📌 Brazilian congressman, Eros Biondini, officially proposes a bill for the acquisition of Bitcoin using up to 5% of the country’s national reserves. - Link
Why does it matter?
The week saw the crypto markets cool off after an explosive week prior, with BTC almost touching the fabled $100K level. Monday saw a renewed attempt at an all-time high break, which fell short, leading to a quick dip into the low $90K range. The markets recovered leading into Thanksgiving, but saw little volatility and volume due to the holiday. Traditional markets did well this week, with the S&P 500 rising close to 1% while the Nasdaq fared much weaker, with a slight 0.17% dip instead.
The market weakness was led by BTC, with BTC showing weakness against altcoin performance. Bitcoin dominance fell to 58.47% from 60.71% from the start of the week. ETH strongly outperformed this week as well, resulting in a repricing of several ETH-adjacent tokens.
Notable outperformers among altcoins were distributed across various categories, with top performers including Stellar (XLM), Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL), and Ethereum Name Service (ENS), which all saw increases of more than 90% in the week.
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Narrative of the Week 📰
AI Agents have seized the narrative this week, with AI agents springing up all over X and full-blown conversations between AI agents.
📌 Arbitrum introduces Trailblazer, a $1M initiative to support the development of AI agents, frameworks, and applications on the chain. - Link
📌 Binance launches its own research report on the AI agents landscape. - Link
Why does it matter?
AI has been a core narrative this cycle; As such, it is no surprise that the introduction of AI agents on X have been so well-received by crypto market participants. Be it market analysis, music-making, or just witty commentary, there’s an AI agent for every use case out there. With each AI agent having their own token as well, these bots and their tokens have taken centre stage as the core narrative this week.
Major Project Updates 🗓️
📌 The US Court of Appeals deems sanctions against Tornado Cash unlawful, paving the way for privacy-related projects and smart contracts as a whole in a massive win for the industry. - Link
📌 Zero-knowledge rollup, StarkNet, launches STRK staking phase 1, enabling users to become validators for the chain or to delegate their STRK tokens to validators, in a move to decentralize the chain further. - Link
📌 Oracle network, Chainlink, announces some of the work they’ve done with Swift, Euroclear, and major banking and capital market institutions including JP Morgan, Franklin Templeton, Invesco and more. - Link
📌 The TON blockchain introduces the TON Teleport BTC whitepaper, outlining the vision for a trustless bridge between Bitcoin and TON, to utilize BTC on the TON blockchain. - Link
📌 Synthetix launches a governance proposal for the acquisition of leveraged token protocol, TLX. Some investors question the value of the acquisition however, while others argue that Synthetix should focus on its own product. - Link
📌 Flashbots introduces BuilderNet, a decentralized block building network for Ethereum, designed to tackle the duopoly in block production on Ethereum currently. - Link
Why does it matter?
The victory of Tornado Cash over its earlier sanctions snags a huge victory for the crypto industry as a whole, opening doors for existing smart contract platforms, especially privacy-related ones, and future smart contract platforms. Coupled with an incoming pro-crypto president and government, this decision could contribute to the perfect environment to develop and expand the crypto space in the coming four years.
DeFi Brief 🏦
📌 A proposal for Aave has been put forward to enter into a collaboration with Instadapp, in which Aave will purchase $4M in INST token using Aave’s stablecoin, GHO. The acquired INST tokens will be used to provide liquidity on Instadapp’s latest DEX, Fluid. - Link
📌 Synthetic stablecoin protocol, Ethena Labs, announces the integration of USDe with leading crypto options exchange, Deribit, enabling users to earn rewards for holding USDe while utilizing it as collateral on the platform. - Link
📌 Yield tokenization platform, Pendle, launches on Base, allowing users to access yield opportunities on cbETH, select BTC assets and more to come. - Link
📌 Dinero (formerly Redacted Cartel) introduces zkETH, the native liquid staking solution for zkSync Era and the zkSync Elastic Chain. ZkETH is built on the yield of pxETH, Dinero’s flagship product. - Link
📌 MEV-protected DEX, CoWSwap, sees several trades on their platform fall victim to a multi-block MEV attack, with an alleged 200K lost to the attacker, although the figure is disputed by the CoWSwap team. - Link
Why does it matter?
Lending platform, Aave has been one of the biggest winners of this cycle, with loans on the protocol surpassing $10B this year. On a similar note, Instadapp’s Fluid has seen tremendous success since its launch earlier this month, with a revolutionary approach to idle capital in DeFi. With a strong partnership between the two DeFi giants, their collaboration could send both of these projects and their respective tokens to new highs.
Meme Coins 🚀
📌 Former Binance CEO, CZ, says that memecoins are getting “weird”, advocating for a focus on real applications, which has sparked some discussions among investors. - Link
📌 Solana memecoin launcher, pump.fun, halts their livestream feature after increasingly concerning livestreams on their site, involving threats of violence, criminal activity, and more. - Link
📌 The owner of Peanut, the squirrel behind the memecoin PNUT, has launched his own token, JUSTICE. In the process, the owner has denounced PNUT, which has slowly declined in value since getting listed on a major exchange. - Link
Fundraises 💰
📌 Stablecoin yield protocol, OpenTrade, raises $4M in a seed extension round led by Albion VC, with participation from existing investors including CMCC Global. - Link
📌 Decentralized L1 for AI agents, Talus Network, raises $6M in their latest funding round led by Polychain, with support from Foresight Ventures, Animoca Brands, Echo and more. - Link
📌 DeFi-backed synthetic stablecoin protocol, Avant Protocol, raises $6.5M in an oversubscribed see round, with investors including Superlayer, Avalaunch, Daybreak Digital and more. - Link
📌 Web3 debit card platform, Bleap, raises $2.3M in a pre-seed funding round led by Ethereal Ventures, with support from Maven 11 Capital, Alliance DAO, Robot Ventures and more. - Link
Airdrops Abound 🎁
📌 Perpetual DEX and L1, Hyperliquid, announces their TGE for Friday, November 29, distributing 310M tokens, or 31% of their total token supply, to point holders. - Link
📌 NFT marketplace, Magic Eden, will be launching the ME token on December 10, with the airdrop checker to launch on December 4. - Link
📌 Leveraged trading platform, SynFutures, announces their governance token, F, as well as its tokenomics. 7.5% of the total token supply will be distributed in the initial airdrop to early users of the platform. - Link
📌 ConsenSys-backed zkEVM chain, Linea, ends their point program, the Linea Surge, as of November 25. Linea hit a total of 2M users on the chain and more than $1.3B in total value locked during the program. - Link
📌 Move-based Ethereum L2, Movement Network, announces their token, MOVE, which will serve as the gas token for the chain. 10% of the total token supply will be distributed in the initial airdrop. - Link
Tweet of the Week 📝
Source: aixbt_agent
The AI agents are starting to sound just like us. Has technology gone too far?
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