CMC Market Pulse delivers actionable market insights, giving you all the key narratives and developments you need in under 5 minutes.
Market Overview 📉
Bitcoin (BTC) closed the week 7.47% up, while Ethereum (ETH) lagged this week, closing the week up 4.24% from the week prior. Total crypto market cap surged higher by 6.39% from $3.426T to end the week at $3.645T.
With the strong move upwards, liquidations centered around shorts, although a significant amount of late longs were also rinsed in the volatility. Funding rates finally begin to show signs of life, with funding rates on majors breaking into the low double digit range.
📌 Strategy has acquired 7.390 BTC for $764.9M at an average price of $103,498 per Bitcoin. - Link
📌 Strategy announces an agreement to sell 10% Series A Perpetual Strife Preferred Stock (STRF) for an aggregate offering price of up to $2.1B. - Link
📌 Texas passes their strategic Bitcoin reserve bill, with a vote of 101-42. - Link
Why does it matter?
This week saw the divergence in crypto and traditional markets, with crypto pushing higher convincingly while traditional equities began to pull back. The S&P 500 is down 1.35% over the past week, while the Nasdaq is also down 1.23%. Will the Bitcoin inflows continue to keep the market afloat, or will we converge back in line with the traditional market?
Notable altcoin outperformers primarily included memecoins such as Moo Deng (MOODENG), Dog (DOG), cat in a dogs world (MEW), and Mog Coin (MOG). Non-memecoin outperformers include Hyperliquid (HYPE) and Worldcoin (WLD).
Narrative of the Week 📰
The GENIUS Act establishing regulations around stablecoin issuance and issuers just passed in the US Senate this week, in a historic 66-32 vote.
📌 The GENIUS Act passes, laying down regulations such as definitions of a stablecoin, capital and reserve requirements and KYC/AML requirements. - Link
📌 The Act is expected to strengthen the US Dollar, driving demand into US Treasuries to maintain its dominance. - Link
📌 Critics, however, lament that the Act seeks to crackdown on actual decentralized stablecoins, forcing market share into government controlled stablecoins. - Link
Why does it matter?
The GENIUS Act finally brings regulatory clarity for stablecoin issuers, further legitimizing the industry and its primary use case: stablecoins and payments.
Major Project Updates 🗓️
📌 Succinct Labs introduces Hypercube, enabling the ability to prove Ethereum mainnet blocks in less than 12 seconds, creating the first zkVM to achieve real-time Ethereum proving. - Link
📌 Anza introduces Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol for Solana designed to reduce transaction final latency by 100x to compete with centralized infrastructure. - Link
📌 Celestia’s Lotus upgrade is now live, reducing inflation and bringing native TIA interoperability via Hyperlane. - Link
📌 Sei introduces the whitepaper for Sei Giga, the reimagined multi-proposer infrastructure for the Sei blockchain to bring it to 200K TPS. - Link
Why does it matter?
Real-time Ethereum proving could be the next step forward for Ethereum in scaling the L1 directly rather than through L2s, which has so far been extractive to the Ethereum L1.
DeFi Brief 🏦
📌 Circle Payments Network officially goes live, enabling real-time settlement of USDC payments via the blockchain between merchants, banks and payment providers. - Link
📌 Lido Finance releases their whitepaper for V3, focusing on modular and customized decentralized staking infrastructure for through stVaults. - Link
📌 Sui’s leading DEX, Cetus Protocol, has been exploited for $223M. Approximately $162M of the stolen funds have been frozen, with the rest having been bridged off to Ethereum as USDC. - Link
Why does it matter?
Stablecoins and payments continue to represent the core use case for blockchain technology and crypto with major players such as Circle continuing to facilitate development in this area.
Meme Coins 🚀
📌 Robinhood lists MEW and MOODENG for spot trading on the platform. - Link
Fundraises 💰
📌 PYUSD-focused non-custodial exchange, TrueX, raises $11M in a Series A funding round led by Accomplice and RRE Ventures, with support from Variant, PayPal Ventures and Reciprocal Ventures. - Link
📌 AI agent infrastructure layer, Catena, raises $18M in funding led by a16z crypto, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, Pillar VC and Circle Ventures. - Link
📌 Sam Altman’s Worldcoin raises $135M from a16z and Bain Capital Crypto in a liquid, market-priced token sale. - Link
📌 Bitcoin liquid staking protocol, Rover, raises $4.1M in a funding round, with investors including CMS Holdings, Animoca Ventures, Maelstrom and more. - Link
Airdrops Abound 🎁
📌 Solana Optimistic Network releases the airdrop checker for the upcoming SOON token airdrop. - Link
📌 DeFi superapp, DeFi App, introduces the HOME token, which allocates 45% of the token supply to the Community and Ecosystem. - Link
Tweet of the Week 📝
Source: @boldleonidas
Bitcoin just broke all-time highs, so alt season is around the corner, right?
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