CMC Market Pulse delivers actionable market insights, giving you all the key narratives and developments you need in under 5 minutes.
Market Overview 📉
With Trump speaking at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference, the week kicked off strong, with positive comments from the Republican presidential candidate about Bitcoin over the weekend.
Crypto markets rose leading into the conference and held strongly into the start of the week. However, the strength did not hold as derisking prior to FOMC on Wednesday and the decision to hold rates steady sparked a dump in the crypto markets despite strength in traditional markets.
While the Nasdaq was up almost 3% on the day and the S&P 500 1.6%, both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) tumbled more than 5%. The markets eventually bounced slightly, pushing ETH into positive territory at 1.29% up from the week prior while BTC held slightly negative at -0.85%.
Liquidations across both long and shorts remain relatively muted this week, with approximately 200M in longs wiped out on Wednesday and Thursday. Funding rates remains largely flat on both BTC and ETH, although ETH has seen its funding rate creep up steadily over the week, perhaps with the anticipation of strong positive inflows into the ETH ETFs.
📌 Trump’s speech at the Bitcoin Conference 2024 promises that the US will become the crypto capital of the world, the creation of a Bitcoin strategic reserve and the removal of SEC Chair, Gary Gensler, among others. - Link
📌 The US Fed announces that it will keep interest rates at 5.25-5.5% during this week’s FOMC. While many felt the meeting was dovish, some felt otherwise. - Link
📌 Other politicians including Republican senator, Cynthia Lummis, and US presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, made promises regarding government acquisition of Bitcoin during the weekend. - Link
Why does it matter?
With the Mt. Gox overhang out of the way, the markets quickly priced in a positive move on the Bitcoin Conference where Donald Trump would be speaking at. While the speech turned out hugely positive for the long term future of Bitcoin, the conference turned out to be a “sell the news” event, quickly retracing a large part of the move into the week. Additionally, despite the positive tailwinds, BTC and ETH both failed to break their local highs, possibly indicating a lack of liquidity in the markets to keep both assets up.
Altcoins held on strong against BTC and ETH this week, with TOTAL3/BTC rising almost 1% this week. No clear sector of altcoins outperformed this week, with sporadic winners across the altcoin market. Some of the top gainers included Aave (AAVE), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Echelon Prime (PRIME).
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Narrative of the Week 📰
Hyperliquid once again takes the narrative, with the highly anticipated launch of the RAGE token sale from Rage Trade, a perpetuals DEX aggregator.
📌 Rage Trade’s token sale completed within 15 mins, raising $6M for the project at a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $30M. - Link
📌Izebel_eth launches a wrapped PURR contract on Ethereum, allowing traders on Ethereum to now purchase the Hyperliquid memecoin without bridging into Hyperliquid. - Link
Why does it matter?
Hyperliquid has grown to become one of the most highly anticipated projects in crypto this cycle, with no VC backing and quickly rising to become one of the top perpetual DEX in the industry.
With the successful launch of the RAGE token, it is plausible that other new projects looking for the same publicity and success might turn to Hyperliquid as a sort of launchpad leading up to their token launch. In doing so, this creates a positive feedback loop to attract future projects to launch on Hyperliquid while helping lesser known projects attain much needed publicity and distribution.
Major Project Updates 🗓️
📌 Gnosis introduces Gnosis AI, designed to bring Web3 and AI together. The first application of this is AI Agents in prediction markets to improve their efficiency and accuracy. - Link
📌 Coinbase L2, Base, launches the Onchain Content Network, a registry of user-submitted projects, games, art, music and more. Through their partners, the Onchain Content Network will help to promote and distribute works submitted, spotlighting builders and creators in the space. - Link
📌 Ethereum restaking layer, EigenLayer, announces upcoming rewards for actively validated services (AVSs) on EigenLayer as well as the ability for AVSs to directly reward stakers and operators. - Link
📌 KakarotzkEVM will be launching on StarkNet in Q4 2024, enabling the support of both the Ethereum Virtual Machine and CairoVM on StarkNet. - Link
📌 SolanaVM L2, Eclipse, is now live on mainnet for builders. Eclipse combines Solana’s high speed with Ethereum’s security and liquidity, while leveraging Celestia’s scalability. - Link
Why does it matter?
With prediction markets, especially PolyMarket, heating up leading into this year’s US Presidential Elections, prediction markets are playing an increasingly large role in the crypto space and beyond. Prediction markets have even been utilized in traditional media to assess the odds involved with events such as the Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden announced his decision to not run for the upcoming elections. In a sense, these markets are being used as a form of “decentralized oracle” on the odds of real-world events.
As such, the efficiency of such markets become increasingly important to keep the accuracy of such predictions high. Gnosis’ AI agents seek to do just that, utilizing AI to effectively source and determine the most probable outcome to a prediction market. Since prediction markets effectively crowdsource the sentiment on the ground, with an increase in ‘rational market participants’, the accuracy of prediction markets are likely to increase with Gnosis’ AI agents.
DeFi Brief 🏦
📌 Dinero (formerly known as Redacted Cartel), partners with Galaxy Digital and Laser Digital to launch ipxETH, to provide accredited investors with access to the highest yielding ETH staking product in a compliant manner. - Link
📌 Elixir introduces deUSD, a new stablecoin backed by stETH and sDAI designed to challenge Ethena’s USDe. DeUSD also captures funding via shorting perpetuals while generating yield via T-Bills in negative funding environments. - Link
📌 Solana DEX aggregator, Jupiter Exchange, launches Jupiter Spot, a unified UI for traders on Solana to manage their limit orders, DCA orders and swaps, while viewing the chart and their trade history. - Link
📌 Compound Finance suffers a governance attack from a COMP whale named “Humpy”, directing 499K COMP tokens to a vault controlled by himself and the “GoldenBoys” group, which is also led by Humpy. Humpy and the Compound Finance team have since reached a truce, with Humpy agreeing to share fees earned to COMP holders. - Link
📌 A vulnerability in a 3rd party software, IBC-hooks, has been exploited on the Terra chain, resulting in the reissuance of several tokens, most notably 60M ASTRO tokens, which have since been sold off by the hacker. - Link
Why does it matter?
Leading up to the approval and launch of the spot ETH ETF, a big question on many investors’ minds was whether the ETF would enable staking for ETH held under the ETF. Currently, the ETH ETFs will not stake the ETH tokens held under their custody. With the introduction of Dinero’s ipxETH, a compliant and high-yielding staked ETH product, institutional clients can now also gain access to the staked ETH yield markets through DeFi.
Elixir’s launch of deUSD threatens the dominance of Ethena’s USDe as the leading synthetic stablecoin in the market at the moment. Building off USDe’s weakness in negative funding rate conditions, deUSD implements T-Bills into its toolbox to continue keeping deUSD high even under negative funding rate conditions, making it a potentially competitive alternative to USDe. However, with Ethena’s first mover advantage, it remains to be seen if Elixir can capture Ethena’s market share.
Meme Coins 🚀
📌 The owner of the late Kabosu, the famous dog behind the Doge meme, announces her new pet, Neiro, spawning multiple memecoins relating to it as well as mass confusion over which one should be adopted as the “true” Neiro memecoin. - Link
📌 Twitter-based memecoin deployer, makenow.meme, goes live, with Nansen founder Alex Svanevik launching the $IQ memecoin through the deployer. - Link
Chart of the Week 📊
Fundraises 💰
📌 Energy-focused DePIN project, Daylight, raises $9M in funding in a round led by a16z, with participation from Framework Ventures, Lattice Fund, Lerer Hippeau and more. - Link
📌 Bitcoin scaling solution, Mezo Network, raises $7.5M in a strategic raise led by Ledger Cathay Capital, with support from Mantle, Ark Stream Capital, GSR and Flow Traders, among others. - Link
📌 NFT infrastructure project, Mintify, raises $3.4M in additional funding from investors including ARCA, Cumberland, Amber Group and over 50 other venture capital firms and angel investors. - Link
📌 AI cloud project, Hyperbolic, raises $7M in a round led by Polychain Capital and Faction, with support from Longhash Ventures, Bankless Ventures and more. - Link
📌 Web3 LinkedIn alternative, Icebreaker, raises $5M in a seed round led by Coinfund, with participation from Anagram, Legion Capital, Accomplice Blockchain and more. - Link
📌 On-chain competition platform, JokeRace, raises $3M in a round led by Maven 11 Capital, with support from RockawayX, Bankless Ventures, ABCDE Labs and Mask Network, among other firms and angels. - Link
Airdrops Abound 🎁
📌 ETH liquid restaking protocol, Swell Network, announces the snapshot and end of their Swell Voyage campaign as the protocol leads into their token generation event (TGE) and airdrop. - Link
📌 Web3 game, Sipher, announces the final leg of Season 1 to claim their final quests before Season 1 ends on 11th August 2024, which will culminate in their token airdrop. - Link
📌 In preparation for the launch of Fluid DEX, whitelisted communities including EtherFi and Lido Finance can now mint a free-to-mint Fluid Pass NFT. There is no announced utility for the NFT yet. - Link
📌 Bridging protocol, DeBridge, announces their upcoming token launch on Jupiter’s LFG launchpad, which likely implies the token airdrop for their Season 1 snapshot as well. - Link
Tweet of the Week 📝
Source: VitalikButerin
Nine years since the birth of Ethereum; how far we’ve come.
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