CMC Market Pulse delivers actionable market insights, giving you all the key narratives and developments you need in under 5 minutes.
Market Overview 📉
This week started off strong, with markets coming off a strong Friday into a bullish weekend. The week saw some mild volatility resulting from tariff-related and macroeconomic news, but nevertheless, markets ended the week higher, with market participants divided on the short term market direction. Total crypto market cap climbed by 0.735% from $2.718T to $2.738T as markets continued to climb despite macroeconomic concerns.
Bitcoin (BTC) closed the week 6.60% up, while Ethereum (ETH), lagged behind, closing the week at only 3.75% up from the week prior.
The week’s liquidation data saw relatively little action due to the lowered volatility from the weeks prior, with total liquidations daily topping out at just over $200M. As expected, funding rates continued to fall on lowered risk appetites, with funding rates on most cryptocurrency majors falling into the low negative range.
📌 Michael Saylor’s Strategy acquires 3,459 BTC for $285.8M at an average price of $82,618 per Bitcoin, bringing their total holdings to 531,644 BTC. - Link
📌 Healthcare technology company, Semler Scientific, files for a registration statement with the SEC to offer up to $500M in securities, for general corporate purposes, including the purchase of Bitcoin as part of their Bitcoin treasury strategy. - Link
📌 The Panama City Council has become the first government public institution to accept crypto payments, starting with BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC. - Link
Why does it matter?
Despite the negative sentiment in the market, the market continues to show mild strength, pushing higher amidst uncertainty surrounding the global trade situation. Interestingly, the crypto markets fared much better than the traditional markets this week. The S&P 500 only saw a small gain of 0.47% over the week, while the Nasdaq fell instead, closing at 0.34% down instead. Some have speculated this to be a decoupling between the asset classes, although historically, such trends often failed to sustain over a prolonged bearish period.
Unsurprisingly, the continued uncertainty only resulted in the continuation of the increase in Bitcoin dominance while altcoins bled out. Bitcoin dominance ended the week up a massive 1.22% to close the week at 64.03%.
Despite the strength in Bitcoin and broader market uncertainty, several altcoins continue to outperform against the broader market. This included L1 tokens Solana (SOL) and Hyperliquid (HYPE) and memecoins such as POPCAT(POPCAT), Mog Coin (MOG) and Brett (BRETT). Other outperformers included DeepBook (DEEP), Raydium (RAY) and Metaplex (MPLX).View CMC Gainers & Losers board
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Narrative of the Week 📰
The rapid collapse of RWA L1, Mantra (OM), sheds light on the low liquidity conditions in the market and the state of altcoins.
📌 RWA L1, Mantra, sees a 93% drop as large OM investors are allegedly liquidated on a centralized exchange, while rumors swirl around the team selling their allocations or large wallets being hacked. - Link
📌 Mantra team confirms on an interview with YouTuber, CoffeeZilla, that they tokens OTC in 2024 and used the proceeds to push the price up through 2024. - Link
📌 Movement Labs founder, Rushi Manache, goes on ‘temporary leave’ as the project commences internal investigations into irregular market maker behavior from the prior month. - Link
Why does it matter?
The sell-off on Mantra highlighted the lack of liquidity in the altcoin market, with traders finding it hard to tell if price movements are organically driven or simply manipulated by market makers and the protocol’s team themselves. The fall of Mantra also resulted in many other low float, recent token launches being heavily shorted, with the most prominent being Story Protocol (IP), which saw a 25% intraday dip.
Major Project Updates 🗓️
📌 A temporary global AWS outage takes out a large number of crypto applications, including Binance, Rabby Wallet, Kucoin, dYdX, 1inch and more. - Link
📌 Ethereum L2, ZkSync, uncovers a compromise of their Admin account, resulting in the loss of $5M worth in ZK tokens, which were unclaimed from their initial airdrop. The funds on-chain are unaffected. - Link
📌 Interwoven rollup network, Initia, announces their upcoming mainnet date for 24th April. - Link
📌 Kaito introduces a new upgrade to Kaito Connect, repurposing Yaps and staked KAITO from votes to signals of alignment with specific projects. Assigning Yaps boosts mindshare accumulation, while assigning sKAITO enables token reward sharing from upcoming capital launchpads. - Link
📌 The Cosmos introduces Cosmos Eureka, a bridging service enabling seamless and fast transfers of BTC liquid staking tokens and other EVMs assets from Ethereum through the Cosmos ecosystem. - Link
📌 High-performance ZK-computing system, RISCZero introduces R0VM 2.0, which seeks to lower proving costs by more than 5x and proving time to less than 12s by July, among other improvements. - Link
Why does it matter?
The recent AWS outage which took out a significant number of crypto applications continues to highlight the centralization that is present in the crypto space. Despite its original ethos of decentralization, the crypto space is largely dependent on several core infrastructure elements on which the majority of Web 2.0 companies are built on as well. The outage then begets the question, can a DEX call itself decentralized if it can be taken offline by AWS with the flick of a switch?
DeFi Brief 🏦
📌 Synthetic stablecoin issuer, Ethena Labs, publishes their proof of reserves for the USDe stablecoin. Their proof of reserves is attested by Harris & Trotter LLP, Chaos Labs, LlamaRisk and Chainlink. - Link
📌 Credit card giant, Visa, joins the the Global Dollar Network (USDG), the stablecoin consortium led by Paxos, with involvement from Kraken, Robinhood and Galaxy Digital. - Link
📌 On-chain lending protocol, Morpho Blue, was exploited for $2.6M due to a frontend bug. The attack was frontran by white-hat hacker CoffeeBabe, and funds remain secure. The bug has since been fixed. - Link
📌 Reinsurance-based yield platform, Re, introduces yields of up to 23% APY on USDe and sUSDe deposits on their platform, where user deposits are used to underwrite reinsurance contracts. - Link
📌 Solana restaking platform, Solayer, kicks off their Emerald Reward Program, rewarding users of their Visa-supported debit card with LAYER tokens. - Link
📌 Optimism introduces SuperStacks, a points program to reward users for providing liquidity using interoperable assets on the Superchain. XP will be awarded based on liquidity provided, duration provided and more. - Link
📌 EVM-based money market protocol, Euler Finance, expands to Optimism, accepting a $500K OP token grant from Optimism to fund the expansion. - Link
📌 Yield tokenization marketplace, Pendle, updates their fee structure to increase claim fees on yield tokens, which are paid out to vePENDLE holders. Yield to vePENDLE holders will also be paid out in stablecoins moving forward. - Link
Why does it matter?
Stablecoins continue to form the main narrative for crypto in general, with stablecoin teams continuing to expand their reach. Ethena’s move to establish their proof of reserves show their commitment to be taken seriously as a competitor to the incumbents, while the Global Dollar Network (USDG) continues to highlight the interest from traditional finance entities in acquiring exposure to the ever-growing stablecoin market and its potential.
Meme Coins 🚀
📌 Base launches a memecoin, “Base is for everyone”, via Zora. The token suffered a 95% dump within an hour of its launch due to insider dumping, but seems to have largely recovered several hours later. - Link
📌 Raydium releases LaunchLab, their all-in-one launchpad, allowing token launches to migrate straight to Raydium’s AMM, competing directly with memecoin launchpad, pump.fun. - Link
Fundraises 💰
📌 Bitcoin-focused life insurance company, Meanwhile, raises $40M in a Series A funding round led by Framework Ventures and Fulgur Ventures, with support from Bitcoin pioneer, Wences Casares. - Link
📌 Blockchain-based communications protocol, Towns Protocol, raises $10M in a Series B funding round led by a16z crypto, with support from Coinbase Ventures and Benchmark. - Link
📌 USDT issuer, Tether, announces a strategic investment in Fizen, a company focusing on self-custody solutions and digital payments, to further support stablecoin adoption. - Link
📌 Stablecoin protocol, Resolv Labs, raises $10M in a seed funding round led by Maven11 Capital and cyber Fund, with other investors including Coinbase Ventures, Arrington Capital and more. - Link
📌 Crypto-native yield platform, Neutral Labs, raises $5M in a seed funding round led by STIX and Accomplice, with support from Amber Group, Nascent, Figment Capital and more. - Link
📌 Crypto investment automation platform, Glider, raises $4M in a strategic funding round led by a16z crypto, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap, GSR and Selini Capital, among others. - Link
Airdrops Abound 🎁
📌 All vested tokens from the deBridge airdrop in October 2024 are now fully vested and can be claimed. The top 10% of deBridge users had half of their airdrop vested for six months from the initial claim. - Link
📌 Solana-based perpetuals DEX, Flash Trade, opens claims for their FAF token airdrop. Claimants can stake their tokens for utility including fee discounts and referral rebates. - Link
📌 Multi-chain restaking platform, KernelDAO, releases the KERNEL token airdrop to eligible addresses, distributing 10% of the total token supply to their early supporters. - Link
Tweet of the Week 📝
Source: @sherlock_hodles
Base is for everyone…or is it?
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