CMC Market Pulse delivers actionable market insights, giving you all the key narratives and developments you need in under 5 minutes.
Market Overview 📉
Crypto markets climbed up this week, albeit in choppy conditions. The S&P 500 gained 1.61%, as investors reacted somewhat positively to the release of key economic data this week.
Bitcoin (BTC) saw a rise of over 3.42% across the week, while Ethereum (ETH) fared much weaker, closing the week with a slight loss of 0.60% from the week prior.
Daily liquidations as a whole hovered in the $100M range, with a spike last Friday where total liquidations hit almost $300M in value. Funding rates on BTC fell into the low positives while ETH’s funding rates climbed steadily across the week.
📌 Eric Balchunas sheds light on Bitcoin ETF numbers, stating that news of their failure is vastly overstated by traditional media — Link
📌 The SWIFT payments system embarks on the next phase of their experimentation into leveraging digital assets to facilitate payments around the world — Link
Why does it matter?
With a series of economic data releases throughout the week, the crypto market is once again at the mercy of macroeconomic factors, trading in tandem with equities to the downside.
The week saw large moves in the equities market as a result of key economic data such as CPI, PPI and jobless claims released, although the moves largely reversed over time, with the S&P 500 once again trading close to all-time highs.
While initially weakening in the early half of the week, altcoins had a strong showing against BTC this week, with TOTAL3/BTC surging with a 2.3% gain. Among altcoins, selected meme coins outperformed include Neiro on ETH (NEIRO), Simons’ Cat (CAT) and Sundog (SUNDOG).
Other top performers include alt L1, Sui (SUI), on the successful launch of Sui Play 0X1 and the Grayscale SUI Trust, as well as Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (FET), which climbed on rumors of the release of GPT 5.0 in the coming week.
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Narrative of the Week 📰
Ethereum fall under the spotlight again this week, with long-term Ethereum investors debating where ETH’s value should be derived, as the asset continues to underperform other cryptocurrency majors such as BTC and SOL.
📌 ChainLinkGod outlines how neither the “programmable money” thesis nor the “ultrasound money” thesis can hold up and how Ethereum has to find its value story elsewhere — Link
📌 CloutedMind takes the stance that Ethereum as the ultimate data availability layer will eventually be its moat as through becoming a loss leader to compete against all other data availability layers — Link
📌 Ryan Berckmans opts into the narrative of Ethereum as digital oil, a modern and essential ingredient required to scale civilization — Link
Why does it matter?
Year-to-date, ETH is up by only 3.06%, compared to BTC’s gain of 37% and SOL’s price appreciation of 32.7% YTD, further cementing the underperformance of the second-largest digital asset.
This has driven discussions on whether Ethereum deserves its current valuation and its role in the future of crypto and blockchain.
Recent discussions have especially focused around how Ethereum L2s are actually parasitic to the L1, with fees paid to the Ethereum L1 by its L2s having fallen tremendously since the Dencun upgrade, which has drastically reduced fees paid by L2s to the Ethereum L1 for data availability.
Major Project Updates 🗓️
📌 Grayscale announces the launch of the Grayscale Sui Trust. SUI is one of the top performers of the past week, gaining over 23% — Link
SocialFi platform, Friendtech, has renounced control over their smart contracts, a move which has interpreted by many as a soft rugpull of the project — Link
📌 Synthetix releases the first phase of their Optimism-based appchain, Snaxchain, which will be used for Synthetix governance to manage deployments across chains — Link
📌 Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains are now supported on Paypal and Venmo in the US, enabling seamless and user-friendly crypto transfers — Link
📌 Sonic (formerly Fantom), unveil their public testnet, which has achieved a time to finality of 0.76s — Link
📌 EigenLayer introduces their new security model, which reduces slashing risk to stakers as well as improve the security of the protocol through pooled stakes and unique stakes — Link
📌 Data availability layer, Celestia, releases their community roadmap, which plans to scale to 1GB blocks, improve verifiability of data and to reduce friction for rollup developers and end-users — Link
Why does it matter?
Once hailed as one of the most innovative consumer crypto applications, Friendtech is a shell of its former self. At one point, Friendtech was making more revenue than the Ethereum L1.
Although the team has stated that the app will continue to function, with the Friendtech team renouncing control over the project’s smart contracts, the project has since been treated as abandoned by its team.
The FRIEND token fell 40% immediately after the announcement, although it has since mostly recovered. Friend.tech is currently trading at a market cap of $1.48 million. Following this news, many have cast doubts on the viability of the SocialFi sector.
DeFi Brief 🏦
📌 Popular EVM wallet, Rabby, introduces Gas Accounts, a feature enabling users to pay for gas with USDC or USDT on any chain, for any address on the wallet — Link
📌 BitGo collaborates with LayerZero to enable WBTC as an omnichain fungible token (OFT) on the BNB Smart Chain and Avalanche — Link
📌 The DeFiLlama team introduces LlamaFeed, a realtime dashboard integrating data sources across news, tweets, airdrops, on-chain movements and more — Link
📌 Liquid restaking platform, EtherFi, partners up with zero-knowledge rollup, Scroll, as the settlement layer for EtherFi’s card, EtherFi Cash — Link
📌 SVM L2, Eclipse, releases their very own Unified Restaking Token (URT), tETH, a single token enabling rewards from the biggest restaking projects, including EtherFi, Renzo, Swell Network — Link
📌 Stablecoin project, Liquity, unveils plans for Liquity V2, which focuses on directing V2 revenues to on-chain initiatives to maintain sufficient liquidity in the Liquity ecosystem as well as to incentivise ecosystem growth — Link
📌 DEX aggregator, KyberSwap, introduces KyberZap, an API to simplify liquidity provision to concentrated liquidity pools, minimize price impact on swaps and minimize leftover tokens when providing liquidity — Link
📌 Osmosis introduces Polaris, a one-stop Token Portal, enabling users to trade across all chains and networks from their wallet, track their multichain portfolio, acquire gas tokens seamlessly and trade privately, among other features — Link
Why does it matter?
Improving crypto UX has been one of the core issues that many projects are targeting in order to onboard the next generation of crypto users.
With the introduction of Gas Accounts on Rabby, users no longer have to worry about acquiring gas tokens, which has often been a pain point for many new users.
In a similar vein, Osmosis’ Polaris enables greater interoperability between chains, breaking down the barriers and reducing the friction of transacting across ecosystems.
Meme Coins 🚀
📌 Despite the bearish sentiments on meme coins recently, it still remains as one of the strongest performers YTD in the market — Link
📌 Binance lists perpetual contracts for the Neiro on ETH memecoin, sparking a short squeeze and subsequent 216% rally for the token — Link
Fundraises 💰
📌 Solana-based creator platform, Drip Labs, raises $8M in a seed round led by NFX, with support from Coinbase Ventures and Progression Fund — Link
📌 Open source AI platform, PIN AI, raises $10M in a pre-seed funding round with investors including a16z Crypto CSX, Hack VC, Anagram, Symbolic Capital and more — Link
📌 Berachain-based “Vape to Earn” platform, Puffpaw, raises $6M in seed funding, led by Lemniscap, with participation from Spartan Capital, Folius Ventures and Volt Capital, among others — Link
📌 Decentralized lending platform, Ammalgam, raises $2.5M in a funding round led by Faction VC and Framework Ventures, with support from Dewhales Capital, NGC Ventures, Robot Ventures and more — Link
📌 Orange Cap Games, the team behind the Pudgy Penguins trading card game, raises $2M in a pre-seed angel round, with investors from Wizards of the Coast, Dapper Labs, 9gag and more — Link
📌 Tokenized real-world asset protocol, Huma Finance, raises $38M in Series A funding, led by Distributed Global, with other participants including Folius Ventures, Hashkey Capital, Fenbushi and more — Link
Airdrops Abound 🎁
📌 Pudgy Penguins airdrops a 1,000 Days Pengus Club soulbound token to Pudgy Penguin holders who have held their Pudgy Penguin NFT for more than 1,000 days — Link
📌 Synthetic dollar protocol, Ethena, announces the end of Season 2 of their airdrop campaign, which will distribute 5% of the total token supply to eligible users. Season 3 has since begun — Link
📌 Liquid restaking protocol, EtherFi, announces the end of Season 3 of their airdrop campaign, with the airdrop opening for claims on 23rd September. From now till 15th September, users can select the chain they wish to claim their airdrop on — Link
Tweet of the Week 📝
Source: 0xfoobar
The absolute state of Ethereum investors.
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