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CMC Market Pulse: Stablecoins, The Next Big Boom?
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Market Overview 📉
The week started off strong as crypto markets quietly climbed through the weekend. The move followed through into Monday, before settling down to consolidate further over the week. Total crypto market cap surged 3.07% from $2.950T to $2.862T as markets show some signs of life again.
Bitcoin (BTC) closed the week 3.32% higher, while Ethereum (ETH) lagged behind, ending the week at only 0.72% higher from the week before.
Daily liquidations stayed largely flat, with total liquidations barely passing $250M per day. Funding rates continue to remain mostly flat, with most chopping around in the low positive to low negative range. Several altcoins still maintain negative funding rates, indicating the market’s lack of appetite for risk at this point.
📌 Michael Saylor’s Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) has acquired 6,911 BTC for a total of $583M at an average price of $84,529, bringing their total balance to 506,137 BTC. - Link
📌 Gamestop updates its investment policy to include Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset in a unanimous board decision. - Link
📌 Fidelity Investments officially files their 19b-4 for their Solana spot ETF with the SEC. - Link
Why does it matter?
The week’s moves were largely led by a strong spot bid in Bitcoin, led by none other than Saylor and Strategy, with their new found capital from their recent preferred stock offerings. This move was assisted by a strong bounce in traditional equities from the week before, although the strength in the markets began to falter closer to the end of the week. Nevertheless, the S&P 500 closed the week up 1.43% while the Nasdaq closed 1.63% higher.
Despite several strong altcoin performers this week, Bitcoin dominance continued to climb this week. Bitcoin dominance rose over 0.66% this week to 61.79%, as several large cap altcoins falter into the week after their initial moves up.
With Bitcoin showing strength, a range of altcoins outperformed this week including memecoins like Fartcoin (FARTCOIN), and SPX6900 (SPX), and DeFi tokens such as Curve Finance (CRV), and Convex Finance (CVX) Other notable altcoins include ZetaChain (ZETA), Berachain (BERA) and Safe (SAFE).View CMC Gainers & Losers board
Narrative of the Week 📰
Stablecoins creep up in mindshare as stablecoin circulating supply surges this week, a figure that has been quietly growing without much attention.
📌 Stablecoin circulating supply grows by $1B in a single day, having risen over $7B in the past month. - Link
📌 Trump’s World Liberty Financial introduces USD1, a 1:1 redeemable stablecoin backed by short-term US treasuries and cash equivalents. The stablecoin will be issued on Ethereum and the Binance Smart Chain. - Link
📌 Wyoming state partners with LayerZero for the development of WYST, the Wyoming State issued stablecoin, with deployments on seven testnets including Ethereum, Solana and Base. - Link
📌 DeFiIgnas highlights potential investment opportunities in the form of DeFi tokens and cross-chain infrastructure project tokens. - Link
Why does it matter?
Stablecoin growth is on the rise, having seen stablecoin circulating supply increase by more than 15% since the start of this year. This is further boosted by the support of the current administration’s focus on stablecoins as a method to strengthen the US dollar. However, for the average retail investor, attractive opportunities in this sector remain few and far between, with only a handful of tokens available while the rest are currently still private companies.
Major Project Updates 🗓️
📌 Crypto.com partners with the Trump Media and Technology Group for the offering of ETFs and ETPs focusing on a “Made in America” approach, including digital assets such as BTC and CRO. - Link
📌 Real-time blockchain, MegaETH opens up their public testnet, after an initial delay from their developer testnet launch earlier in the month. - Link
📌 Centralized exchange, Coinbase, is in “advanced talks” to acquire leading crypto options platform, Deribit. The current expected valuation is approximately $4-5B. - Link
📌 The Movement Network foundation announces that they have seized $38M from a rogue market maker, after an investigation with Binance. The seized funds will be channeled to buybacks of the MOVE token for long-term strategic use. - Link
📌 Popular predictions market platform, PolyMarket, expands to Solana. In the same week, they encountered a governance attack in which a UMA token whale misused their voting power to manipulate the oracle to settle a decision in their favor. - Link
📌 Hyperliquid has officially linked HyperCore and HyperEVM, enabling spot assets that were originally deployed on HyperCore to be bridged over the HyperEVM seamlessly. - Link
📌 Arbitrum DAO member, Nathan van der Heyden, puts up a governance proposal considering the clawback of unused ARB tokens allocated to their Gaming Catalyst Program. - Link
Why does it matter?
The partnership between Crypto.com and the Trump Media and Technology Group has drawn skepticism from critics who questioned choosing Crypto.com over other more established US-based exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken or Gemini. Others also pointed out the recent controversial CRO proposal to reissue 70B CRO tokens which were burnt previously in 2021. Despite 77% of their validators voting against it, the vote still went through as Crypto.com held the majority stake of circulating CRO tokens.
DeFi Brief 🏦
📌 Hyperliquid is once again attacked in a self-liquidation attack, passing a large JELLY short position to the HyperLiquidity Provider (HLP) Vault. The saga ends with Hyperliquid delisting JELLY and force-closing the short position the attacker’s long position’s profits to reverse the losses borne by the HLP vault. - Link
📌 Perpetuals DEX, dYdX announces its first buyback program, which allocates 25% of all net protocol fees to buying back DYDX tokens from the open market. - Link
📌 MIM stablecoin issuer, Spell, sees the exploit of its gmCauldron smart contracts, resulting in a loss of 6,262 ETH ($13M). The team is offering a 20% bug bounty to the hacker, who has not responded. - Link
📌 Kraken launched kBTC, a 1:1 backed Bitcoin token on Ink, Kraken’s ETH L2 chain. - Link
📌 Mantle introduces Mantle Bank, designed to connect fiat and crypto using a DeFi-first approach. Mantle Bank will provide for financial services on-chain including, lending, payments and wealth management.- Link
📌 US-based asset manager, Fidelity, files for an on-chain money-market fund on Ethereum, which is expected to go live on 30th May, assuming regulatory approval. - Link
📌 World Network (formerly Worldcoin) is reportedly in talks with Visa to facilitate stablecoin payments directly from the World Wallet. - Link
Why does it matter?
The Hyperliquid attack is the third attack of this kind this month, showcasing once again the flaw in Hyperliquid’s design, this time with a much bigger potential loss at stake. The decision by the team to force close the positions at $0.0095, which was way below the market price of ~$0.05, raised questions on the ethics surrounding the decision, especially that of Hyperliquid’s decentralization. However, many also defended the decision, stating that this was a necessary move to save the project, with some comparing this to the ETH DAO hack rollback incident in 2016. Furthermore, the action taken by the team has shown the project’s stance on similar attacks in the future, which is likely to deter similar attacks.
Meme Coins 🚀
📌 Memecoin launchpad, pump.fun, launches PumpSwap, their own native DEX. Tokens that graduate from pump.fun will now automatically migrate to PumpSwap instead of Raydium. - Link
Fundraises 💰
📌 Crypto-based credit card platform, Rain, raises $24.5M in a funding round led by Norwest, with support from Galaxy, CompoSecure, Lightspeed, Coinbase Ventures and more. - Link
📌 Memecoin voting platform, Coresky, raises $15M in a Series A funding round led by Tido Capital, with other investors including WAGMI Ventures, Copilot Venture Studio, Parallel Ventures and more. - Link
📌 Verifiable and decentralized oracle network, Chronicle Protocol, raises $12M in a seed funding round, led by Strobe Fund, with participation from Galaxy, Brevan Howard Digital, Fenbushi, Gnosis and more. - Link
📌 Solana liquid restaking platform, Fragmetric, raises $5M in their latest strategic round led by RockawayX, with other investors including Robot Ventures, Amber Group, Hypersphere and BitGo. - Link
📌 Web3 game development studio, Tarta Labs, raises $4.5M in a funding round led by BitKraft, with support from HashKey Group, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Spartan Group and more. - Link
📌 Immutable-based game, Immortal Rising 2, raises $3M in a funding round, with investors including Spartan Group, Immutable, Planetarium and more. - Link
Airdrops Abound 🎁
📌 Chain abstraction layer, Particle Network, opens claims for the PARTI token airdrop, which distributes 9% of their total token supply to early users of their trading platform, UniversalX. - Link
📌 Restaking protocol, KernelDAO, unveils their Season 1 airdrop checker. The token generation event (TGE) and airdrop will occur in April. - Link📌 ApePro opens claims for the JUP airdrop to eligible users on their platform. Users must have traded at least $1,000 in volume as of the snapshot on 14 January 2025. - Link
Tweet of the Week 📝
Source: @boldleonidas
Studio Ghibli x CT. Now that’s a crossover no one saw coming this week.
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