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 kicked off the week strong, with a push upwards over the weekend, mainly driven by perpetuals. However, Monday quickly saw a reversal of the move, ending the week with the Total Crypto Market Cap up 1.01% this week, currently sitting at $2.438T.
Bitcoin (BTC) saw a small gain of 0.43% across the week, while Ethereum (ETH) fared much weaker, closing the week down 3.62%.
Daily liquidations skewed towards the long side, with long liquidations peaking at $203M on Wednesday. Funding rates on BTC and ETH climbed steadily across the week, with BTC reaching 12.69% while ETH’s funding rate hit 9.60%.
📌 Billionaire asset manager, Paul Tudor Jones, announces that he is “long Gold” and “long Bitcoin”, citing an increasingly inflationary environment. - Link
📌 Denmark seeks to implement a capital gains tax on cryptocurrencies, with a bill expected in January. The move comes shortly after a similar move in Italy. - Link
📌 VanEck launches staking for their Solana ETP product, VSOL, allowing SOL tokens within the product to be staked, with rewards reinvested and reflected in the NAV daily. - Link
Why does it matter?
Despite the positive move the week prior, the markets still struggle to show significant strength, with BTC unable to break through the range it has been trading in. The weakness likely originates from the traditional equities, which has seen the S&P 500 and Nasdaq lose almost 1.5% at their lowest this week. The week’s jobless claims figure came in at 227K, which is lower than the consensus forecast of 245K and lower than the week prior at 242K.
The week initially saw altcoins rally against BTC, however, BTC once again reclaimed dominance leading into the end of the week as markets softened. Despite the slight rise in BTC dominance across the week, TOTAL3 still rose almost 1.8% in the week against BTC. This move was largely due to significant ETH weakness, as ETH/BTC hit a new low for the year, and its lowest since April 2021.
Notable outperformers among altcoins continue to center on memecoins with Goatse Maximus (GOAT) taking center stage with a whopping 173% over the week. Other tokens that did well include Apecoin (APE), driven by the launch of ApeChain, and Solana ecosystem tokens in general, including Raydium (RAY), Jupiter (JUP) and Helium (HNT).
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Narrative of the Week 📰
The meteoric rise of the Goatse Maximus (GOAT) memecoin has catalyzed a new wave of AI-powered memecoins especially on Solana, single-handedly forming a brand new meta for the markets.
📌 The AI-powered X account, Truth Terminal, makes a typo in a tweet, with many questioning the legitimacy of the bot, citing that AIs do not make spelling errors, although its creator has emerged to debunk the claim. - Link
📌 Truth Terminal tweets directly at Brian Armstrong about his dog, Russell, and its breed, leading many to once again question if the account is run by a human as the reply sounds too human-like. - Link
📌 a16z’s Marc Andreesen goes on a 40-minute video to discuss Truth Terminal, the GOAT token, and the intersection of AI and Crypto. - Link
📌 The GOAT token sees multiple perpetual listings from the likes of OKX, Bybit, Hyperliquid, and Binance - Link
Why does it matter?
With AI being a hot narrative for the cycle, it is no surprise that the AI memecoin meta has been extremely well-received by the crypto community, with the GOAT token quickly rising to a valuation of over 940M in just two weeks. Several forks and copycat projects have also quickly launched, capitalizing on the wave. With GOAT making it onto several top tier centralized exchanges (CEX) on perpetuals, this also marks the first listing of a coin launched via pump.fun on a Tier-1 CEX.
Major Project Updates 🗓️
📌 Fintech giant, Stripe, acquires stablecoin payments platform, Bridge, for $1.1B, in a move to increase stablecoin adoption and utility globally. - Link
📌 Proof of humanity layer, Worldcoin, rebrands to World alongside the launch of the World Chain, an L2 built on the OP stack. - Link
📌 The ApeCoin team launches ApeChain, enabling users to bridge their ETH and APE tokens onto the chain to begin earning native yield. - Link
📌 Dymension introduces Initial RollApp Offerings (IROs), allowing any user to deploy a token and evolve it into a blockchain seamlessly. Funds raised from the IRO can be then used to seed liquidity for the token on Dymension’s DEX. - Link
📌 Centralized exchange, Kraken, unveil their upcoming L2 blockchain, Ink, designed to connect and power an integrated DeFi ecosystem. - Link
Why does it matter?
Stablecoins and payments have always provided one of the biggest angles for mainstream adoption of blockchain usage. Stripe’s acquisition of stablecoin payments platform, Bridge, signifies growing interest in integrating crypto with traditional payment rails to onboard the next billion users into crypto. Additionally, this further cements Stripe’s positive stance towards crypto integration, with this acquisition being their largest to date.
DeFi Brief 🏦
📌 Sky (formerly MakerDAO) is considering a rollback of their rebranding, after confusion over the new tokens and their purpose in the ecosystem, with many users preferring the old MakerDAO brand. - Link
📌 Uniswap introduces permissionless bridging across its nine supported chains. The latest release by the team is powered by Across Protocol. - Link
📌 Orderbook liquidity layer, Elixir, announces their upcoming mainnet launch for 31 October 2024, whereby the network will undergo testing before its public launch and token launch. - Link
📌 On-chain full-stack trading platform, Azura, is now live, enabling users to trade any asset across major EVM chains and Solana. - Link
📌 Omni-chain stablecoin protocol, Tapioca DAO, suffered a social engineering attack, leading to the compromise of the TAP token vesting and USDO stablecoin contracts, resulting in losses of 591 ETH and 2.8M USDC. - Link
📌 Thunderhead Labs introduces stHYPE, the liquid staking token for HYPE, the upcoming native token for the Hyperliquid L1, HyperEVM. StHYPE enables stakers to earn protocol rewards and while staying composable within the Hyperliquid ecosystem. - Link
Why does it matter?
The MakerDAO rebrand to Sky was a huge step for the protocol, with MakerDAO and DAI having become household names in the DeFi scene after years of operation. Although the rebrand brought certain upgrades to DAI stablecoin, including native yields, the new tokens and branding created confusion for many users. Additionally, the ability to freeze the new stablecoin, USDS, was not a welcome change for users who valued decentralization and censorship resistance.
Meme Coins 🚀
📌 Memecoin launcher, pump.fun, launches pump advanced, a zero-fee trading terminal with essential token stats, social activity and more, optimized just for memecoin traders - Link
📌 Solana infrastructure project, gm.ai, release PaperHands, a tool for traders to find out how much they “paperhanded”, or how much they would’ve made if they held onto some of the tokens they once held. - Link
Fundraises 💰
📌 Bitcoin Layer-2 chain, B² Network, closed a new fundraising round, with participation from Spartan Group, HashKey Capital, Animoca Ventures and more. - Link
📌 DAO treasury management service, Karpatkey, raises $7M in a Seed Round, with investors including Wintermute and AppWorks Ventures, alongside angels ConsenSys’ Joe Lubin, Lido’s Konstantin Lomashuk and more. - Link
📌 Payments infrastructure platform, Borderless.xyz, raises $3M in a pre-seed funding round led by Amity Ventures, with nine other angel investors including Fireblocks’ Michael Shaulov. - Link
📌 Arbitrum-based perpetual and derivatives trading platform, Variational, raises $10.3M in seed funding led by Bain Capital Crypto and Peak VX Partners, with support from Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly and more. - Link
📌 Omni-chain interfacing layer, Azura, raises $6.9M in a round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Volt Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Alliance DAO and several angel investors. - Link
📌 Metaverse mobile gaming platform, Party Icons, raises $9M in a private round led by BITKRAFT Ventures, with support from investors including Mantle, Zentry, Yield Guild Games and more. - Link
Airdrops Abound 🎁
📌 Zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) chain, Scroll, releases allocations and opens claims for the SCR token airdrop, distributing 4% of the token supply to more than 500K wallets. - Link
📌 AI data layer, Grass, releases the allocation checker for their upcoming GRASS token airdrop, which distributes 9% of the token supply to Grass Points holders, 0.5% to GigaBuds NFT holders and 0.5% to users who installed their Desktop Node or Saga Application. - Link
📌 Cofounder of memecoin launcher, pump.fun, Sapijiju, confirms a future airdrop for users of the pump.fun platform. - Link
📌 Liquidity layer, Elixir, announces their upcoming token, ELX, which will be launched after a period of network stability testing following Phase 1 of the Elixir mainnet launch at the end of this month. - Link
Tweet of the Week 📝
Source: truth_terminal
Sometimes, the memes just write themselves.
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