Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

BTC and ETH experienced a slight dip following the Bybit hack, demonstrating market resilience. The strongest categories were RWA and DeFi, whereas memecoins and AI agents underperformed the most. On March 1st, 11.2 million SOL from the FTX bankruptcy auction will be unlocked, valued at $2.06 billion. The unlocked tokens account for approximately 2.29% of the current circulating supply of SOL. Some of it has already been priced in, and while some may choose to sell after the unlock, SOL's narrative and momentum remain quite strong.

Options Market

Funding rates for both BTC and ETH remained around zero, suggesting no excess demand for long and short. In other words, the bullish sentiment waned in reaction to the sideway moves seen in the past few weeks. Implied volatility jumped following a rising realised volatility caused by the uncertainty on the Bybit hack and quickly reverted into the pre-hack levels as the IV selloff into the weekend resumed. Front-end skew briefly spiked as the downward protection demand rose around the hack concern. Yet it followed the similar pattern as IV to drift back to pre-hack levels. Given the weakness seen in the equity markets and the hack concern, the market stayed rather resilient.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• According to OnchainLens monitoring, a total of 514,723 native ETH and various ETH derivatives were stolen from Bybit.

• Bybit's official statement confirmed that deposits and withdrawals on the platform have fully returned to normal levels, as verified by on-chain data.

• According to an official announcement from BNB Chain, the BNB Smart Chain will undergo the Pascal hard fork upgrade, scheduled for implementation on the testnet on February 25, 2025, with the mainnet upgrade planned for mid-March 2025.

• On Polymarket, the probability of "Trump establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve within his first 100 days in office" has dropped to 10%. On January 20, the day of Trump's inauguration, this probability had briefly surged to 48%.

• Microsoft is preparing for OpenAI's latest model, with GPT-4.5 expected to be released as early as next week. Microsoft also anticipates that GPT-5 could be launched by late May.

• The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved, for the first time, a stablecoin application with interest-bearing features. The stablecoin, named YLDS, is developed by digital asset company Figure Markets. It will be pegged to the U.S. dollar and offer users a 0.5% yield, similar to cash in a savings account.

• Arweave ecosystem storage project ar.io launched both its mainnet and token generation event on Thursday. ar.io describes itself as "the world's first permanent cloud network."

• According to 13F filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), large institutions such as pension funds and hedge funds doubled their holdings of spot Bitcoin ETFs in Q4 2024.

Macro

The major benchmarks declined for the holiday-shortened week: the DJIA lost 2.5%, the S&P 500 lost 1.7%, and the Nasdaq lost 2.5%. Chinese stocks finished the week with solid gains: the Shanghai Composite Index added +0.97%, the CSI 300 +1.00% and the Hang Seng index advanced +3.79%.