Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

By surpassing Silver, Bitcoin has now become the second-largest commodity ETF in the United States. The reason behind Grayscale's choice to sell its Bitcoin holdings was due to high fees and investors withdrawing their investments. The annual fee of 1.5% charged for GBTC, resulted in investors searching for more affordable options. Furthermore, many investors had initially purchased GBTC at a substantial discount of up to 40%, which has now diminished to zero. Consequently, many investors were leaving GBTC and requesting redemptions of their shares, forcing Grayscale to sell BTC holdings to fulfill these demands. The process could take weeks and may lead to fluctuations in the Bitcoin market.

Options Market

Both BTC and ETH were trading in a relatively tight range in the past week. Near-term IV naturally slided to sub-50 points to echo this RV drop. ETH volatility remains higher than BTC’s in the aftermath, although the volatility spread between ETH and BTC narrowed down. Skew shifted towards neutrality, suggesting the market expects both assets to continue trading sideways. Open interest on ETH continues to rise while that on BTC keeps falling to pre-ETF level.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• The U.S SEC has postponed the resolution date for Fidelity’s proposed Ethereum spot ETF to March 5.
• Arbitrum has initiated a long-term incentive pilot program, planning to distribute 25 to 45 million ARB tokens to protocols on the Arbitrum network.
• Solana Mobile has commenced the pre-sale of the second-generation Saga smartphone, with an initial deposit of $450.
• The Ethereum Goerli testnet has successfully completed the Dencun upgrade.
• Jupiter Co-founder has announced a JUP token airdrop scheduled for January 31.
• HashKey Group has successfully completed its Series A funding round, raising nearly $100 million.
• Tether’s market share grew by 21% in 2023, constituting two-thirds of the stablecoin supply.
• OpenSea is in the process of developing an upgrade for its platform called OpenSea 2.0.
• The Curve team proposes offering approximately 6.04 million veCRV to compensate for the losses incurred by the JPEG’d DAO due to a hack in July.
• Blast has launched its testnet.

Macro

The major benchmarks ended higher for the holiday-shortened week, with the Nasdaq outperforming the rest: the DJIA added +0.7%, the S&P 500 +1.2%, and the NASDAQ +2.3%. The inflation data so far in 2024 has been mixed, and expectations for rate cuts over 2024 fell a lot more than the week before.