Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

Jerome Powell has stated that interest rate cuts will not take place until inflation is better managed. Bitcoin fell to as low as $66,000 and ETH briefly fell to $3,319. The transfer of $2 billion worth of Silk Road Bitcoin assets by the U.S. government has attracted attention amid market pullback. Since their inception, Bitcoin ETFs have brought in an average of $213M per day and currently hold 4.25% of the total circulating supply. 77.5% of Solana transactions are failing because Solana nodes are overwhelmed and bots start spamming txs to the network to maximize the chance that a tx gets processed. 

Options Market

Realised volatility came back to life this week as BTC and ETH broke past the 70k and 3.5k levels respectively. This is seen as a repeat of the leverage flush out that we have seen during this bull run. The funding rate finally came down to a normal and healthy level. The upcoming halving event keeps implied volatility stable and we now see a small vol premium on BTC over ETH. Front-end skew shifted back to favour calls. Although gamma selling becomes less attractive, it still makes sense as the volatility carry remains positive.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• According to HODL15Capital monitoring, the net purchase of Bitcoin spot ETFs (including GBTC) in the U.S. was 7,376 BTC in the past week. Bitcoin spot ETFs have accumulated a net increase of approximately 222,800 BTC since their launch.

• According to DefiLlama data, the total value locked (TVL) of the Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer has surpassed $12.5 billion and is currently at $12.562 billion.

• According to Token Terminal data, the number of active addresses on the TON network has increased to 909,800 in the past 7 days, a MoM growth rate of 39.4%.

• According to official data, Binance's new launchpool project Saga (SAGA) has deposited more than 18.01 million BNB and more than 2.8 billion FDUSD.

• The ERC-404 project Pandora launched Launchpad as the first of three strategic measures to achieve its wide-ranging application vision.

• DeFiLlama data shows that Pendle TVL is close to $4.5 billion, with a 7-day growth rate of 27.71%。
  According to Bloomberg, Pantera Capital's crypto fund, Liquid Token Fund, saw a 66% increase in returns in the first quarter.

Macro

The major indexes closed lower for the week: the DJIA lost -2.3%, the S&P 500 -1.0%, and the NASDAQ -0.8%. There are growing concerns about the time and the magnitude of rate cutting this year. The stock market pulled back from record highs while the labor market remains in good shape.