Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

The current market expectations are for the Fed Funds Rate to be paused on December 13, and then cut by 25 basis points to a range of 5.00-5.25% by May 1, 2024. Global X's spot bitcoin ETF application decision has been delayed by the SEC. In just 15 days, the Onchain Derivatives market has exceeded $35 billion USD in volume, surpassing the total volumes traded in September. NFT Volume has recently rocketed to the highest levels seen in months. Despite the recent increases in the price of crypto, retail interest remains low with search volumes remaining similar to 2019 levels.

Options Market

Both BTC and ETH had some retracements this week but seemed to be well supported. The emerging narrative of a possible ETH spot ETF ran out of steam to push the spot to break the pivot resistance of 2.1k. ETH/BTC ratio cooled off from last week’s rally. RVs remained relatively elevated - 42 points for BTC’s 7-day RV and 51.5 points for ETH. Volatility spread between BTC and ETH stayed rather flattish with ETH’s trading at a marginal premium. Skew shifted a bit to puts yet still favoured calls.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• According to The Block, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has postponed approval of the “Hashdex Nasdaq Ethereum ETF” and will make the decision before January 1, 2024.
• After the price of Yearn Finance (YFI) plunged 40% on November 18, dYdX stated that approximately $9 million from the dYdX v3 insurance fund was used to fill the gap in the YFI liquidation, dYdX CEO announced it was a targeted attack.
• Dune data shows that the single-day trading volume of the OKX Web3 wallet Ordinals market exceeded 23 million USDT, setting another record high.
• Crypto quantification company Kronos Research suffered unauthorized access to some of its API keys and lost 13,007 ETH in the attack, worth approximately $25 million.
• The decentralized oracle Pyth Network announced that the retroactive airdrop will be available for redemption at 22:00 GMT+8 on November 20, users can check the airdrop qualifications on the web page.
• Jupiter Exchange, the Solana ecosystem transaction aggregator, will conduct a first-round airdrop of 1 billion JUP to 955,000 eligible wallets next week.
• According to Cointelegraph, Infura, a crypto infrastructure company owned by Consensys, is working with Microsoft, Tencent and 16 other technology companies to launch a decentralized infrastructure network (DIN) to make the Infura network more decentralized and increase censorship resistance

Macro

The major benchmarks built on its strong gains for a third consecutive week: the DJIA added +1.9%, the S&P 500 added +2.2%, and the NASDAQ +2.4%. Market was inspired by the cooling inflation signals, with core CPI falling to its lowest reading in two years. The long-term yield benchmark 10-year note hit a two-month low of 4.4% on Friday.