Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

BTC remains range-bound between $35k-$38k, with altcoins outperforming BTC last week as shown by declining BTC dominance, indicating continued risk appetite for alt coins in the broader crypto market. Binance CEO CZ stepped down and Binance agreed to pay a $4bn fine to the US, resulting in a moderate drop (-5%) in BNB. Despite this, the overall market is relieved with the uncertainty gone and no catastrophic scenario in sight. The OpenAI drama boosted AI-related coins, with $AKT leading the way, surging 61.1% from $1.02 to $1.65 on Nov 23.

Options Market

The broad market sentiment remained optimistic on the ETF narrative. The settlement of the SEC and Binance’s saga seemed to pave the way for the imminent ETF approval although the market reaction was initially perplexing. Retracements that took place in the past weeks were well absorbed and supported by the market. Short-term IVs decreased for both BTC and ETH as RV stablised. Despite ETH’s marginally higher realized volatility, the ETH/BTC vol spread narrowed down further to a slight BTC volatility premium.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• The U.S. Department of Justice settled with Binance, fining it over $4 billion, and CZ  resigned.
• The SEC filed a new lawsuit against Kraken for allegedly operating an online trading platform without registration.
• More than 100 million US dollars were stolen from HTX and HECO BRIDGE, and HTX will fully compensate users for their losses in this event.
• According to DeBank data, Layer 2 network Blast TVL exceeded $500 million.
• The Cosmos Hub community has voted to pass the "ATOM Production Reduction: Set the Maximum Inflation Rate to 10%" proposal.
• According to Spot On Chain, KyberSwap was hacked on multiple chains including Arbitrum, Optimism, Ethereum, Polygon and Base, with a value of approximately $48.3 million.
• TreasureDAO co-founder Karel Vuong revealed that TreasureDAO is building a game chain and plans to use $MAGIC as the Gas token, which may be based on the Arbitrum chain or the Cosmos chain.
• According to The Block data, Grayscale GBTC’s negative premium rate narrowed to 9.77% last week, falling below 10% for the first time since July 2021.
• According to Decrypt, NFT gaming company Matr1x announced the completion of a $10 million Series A-2 round of financing, led by Folius Ventures, co-led by SevenX, and participated by ABCDE Capital, Jambo, Initiate Capital, and Find Satoshi Lab.
• According to VentureBeat, distributed computing platform Expanso completed a $7.5 million seed round of financing, led by General Catalyst and Hetz Ventures.

Macro

The major indexes built on gains over a holiday-shortened week: the DJIA added +1.3%, the S&P 500 added +1.0%, and the NASDAQ +0.9%. Slowing growth signals and inflation uncertainty contributed to a 16 billion USD auction of 20-year U.S. Treasury bonds last Monday, while the rest of the yield market remained quiet.