Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

Bitcoin experienced a surge in value, surpassing $38K and almost reaching $45K, which had an impact on altcoins as investors diverted their liquidity towards BTC. The market is currently at a crucial turning point due to fluctuations in BTC dominance caused by investors' anticipation of a BTC ETF. The primary attention of the market was on ordinals, especially $ORDI, which tripled its market cap within one week. Solana's recent upsurge has sparked users' interest in its ecosystem, particularly towards Solana-based ventures such as Jito and token airdrops. This has resulted in a concentration of wealth within the on-chain network, similar to the UNI airdrop in 2020.

Options Market

The strong and continuous upward trend with minimal retracements suggests strong market confidence in the likelihood of a BTC ETF launching early next year. IV rose alongside spot prices, particularly as key resistance levels were broken, fueling concerns about more volatile movements driven by a surge in FOMO. Volatility carry remained positive for both BTC and ETH, suggesting an orderly market trend. The skew between BT and ETH aligned once more, as BTC’s call skew decreased and Ethereum’s recovered which echoed ETH/BTC ratio’s uptrend this week.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• Pudgy Penguins is set to launch Pudgy World Alpha in Q1 2024, which will serve as an interactive digital gaming venue for Pudgy Penguins NFT holders, toy owners, and newcomers. It will be supported by zkSync.
• On December 8th, according to official sources, the Kava 15 mainnet has successfully launched, and starting from January 1st, 2024, at 8:00 AM Beijing time, the inflation rate of the KAVA token will be permanently reduced to zero.
• LayerZero Labs explicitly stated on their social media platform that the protocol has a native token. The team is committed to ensuring the proper distribution of the token and expects to complete it in the first half of 2024.
• Bitcoin collateralization protocol Babylon has completed a $18 million financing round, led by Polychain Capital and Hack VC, with participation from Framework Ventures, ABCDE Capital, IOSG Ventures, Polygon Ventures, and OKX Ventures.
• According to Ark Invest Daily, Cathie Wood's ARK Invest sold 237,572 shares of Coinbase stock, amounting to approximately $33 million, on December 5th. On December 6th, they sold 180,422 shares of Coinbase stock, amounting to approximately $24.29 million, through three funds.
• Cryptocurrency data platform Shadow announced the completion of a $9 million seed funding round, with Paradigm leading the investment and participation from Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap, and Flashbots, among others.
• EVM-compatible chain Evmos Core team has proposed a new token burning mechanism and released a related draft, suggesting the burning of 132.3 million EVMOS tokens from the incentive pool account.
• The Fantom Foundation has announced the launch of the Sonic Labs startup accelerator program, aimed at fostering innovation within Fantom's new Sonic technology stack and providing resources and support for the next generation of web3 entrepreneurs.
• According to the latest data from Dune, the Bitcoin NFT protocol Ordinals has generated cumulative fee revenue of over 3,464 BTC, equivalent to approximately $152,663,728.

Macro

The major indexes closed modestly higher for the week: the DJIA ended flat, the S&P 500 added +0.2%, and the NASDAQ +0.7%. Consumers grow more optimistic as the labor market is gently cooling: The unemployment rate fell back to 3.7% from 3.9% in October. The 10-year U.S. Treasury note hit an intraday  low of 4.10% on Thursday.