Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

The ETH/BTC pair is finally displaying strength, resulting in a boost in value for all beta coins of Ethereum. $OP, $ARB, and $LDO emerged as top performers. According to Glassnode, over 28,000 BTC worth $1.19 billion left centralized exchanges, the largest single-day outflow in $BTC terms since 14 December 2022. The price has consolidated lower while traders take some profits and deleverage their positions. Solana has hit record numbers in terms of monthly new and active wallet addresses. SOL is 58.4% away from its ATH.

Options Market

The BTC spot ETF decision got closer and closer and naturally IVs started climbing up slowly to offset theta decay. This week, we saw a shift of interest into ETH and other alts pushing ETH to shortly break through the 2,400 mark as the market expects the spot ETF approval to put a spotlight on ETH and alts. Skew pulled back to be marginally positive in the near term as quite some call spreads printed this week kept  the upside skew in check. The market had played into this ETF approval for quite a while, the room for a short-term further rally could be limited, thus it makes more sense to buy bull spreads rather than outright calls.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• According to a Reuters report, the SEC will notify the issuer as early as Tuesday or Wednesday that its spot Bitcoin ETF has been approved for listing.
• BlackRock submitted a revised S-1 form for its spot Bitcoin ETF to the SEC, designating Jane Street Capital and J.P. Morgan Securities as authorized participants for the ETF.
• Tellor is developing the L1 oracle chain called Tellor Layer to pave the way for future users to seamlessly integrate BRC20 assets with Tellor.
• The Avalanche Foundation announced its intention to recognize and encourage culture and fun symbolized by meme tokens through the "Culture Catalyst" initiative, creating a collection by purchasing selected meme tokens based on the Avalanche chain.
• The PancakeSwap community has voted in favor of a proposal to reduce the maximum supply of CAKE from the current 750 million tokens to 450 million tokens.
• Decentralized storage platform CESS has completed an $8 million financing round, with participation from HTX Ventures, Infinity Ventures Crypto, DWF Labs, Mentha Partners, Vespertine Capital, and others.
• Data as of December 26th shows that Ark Invest has reduced its holdings of Coinbase by 1,535,789 shares in December, valued at approximately $282.5 million.
• The Aptos ecosystem derivative DEX, Merkle Trade, has officially launched its V2 version and will initiate the TGE in Q1 2024.
• According to official sources, between November 30th and December 26th, MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries added approximately 14,620 bitcoins to their holdings, worth around $615.7 million in cash.

Macro

The major benchmarks closed slightly higher for the year-end holiday-shortened week: the DJIA added +0.8%, the S&P 500 added +0.3%, and the NASDAQ +0.1%. The week was generally very quiet in fixed income markets, as  many investors were out of the office.