Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

The SEC has approved the first spot Bitcoin ETF, marking the beginning of trading for eleven similar ETFs. Bitcoin spot ETFs recorded a trading volume of $4.6 billion on day one with Grayscale, BlackRock, and Fidelity leading in trading volumes. Following the approval of Bitcoin ETFs, $ETH surged by almost 15% and broke past the $2600 psychological barrier. There was increasing speculation about the possibility of Ethereum being the next cryptocurrency to gain ETF approval.

Options Market

The long-waited BTC spot ETF is finally real - IV crashed as expected. Although investors are still waiting for ETF cash inflows, ‘sell the news ’ scenario did take place. Skew on BTC showed increasing demand for downside protection with a preference for put spreads over outright puts. Skew on ETH, on the other hand, reflected a rotation of market interest into ETH  propped by a potential ETH ETF narrative. IV spread between ETH and BTC widened on a strong weekly outperformance from ETH.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETF applications, including those from Bitwise, Grayscale, Hashdex, BlackRock, Valkyrie, BZX, Invesco, VanEck, WisdomTree, Fidelity and Franklin.
• Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas tweeted that Bitwise Bitcoin ETP Trust’s first-day inflows reached $238 million, ranking first among similar products. Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust is at $227 million and iShares Bitcoin Trust is at $111 million.
• According to Cointelegraph, the U.S. SEC needs to make approval decisions on multiple Ethereum spot ETF applications before the end of May, including VanEck, Ark 21Shares and Hashdex Ethereum ETFs.
• According to Reuters, stablecoin company Circle said it has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO.
• According to Fortune Crypto, Genesis reached a settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) and will confiscate its cryptocurrency license "BitLicense" and pay a fine of US$8 million, while also stopping its business in New York.
• Layer1 public chain Berachain open test network Artio, the main network is expected to be launched in the second quarter.
• The Ethereum re-staking protocol EigenLayer will introduce three new liquidity staking tokens (LST) at 04:00 on January 30, namely Frax Ether (sfrxETH), Mantle Staked Ether (mETH) and Liquid Collective Staked Ether (LsETH).
• Dune data shows that the cumulative cost of minting inscriptions on the Bitcoin NFT protocol Ordinals exceeds 5,465 BTC, exceeding US$255 million, and the total number of inscriptions minted currently reaches approximately 53.94 million.
• L2BEAT data shows that the TVL on the community-driven ZK L2 network ZKFair exceeded $130 million, a record high, with a 24-hour increase of 109%, ranking 12th on the L2 rankings.

Macro

The major benchmarks resumed from last week, with Nasdaq outperforming the other markets: the DJIA added +0.3%, the S&P 500 +1.8%, and the NASDAQ +3.0%. Tech giants like Meta and NVIDIA marked solid gains. The 10-year Treasury note yield fell below the key level of 4% over the week.