Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

The SEC's sudden approval of spot Ethereum ETFs took everyone by surprise, as most were expecting a rejection. Ethereum is now considered a commodity. Despite the unexpected approval of spot Ethereum ETFs by the SEC, both ETH and BTC experienced a drop in value with ETH down by 4% trading at $3,706 and BTC down by 3.66% after hitting $71K on Wednesday. Despite the underwhelming inflows of ETFs in Hong Kong, regulators are considering permitting ETF issuers to engage in Ether staking.

Options Market

ETH and BTC spot spread bounced back strongly from the low on the ETF approval. The implied volatility of ETH, particularly the front-ends,  gradually climbed up following an upgrade in the probability of an ETH spot ETF being approved and quickly got hammered post the approval as the approval failed to spark an explosive move in the market. The implied volatility for BTC increased a bit along with  ETH and quickly cooled off after the decision. Skew moved further down to favour calls for ETH while BTC’s skew rose a little but still favour calls.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• On May 24th, Aptos achieved a record-breaking daily transaction volume of 95.6 million transactions, surpassing the historical record of daily transaction volume on L1 public chains. The main driving factor behind the increased activity on the Aptos network is a Tap-to-Earn game called Tapos.

• Jupiter announced that deBridge emerged as the winner in the community vote with a 59% majority and will be launched on the LFG Launchpad in the coming months.

• According to Dune data on May 25th, the total revenue of Farcaster has exceeded $1.45 million, currently reaching $1,457,863, with a total user count of 400,871.

• Pencils Protocol, a flagship project in the Scroll ecosystem, partnered with Trust Wallet, Scroll, StakeStone, Puffer Finance, and KelpDAO to launch a Scroll treasure hunt event on the Galxe platform. Users can deposit assets to earn multiple platform points.

• SynFutures will launch a new rewards program on May 28th at 4:00 PM Beijing time, where users can earn Blast points, Blast Gold, and SynFutures points as bonuses by providing liquidity and trading.

• Telegram is set to introduce a new in-app currency called Telegram Stars. Users can purchase it through Apple and Google and use it to pay for digital goods and services within Telegram bots and mini-programs.

• Binance announced that the second project to be listed on Megadrop is Lista (LISTA), a liquidity staking and decentralized stablecoin protocol.

• Kelp, the Ethereum re-staking protocol, announced the completion of a $9 million token financing at a valuation of $90 million. SCB Limited and Laser Digital (Nomura Securities' cryptocurrency division) led the funding round, with participation from Bankless Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures, Draper Dragon, DACM, and others.

• Cosmos released a statement announcing the launch of Hydro, a cross-chain auction platform. It serves as a bidding and governance platform for efficiently deploying liquidity within cross-chain ecosystems.

Marco

The major indexes recorded mixed results over the week: the DJIA lost -2.3%, the S&P 500 ended flat, and the NASDAQ added +1.4%. The DJIA suffered its largest weekly loss since April while the Nasdaq marched to new record territory.