Weekly Market Insight: April Week 3

English

Request a demo

14 Apr 2025

Headline News

Bitcoin price increased by 6.8% last week as President Trump announced a 90 day-pause on reciprocal tariffs against all countries (except China), temporarily de-escalating the potential global trade war and further sell-off of the US treasury market. Bitcoin’s volatility has recently begun to converge with that of the S&P 500, reflecting a shifting perception of crypto risk within institutional portfolios.

Macro-Outlook

The US announced an additional 104% tariff on Chinese goods later increased to 145%. Meanwhile, China retaliated further with tariffs on all US goods increased from 84% to 125% starting April 12.
President Trump later clarified that popular consumer electronics are exempted from reciprocal tariffs and only subjected to the existing 20% tariffs. One day later, President Trump stated on Truth Social, there is no tariff "exception" announced and semi-conductors and the whole electronics supply chain are subjected to the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations, which is expected to be announced in the upcoming week.
Canada announced imposing 25% tariffs on non-CUSMA-compliant US vehicle imports and on non-Canadian/Mexican content in CUSMA-compliant vehicles on April 9.
The European Commission proposed a 25% retaliatory tariff on a range of US goods in response to President Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum on April 7. The duties will take effect on some products starting May 16, with the remainder set for December 1.
The March FOMC minutes showed the committees expressed concern about persistent inflation, slower growth and favoring steady balance sheet drawdown. Boston Fed President Susan Collins also stated the Fed is prepared to take action to maintain market functioning if severe disruptions occur.
The US inflation in March decreased to 2.4%, lower than the market expectation of 2.6%. The core inflation increased by 0.1% in March, beating the market estimation of 0.3%. The PPI decreased by 0.4% in March, significantly better than the market forecast of a 0.2% gain. Economists now estimate the core PCE will likely increase by 0.1% in March, down from 0.4% in February.
However, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment plunged to 50.8 in April, the lowest level since June 2022, growing worries about trade war escalation.

Upcoming Economic Calendar including,

Wednesday, April 16, 8:30pm: US Retail Sales in March
Thursday, April 17, 1:30am: Fed Chair Powell Speech on Economic Outlook at the Economic Club of Chicago
Thursday, April 17, 8:15pm: ECB Interest Rate Decision

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview

Teucrium launched the first XRP ETF, a 2x Long Daily XRP ETF on NYSE. The fund utilises futures and swaps agreements to 200% XRP exposure.
Galaxy Digital announced that the SEC has declared effective its Form S-4 registration statement related to the company’s reorganization and redomiciliation to Delaware, and proposed listing on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “GLXY.” A special shareholders meeting to vote on the reorganization will be held on May 9.
The US DOJ issued a memorandum announcing that it will no longer launch criminal investigations into crypto exchanges, mixing services, and offline wallets due to user behavior or unintentional violations, nor will it pursue legal liability for developers whose code is used by others to commit crimes.
President Trump has signed a resolution repealing the crypto tax rule that required custodial brokers to report user transaction data to the IRS and issue Form 1099s for non-employment income.
The state of Arizona has officially passed the Bitcoin Mining Rights Bill, HB 2342, which protects anyone running a node or mining digital assets from zoning or usage restrictions. The bill passed the Senate with a vote of 17 to 12 and has now been sent to the Governor's office for signature.
The US Senate has voted to confirm Paul Atkins as the SEC Chair.
The SEC has approved option trading for Ethereum ETFs from issuers such as Bitwise, Grayscale and Blackrock.
The SEC released guidance on offerings and registrations of securities in the crypto asset markets, encouraging token issuers to disclose areas such as description of business, roles of tokens, revenue model, smart contract functionality, risks and more.
The SEC cryptocurrencies roundtable was held last week. The SEC suggested a temporary conditional exemption system for registered and unregistered entities, discussion on securities and non-securities trading under the same regulation, and questions on SEC jurisdiction.
Helium confirmed that the SEC has dismissed its claims that Nova Labs sold unregistered securities, affirming that the HNT, IOT, and MOBILE tokens distributed through the Helium Network, as well as compatible hotspot devices, do not constitute securities.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

Ripple acquires Hidden Road for $1.25 billion to bring digital assets to institutions, shifting post-trade operations to XRPL and using RLUSD as collateral.
Solana introduced Confidential Balances token extensions, enabling encrypted balances and transfers, confidential mint and burn, and private fee transfer for better regulatory compliance requirements.
NEAR launched Omni Bridge, replacing Rainbow Bridge, abstracting cross-chain transactions across Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Base, Arbitrum and more in the future.
Avalanche has completed its Octane upgrade on the mainnet, lowering the gas fee with dynamic fee mechanism on the C-Chain.
Cosmos launched IBC Eureka, a new native bridge connecting Cosmos Hub to Ethereum, Babylons and other Cosmos chains. The bridging fees paid in tokens will be swapped for ATOM automatically via fee abstraction to cover the Cosmos Hub fee, base fees on Cosmos Hub will be burnt permanently.
RISE, a high performance Ethereum Layer-2 which aims to achieve 100,000 TPS and 10 Gigagas/s, has launched its testnet.
Plume Network has secured an undisclosed strategic investment from Apollo Global, the private-equity giant which manages $696 billion in AUM.
Babylon has launched its mainnet and token, with 12% of the token supply staked and 8% token inflation. BABY token is valued at approximately $1.3 billion.
The token price of Mantra, the largest RWA protocol in terms of market cap, crashed by 90%, erasing nearly $10 billion in valuation within 2 hours. The team stated the crash was caused by some reckless liquidation with no further explanation.

Dapps

World Liberty Finance proposed conducting a test of USD1 airdrop to WLFI holders.
Ethena entered into a non-binding letter of intent with TLGY Acquisition Corp, a SPAC that listed on Nasdaq OTC market. TLGY intended to acquire a validator business on the Converge network, the new RWA-focus permissioned network initiated by Ethena and Securitize, together with the right to purchase up to $100 million worth of ENA at a reasonable discount.
RedStone introduced RedStone Bolt, the push-oracle service on MegaETH, which updates every 2.4 milliseconds.
Pump.fun relaunched its livestreaming feature after pausing for 4 months.
Fetch.ai introduced Back-and-Forth Agent Communication upgrade in ASI-1 mini, enabling more dynamic and bidirectional communication with agents.
Wayfinder, a DeFAI protocol backed by Parallel Studio, launched its PROMPT token. The token is used for minting Wayfinder Shell (agent), accessing Wayfinder Paths (cross-chain route etc), network gas, payment and governance. PROMPT is valued at approximately $400 million in FDV.

Upcoming Alpha and Governance

Pendle passed the voting to onboard PT tokens to Aave V3.
Ocra passed the proposal to initiate ORCA buyback using protocol fees for redistributing to stakers, $10 million buyback for contributors and new hirings, burns 25% of the token supply and more.
Aave Labs proposed a 50/50 revenue share with the Aave DAO from the Horizon instance’s Reserve Factor and GHO revenue.
Arbitrum proposed to achieve better operational efficiency via Arbitrum Aligned Entities. The proposal is favored by some, while others raise concern about centralisation risk.
PancakeSwap proposed a major tokenomics revamp by retiring veCAKE and gauges voting system, reducing emissions by 43.75%, redirect revenue sharing to burning and handling emissions management to the team themselves.
KernelDAO, the leading liquid restaking protocol on BNB and managing more than $1.5 billion in liquid restaking on Ethereum via KelpDAO, is expected to launch KERNEL token on April 14.
Filecoin is expected to undergo the mainnet v25 upgrade on April 15, reducing finality from 7.5 hours to tens of seconds, adding "temporary storage" to transaction executions, simplify termination fees, removing batch balancer and replacing it with new daily per-sector fee.
RenderCon will be held on April 15 in California. The conference will be discussing the future of rendering in Hollywood, 3D and AI, as well as Render Network development updates.
WalletConnect's WCT token is expected to live on April 15. WCT is WalletConnect native token that is used to participate in governance, node staking and share part of the protocol fees in the future.
CowSwap is expected to pass the proposal to enable flash-loan router integration on April 16.
BNB has completed Lorentz testnet hardforks, enabling opBNB to achieve 0.5 second block times and 1.5 second on BSC. The mainnet upgrade is expected on April 29.
Jupiter is expected to announce new product launches and Jupiter Mobile v2 by the end of April.
Fluid is expected to implement dynamic fees on Fluid DEX soon, potentially capturing more trading volume marketshare on Ethereum.
Sonic Summit will be held from May 6 to 8 in Vienna.

Token Unlock

STRK token unlocked on April 16, amount representing 4.65% of the token supply.
ARB token unlocked on April 17, amount representing 2.01% of the token supply.
VANA token unlocked on April 17, amount representing 1.47% of the token supply.
IMX token unlocked on April 18, amount representing 1.36% of the token supply.
TRUMP token unlocked on April 18, amount representing 19.9% of the token supply.
PLUME token unlocked on April 21, amount representing 5.48% of the token supply.
RON token unlocked on April 27, amount representing 5.28% of the token supply.
GRASS token unlocked on April 30, amount representing 1.35% of the token supply.
OP token unlocked on April 30, amount representing 1.99% of the token supply.
SUI token unlocked on May 1, amount representing 2.71% of the token supply.
ENA token unlocked on May 2, amount representing 1.69% of the token supply.

Please click HERE to subscribe for weekly market insight and exclusive research.

Speak to our experts

* First Name

* Last Name

* Corporate Email Address

* Your Mobile Phone Number

Please Select

no data

* Company Name

* Job Title

Remarks

0/200