Weekly Market Insight: February Week 4

English

Market Updates

24 Feb 2025

Headline News

- Bitcoin saw minimal movement last week, recording a modest 0.14% gain. Market-wide trading volume declined, largely due to exhaustion from memecoin trading following the LIBRA rug pull incident. Although Bitcoin briefly reclaimed the $99,000 level, its gains were quickly erased by the Bybit hack and weaker-than-expected economic data released on Friday.

- The FOMC minutes in January showed the discussion of possibility of pausing or slowing down the balance sheet runoff before resolving the debt ceiling issue, and concern towards potential changes in trade and immigration policies that could drive higher inflation.
- The U.S. Michigan 5-year inflation expectations climbed to 3.5% in February, the highest since 1995.
- A new covid-like bat virus was discovered by researchers in China. However, some experts called the reaction to the study overblown, as the virus has a less binding affinity to humans and more immunity in the population since 2019.

- Thursday, February 27, 9:30am: Durable Goods Orders in January and Q4 GDP Second Estimate
- Friday, February 28, 9:30pm: Core PCE, Personal Income and Personal Spending in January

- Bybit was hacked by North Korea's Lazarus Group for $1.4 billion in ETH with a musked Safe interface. Bybit experienced approximately $5.5 billion net withdrawal from the exchange in the past week. The exchange ETH reserve has fully restored now, according to the CEO.
- Ethena reported a $30 million PnL exposure on Bybit but no spot assets were deposited on the exchange. Market concerns over potential collateral losses for USDe led to a temporary depeg, but AAVE stated that no bad debt resulted from the USDe collateral during the same period.
- Strategy (previously MicroStrategy) announced $2.0 billion aggregate principal amount of 0% convertible senior notes due March 1, 2030 to qualified institutional buyers and use the proceeds for acquisition of bitcoin and working capital.
- OpenSea CEO said the SEC is closing the investigation into OpenSea. The enforcement case against Coinbase is expected to be removed as well.
- Canary Litecoin ETF is listed on the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) system under the ticker LTCC.

- Ethereum Foundation announced Open Intents Framework, aims to achieve seamless cross-chain interoperability across Ethereum ecosystem. The framework contains ERC-7683 Reference Implementation, which is the intent standard introduced by Uniswap and Across.
- Monad, a new high performance EVM compatible Layer 1, launched its highly anticipated testnet with 0.5 second block times. The testnet aims to achieve 1 billion gas per second before mainnet launch, approximately 40x increase over Base's current capacity.
- Hyperliquid launched HyperEVM mainnet. A massive number of DeFi dapps are expected to launch gradually, while protocols such as HypurrFi, HyperSwap and Keiko are already live.
- NEAR launched Shade Agents framework which enables developers to build Autonomous AI agents on NEAR with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) supported to increase sovereignty with off-chain data and AI models, as well as enables agents to execute transactions on every chain via NEAR's Chain Signatures.
- Bittensor has successfully launched dTAO. There are 70 subnets currently and valued at approximately $85 million in market cap among their Alpha tokens. Subnet 4, Targon, secured the top rank among the subnets with 12.3% of the emission entitlement.

- Kaito launched KAITO token which is valued at $1.5 billion in FDV. The launch demonstrated a successful example of a centralised platform utilises crypto into their services. Kaito is also powered by Bittensor subnet 5 to decentralise search indexing.
- Crossmint, a Solana Smart Wallet, launched its beta on devnet with features such as gasless transaction and programmable security modules.
- Maple and CoreDAO announced lstBTC, enabling BTC holders to earn yield on their BTC with custodians by trusted parties such as BitGo, Copper and Hex Trust.
- IO launched co-staking, stakers can now co-stake with device suppliers to earn rewards.
- Virtuals Protocol announced Agent Commerce Protocol, an open standard for multi-agent commerce and coordination.
- Li.Fi Protocol, an aggregator of cross-chain bridges, announced LIFI 2.0, an intents protocol that works across any VM.
- OpenEden introduced USDO, a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by tokenised Treasuries under a Bermuda Digital Asset Business Act (DABA) License.
- Moonwell introduced Virtual Accounts, a U.S. Checking accounts with zero fees. Users can receive USD via ACH, wire transfer, PayPal and more. The USD will be converted to USDC and earn yield in the USDC vault or spend with Moonwell Card.

- ETHDenver is held from February 23 to March 2.
- Stacks will raise the sBTC cap to 3,000 BTC on February 25, providing yield of 5% APY.
- Kaito is expected to start distributing staking rewards to stakers, the yield sources from Liquidity Incentives allocation and network fees.
- Solana is scheduled to unlock 8.7 million SOL or about $1.5 billion on March 1.
- Pump.fun is reportedly working on their own AMM liquidity pools on amm.pump.fun.
- Story Protocol released its technical roadmap, aiming to deliver IP Portal (IP registration and browse registered IP) and Story Attestation (an oracle network that brings IP validation signals onchain) in Q2.
- The Curve founder, Michael Egorov, was reportedly working on a new project called Yield Basis, aiming to solve impermanent losses for liquidity providers. The strategy involved borrowing crvUSD to create a liquidity ratios adjusted position to eliminate impermanent losses.
- MakerDAO passed an emergency proposal increasing the borrowing limit against SKY tokens and was claimed the proposal was to address the potential governance attack. The team also reclaimed the Uniswap V2 liquidity and reduced the surplus threshold to 70 million DAI, which caused the buyback and burn mechanism kicked in immediately.
- Liquity announced V2 will be re-deployed in mid-March.
- FTX is expected to distribute the claims over $50,000 on May 30.

- ALT token unlocked on February 25, amount representing 9.47% of the token supply.
- OP token unlocked on February 28, amount representing 2.39% of the token supply.
- GRASS token unlocked on February 28, amount representing 1.52% of the token supply.
- SUI token unlocked on March 1, amount representing 2.60% of the token supply.
- ENA token unlocked on March 2, amount representing 3.02% of the token supply.
- JTO token unlocked on March 7, amount representing 3.84% of the token supply.
- MOVE token unlocked on March 9, amount representing 2.08% of the token supply.
- IO token unlocked on March 11, amount representing 2.17% of the token supply.
- APT token unlocked on March 12, amount representing 1.91% of the token supply.
- STRK token unlocked on March 15, amount representing 2.47% of the token supply.

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