CMC Market Pulse delivers actionable market insights, giving you all the key narratives and developments you need in under 5 minutes.
Market Overview 📉
The crypto markets showed significant weakness at the start of the week, with BTC and ETH both falling as much as 8% and 6.2% respectively. The sell-off on June 24 saw a significant $368 million worth of positions liquidated, with $306 million in longs liquidated. The recent market downturn has led to a funding rate reset across the board, indicating a cool off from the euphoric phase we saw earlier in March.
ETH showed significant strength against BTC during the market reversal on June 25, with its 6.5% gain from the lows outpacing BTC’s 5.4% gain.
📌 SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s comment on the spot ETH ETFs process “going smoothly” gives analysts and investors some hope in an earlier than expected ETF launch — Link
📌 Bankrupt exchange, Mt Gox finally commences repayments to creditors in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, temporarily spooking the markets as 141,686 BTC (~$8.64B) and 142,846 BCH (~$54M) is transferred from Mt Gox controlled wallets — Link
📌 VanEck, the $89.5 billion asset manager, filed for the first Solana ETF in the U.S., leading to an 8% gain in SOL. However, the crypto community are divided over the potential of an approval — Link
📌 Andrew Kang dives into an analysis of why the ETH ETF might not be as bullish as many investors are hoping for, predicting ETH to trade lower after the launch and ETHBTC to form a lower high — Link
Why does it matter?
The strength in ETH is largely attributed to continuous progress in ETH spot ETF filings as well as anticipation for the ETF launch which could potentially occur next week. Coupled with Gary Gensler’s positive comments on the process thus far, the possibility of a launch next week seems increasingly likely.
Additionally, weakness in BTC is spurred on by the beginnings of the Mt Gox BTC distribution and constant BTC movement from wallets linked to the German government and Genesis Trading with exchanges, which likely indicates spot selling of BTC. Cumulatively, the negative news was enough to shake up the markets, causing a further drop of 4.01% in the total crypto market capitalization, losing $9.97 billion in value.
However, on a brighter note, despite a weak showing by BTC and ETH, altcoins held up well with TOTAL3/BTC forming a strong reversal of its downtrend on Monday. This indicates strength in the altcoin markets, with altcoins (excluding ETH) gaining 6% against BTC this week. TOTAL3 represents the market cap of the entire crypto market, excluding Bitcoin and Ethereum.
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Narrative of the Week 📰
Although Solana largely stayed under the radar with all eyes on Ethereum leading up to the ETH spot ETF launch, the week has been filled with developments for the Solana ecosystem, bringing eager eyes back to the chain.
📌 US asset management giant, VanEck, files an S-1 with the SEC for a Solana trust, outlining their thoughts on why they believe Solana to be a commodity and their thesis on Solana as a competitor to Ethereum — Link
📌 Solana introduces Solana Actions and Blockchain Links (Blinks), enabling blockchain actions to be converted into links. Make a payment, swap, stake or vote through simple links — Link
📌 Light Protocol and Helius Labs collaborated to release ZK Compression for Solana, enabling compressed state for accounts on Solana, significantly reducing costs for developers across the board — Link
Why does it matter?
While Solana was a huge winner from late 2023 and into Q1 2024, it has largely lost the spotlight after a series of bad celebrity meme coin rugpulls and a shift in focus to Ethereum with the ETH ETF approval. However, this week’s huge releases in the Solana ecosystem, coupled with VanEck’s Solana spot ETF application, has drawn the attention back to Solana.
Blinks enable any blockchain action to be converted to a link. Imagine apeing into a memecoin directly on Twitter without leaving the app or staking SOL via a link included in a Telegram message. All that is now possible via Blinks. Groups have already sprung up to utilize this new function to its full potential with many others sharing potential ideas to be built. Many have also lauded the move as moving towards actual consumer adoption by tearing down friction and barriers to entry in using crypto products.
Looking at the SOLETH ratio, a measure of SOL’s performance against ETH, it has gained 11.3% this week, after a drawdown of over 30% since mid-May.
Major Project Updates 🗓️
📌 Zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) chain, zkSync, unveils the ‘Elastic Chain’ as part of its zkSync 3.0 roadmap, designed to unify the entire elastic chain ecosystem akin to a single blockchain — Link
📌 Polygon releases a new governance proposal, PIP-42, to enable the use of Polygon’s new token, POL, for Proof-of-Stake staking, which currently uses the MATIC token — Link
📌 Arbitrum introduces Layer Leap, enabling the instant transfer of assets from the Ethereum L1 to any of their Arbitrum Orbit L3 chains such as RARI Chain or Proof of Play’s Apex Chain — Link
📌 Web3 gaming platform Immutable partners with MARBLEX, the blockchain arm of leading South Korean gaming publisher Netmarble, which will move its leading IPs to the zkEVM chain — Link
Why does it matter?
ZkSync’s Elastic Chain attempts to unify all chains built on zkSync’s ZK Stack into one cohesive and seamless ecosystem, allowing users to interact with the chain without the need to switch between chains constantly.
This development has also been seen as competition to Polygon’s AggLayer, which seeks to connect all chains built on Polygon’s Chain Development Kit (CDK), through the aggregation layer. The AggLayer connects these chains in liquidity, users and state, creating a seamless user experience across the ecosystem.
DeFi Brief 🏦
Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/chain-ranking/
📌 Popular trading terminal Dexscreener launches its own pump.fun competitor, Moonshot, allowing anyone to mint and launch their own tokens — Link
📌 Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter Exchange, introduces Jupiter V3 which brings to the exchange instant routing, dynamic slippage and smart token filtering, among other key upgrades — Link
📌 Optimism teases their upcoming SuperFest, a DeFi festival across Optimism and three other chains built on the OP Stack: Base, Mode and Fraxtal, with the involvement of more than 30 projects — Link
📌 Instadapp-based protocol, Fluid, launches the Fluid DEX, a highly capital efficient DEX, built on two novel concepts: smart collateral and smart debt — Link
Why does it matter?
With the success of meme coins and pump.fun, it is clear that meme coins are here to stay and will continue to play a huge role in this cycle. With pump.fun hitting a record daily revenue of $1.48 million, it is no surprise that a competitor has quickly emerged in the form of Dexscreener’s Moonshot.
Moonshot advertises that its platform is fair and safe, alleging no pre-sales, insiders and that the tokens are ‘unruggable.’ Since its launch on June 25, Moonshot has since seen more than 130,000 tokens launched on their platform.
Additionally, with Dexscreener’s popularity as the de facto price charting application for on-chain traders, it will be interesting to observe if pump.fun’s first mover advantage will keep it at the top or whether Moonshot will quickly take its place on the meme coin throne.
Meme Coins 🚀
📌 Meme coins bounce hard on the first sign of green in the market, showing the market’s desire to bid up memecoins again. Notable performers include Ethereum-based MOG, which gained 119% in the past week — Link
📌 New meme coin, Doraemon (DORAE) surges to a whopping $2.41B market cap, briefly flipping WIF, in just 10 hours, before collapsing more than 99% after a large dump from wallets linked to the developer wallet — Link
📌 The meme coin ZYN, which is named after the popular nicotine pouch, has resolved a legal dispute with tobacco giant Phillip Morris regarding the coin’s name. ZYN pumped over 180% following the news — Link
Chart of the Week 📊
Fundraises 💰
📌 Berachain-based liquid staking protocol, Infrared receives an investment from Binance Labs in a strategic round with Binance Labs as the sole investor — Link
📌 MegaETH raised $20M in a seed round led by Dragonfly Capital with support from Figment Capital, Folius Ventures, Tangent, and angels including Vitalik Buterin — Link
📌 AI x Crypto infrastructure platform, Allora, closes a raise for $3M in a strategic round leading up to their mainnet launch. This round saw participation from investors including Polychain Capital, Framework Ventures and Delphi Digital, among others — Link
📌 Chain deployment infrastructure protocol, Conduit, raised $37M in its latest round this week led by Paradigm and Haun Ventures, with support from Coinbase Ventures, Robot Ventures and more — Link
📌 Modular data infrastructure platform, Covalent, raised $5M led by RockTree Capital, with participation from Moonrock Capital, Double Peak Group and CMCC Global, among others — Link
📌 Enso Finance raised $4.2M to support the launch of its intent engine, with participation from IDEO CoLab Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures and more than 60 angel investors — Link
Airdrops Abound 🎁
📌 Blur-backed L2, Blast, announces and opens the airdrop for the BLAST token, distributing 7% of the token supply to Blast Points and 7% to Blast Gold holders — Link
📌 ZkSync opens Phase 2 of the ZK airdrop to Protocol Guilds, contributors to external projects and users nominated by zkSync-native ecosystem projects — Link
📌 Fantom Foundation announces plans for the airdrop of 190M S tokens for the new Sonic network. The airdrop is expected six months after the launch of the Sonic network and will reward liquidity providers, validators and more — Link
Tweet of the Week 📝
Source: WazzCrypto
It seems the Blast initial valuation estimates were a tad optimistic after all.
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