Weekly Market Insight: January Week 3

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Market Updates

14 Jan 2025

Headline News

- Bitcoin's price declined by 3.9% last week, driven by a combination of factors. Key economic data suggesting a delay in interest rate cuts weighed on market sentiment, while reports that the U.S. Department of Justice has received approval to liquidate 69,370 Bitcoin seized from Silk Road further added to the selling pressure.

Macro-Outlook

- The U.S. ISM Services PMI rose to 54.1 in December, above market expectation of 53.3.
- The number of job openings increased by 259,000 to 8.098 million in November, from an upwardly revised 7.839 million in October and above market expectations of 7.70 million.
- Minutes from December 2024 further solidify the view of majority of Fed officials judgment that upside risks to the inflation outlook had increased, signaled just two rate cuts in 2025.
- The U.S. Non-Farm Payrolls increased 256K in December, the highest increment in nine months, beating market forecasts of 160K. The unemployment rate slightly cooled to 4.1% in December from 4.2% in the previous month, below market expectations of 4.2%.

Upcoming Economic Calendar including,

- Tuesday, January 14, 9:30pm: The U.S. PPI in December
- Wednesday, January 15, 9:30pm: The U.S. Inflation Rate in December
- Thursday, January 16, 9:30pm: The U.S. Retail Sales in December

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview

- The Czech central bank governor stated in an interview that he was considering Bitcoin as part of the bank's diversification strategy.
- Kenya's treasury cabinet secretary stated the country is preparing legislation to legalise cryptocurrencies.
- Sol Strategies had secured a total of $52.5 million CAD from credit facility and ParaFi to facilitate their acquisition of SOL.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

- Arbitrum now supports ElizaOS. Developers can utilise incentive programs, Trailblazer and Stylus Sprints, to fund their agent development on Arbitrum.
- Solana Foundation encouraged testnet validators to perform Frankendancer upgrade in Discord. The test is viewed as the final stage before Firedancer mainnet debut.
- Solayer's 2025 roadmap introduces InfiniSVM, a hardware-accelerated, infinitely scalable blockchain architecture, achieving 100 Gbps with atomic state.
- Starknet introduced SN stack, enabling developers to build their own ZK appchain within Starknet ecosystem.

Dapps

- ElizaOS launched a v0.1.8 upgrade, introducing 15 text-to-speech support, Intel SGX secure enclave support, protocol integrations such as Hyperliquid and more.
- Nubit introduced Goldinals, enabling indexing of BRC-20, Ordinals, Runes and more asset standards in a trustless mechanism.
- Raydium launched perpetual exchange powered by Orderly Network, offering free gas and maker fees.
- Aiccelerate, an investment DAO on dao.fun backed by multiple notable KOLs in crypto AI Agent narrative, launched its AICC token. However, the launch was considered controversial as the pre-launch was allocated to 245 whitelist insiders which resulted in their initial investment surged over 1000x.
- Illuvium partnered with Virtuals to leverage G.A.M.E Framework to create interactive NPC for personalised player experience.
- Ether.fi launched Liquid BTC Yield vault, offering 15% APY from points across 8 protocols.
- Phala Network announced v2.0, an OP Succinct Layer 2 on Ethereum, bringing TEE services closer to Ethereum developers.
- Thorchain paused the ThorFi Savers and Lending programs for the next 12 months, citing its complexity and burden potentially caused by redemption mechanism could drive away participants.
- Derive introduced Derive Pro, partnering with Messari to enable quick trade options from research or news on Messari platform.
- Enso launched on ZKsync, enabling dapps on the ecosystem to integrate DeFi features such as swap, lending or vaults seamlessly.

Upcoming Alpha and Governance

- Usual announced the revenue switch (which is projected at approximately 77%, on top of the current 274% APY) will go live if 50% of USUAL tokens are staked or it will auto-activate on February 1. Usual also caught the market by surprise by changing the hard-coded floor price of USD0++ to $0.87. The action sparked community dissatisfaction. As part of the rectification, the team announced the "1:1 Early Unstaking" feature which will allow users to forfeit a part of their accumulated USUAL rewards to guarantee the 1:1 unstake ratio be released this week.
- Grayscale Solana ETF's first deadline is expected on January 23, while VanEck and 3 other issuers' deadlines are expected on January 25. The consensus outcome is that the SEC will extend review regarding the applications.
- Azuki has officially introduced ANIME token which will be launched in January. 50.5% will be allocated to community and 76.94% token supply will be fully unlocked at launch.
- Aerodrome is expected to launch Slipstream V2 this month, introducing dynamic fees that would increase during a high volatility period and potentially accrued higher APR for liquidity providers.
- Subsequently, after the launch of Mode's AI Agent App Store in November, Mode is set to launch AI Terminal this month, a chat co-pilot that can perform DeFi actions, laying the foundation for DeFAI on Mode Network.
- Blast announced its mobile platform and tokenomics updates will be released this month. The tokenomics updates might be related to the December proposal, which utilises yield to buyback BLAST token.
- Theta plans to release the beta version of hybrid edge cloud architecture on June 25, 2025. Expanding edge nodes's support to seamlessly integrate with cloud-based GPUs to optimize compute-intensive workloads
- Ronin partnered with Virtuals to launch its own AI Agent, JAIHOZ. Ronin plans to open Ronin by Q1 2025, opening development on Ronin Network.
- Arbitrum passed the proposal to activate BoLD, enabling permissionless dispute resolution to Arbitrum fraud proof.
- Arbitrum is in discussions to onboard Lotte's metaverse gaming platform, Caliverse, to the Arbitrum Network. In return, the platform could receive what would potentially be the largest grant ever awarded by the Arbitrum Foundation.
- Threshold Network proposed setting up tLabs to lead the development of tBTC and redesign of T tokenomics to address the concern of inflation and token value accrued. The initiative aims to raise 1.2 billion newly minted T for funding tLabs.

Token Unlock

- ARB token unlocked on January 16th, amount representing 2.2% of the token supply.
- VANA token unlocked on January 16th, amount representing 1.46% of the token supply.
- APE token unlocked on January 17th, amount representing 2.12% of the token supply.
- MERL token unlocked on January 19th, amount representing 5.8% of the token supply.
- WELL token unlocked on January 23rd, amount representing 1.17% of the token supply.
- IMX token unlocked on January 24th, amount representing 1.43% of the token supply.
- ALT token unlocked on January 25th, amount representing 10.4% of the token supply.
- RON token unlocked on January 27th, amount representing 8.86% of the token supply.
- GRASS token unlocked on January 28th, amount representing 1.51% of the token supply.
- OP token unlocked on January 31st, amount representing 2.38% of the token supply.

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