(49/52) Weekly Market Insights: Bitcoin’s Path to a New High of $100,000

Hot News

• Bitcoin prices fell 0.88% last week, retreating to nearly $91,000. On-chain data shows that most of the addresses that realized profits were long-term holders, especially those that accumulated BTC from 2022 to 2023. At the same time, Bitcoin ETF net outflows reached $138.07 million. Despite this, the Crypto Fear and Greed Index remains above 70.
• December could be a key month for Bitcoin to reach the $100,000 milestone. Historically, similar to the halvings in 2016 and 2020, Bitcoin recorded increases of 30.8% and 46.92% in December, respectively. This historical data provides hope for this year's market performance.

Macro Outlook

• The FOMC minutes released last week showed that the pace of future rate cuts will be gradual. Participants were unsure about the level of the neutral interest rate, but still believed that inflation would rise to 2% and that the source of inflation was not wages. The market raised the probability of a 25 basis point rate cut in December from 50.9% to 67.1%.
• U.S. durable goods orders rose 0.2% in October, below the 0.5% forecast. The second estimate of U.S. Q3 GDP was 2.8%, in line with expectations. Core personal consumption expenditures rose 0.3% month-on-month in October, also within the market's estimate. Personal consumption expenditure prices rose 2.3% year-on-year in October, in line with expectations. Personal income rose 0.6% in October, higher than the 0.3% forecast. Personal spending rose 0.4% in October, also slightly higher than the 0.3% forecast.

The upcoming economic calendar includes:

• Monday, December 2, 11:00 PM: US November ISM Manufacturing PMI
• Tuesday, December 3 11:00 PM: US October JOLTs job openings
• Wednesday, December 4, 11:00 pm: US November ISM Services PMI
• Thursday, December 5, 2:45am: Jerome Powell speaks at the New York Times DealBook Summit
• Friday, December 6, 9:30 pm: US November non-farm payrolls and unemployment data
• Friday, December 6 at 11:00 pm: University of Michigan preliminary December consumer sentiment index

Cryptocurrency Market Quick Facts

• MicroStrategy purchased an additional 55,500 BTC, bringing its total holdings to 386,700 BTC. MARA also purchased an additional 703 BTC, bringing its total holdings to 6,474 BTC.
• WisdomTree filed for an XRP ETF in Delaware.
• Valour launches DOGE ETP on Sweden’s Spotlight Stock Market.
• 21Shares has added four new ETPs to the Amsterdam and Paris markets of European exchanges, including RNDR, PYTH, ONDO and NEAR.
• A U.S. court ruled that OFAC’s (Office of Foreign Assets Control) sanctions on Tornado Cash exceeded the scope of its authority.

Layer 1 and Layer 2 Public Chains

• Ripple has announced a partnership with Archax to bring tokenized money market funds to the XRP Ledger.
• Movement Labs announced its integration with Celestia, allowing the Move chain to publish Blob data to Celestia. In addition, Movement also launched the MOVE token as a pledge collateral and gas token for its second-layer network. 50% of the tokens are allocated to the ecosystem, community, and initial claimants.
• Supra, a multi-virtual machine layer network, launched the first phase of the mainnet, supporting EVM and MoveVM, and SVM and CosmWasm will be launched soon.
• Sonic launched the Blaze testnet 2.0, with the current final confirmation time being around 840 milliseconds.

Dapps

• Hyperliquid launches HYPE token, with 31% allocated for initial airdrop and 38.89% for future release and rewards. The token will be used as collateral for staking and gas tokens for HyperBFT. The FDV of HYPE token is just under $10 billion, and the platform has set new highs in open interest, trading volume, daily new users, and daily inflows.
• Hyperlane has partnered with Velodrome Finance to launch Superlane, an interoperability layer that enables permissionless cross-chain solutions on the Optimism Superchain.
• EtherVista launches Etherfun on Base, and the fees generated by the network will be used to repurchase and destroy VISTA tokens.
• Pendle is launched on Base, and the first assets launched include cbETH and BTC.
• 1inch launches Fusion+, providing intent-based cross-chain token swap capabilities to all users.
• Bons(ai) launches an on-chain agent platform that creates agents that can trade, connect, and evolve through prompt-based learning. These agents can track social trends, identify tokens, perform transactions, and create meme coins.
• Justin Sun invested $30 million in World Liberty Financial, becoming the platform’s largest investor.
• Liquity launches V2 on testnet. V2 or BOLD features user-set interest rates, native stablecoin yields, multi-collateral support, and actual returns for LQTY stakers.
• After Binance announced the delisting of REN, the Dark Pool Protocol team tweeted that its v2 version will be launched soon.
• Flashbot launches BuilderNet, a decentralized Ethereum block-building network that runs on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and shares MEV and Gas fees with users.
• Elixir’s deUSD (the DeFi version of the BUIDL fund) announced Curve as the primary liquidity hub.
• Clanker, a platform that launches tokens through Farcaster posts, announced that it will share 40% of the fees with users who create tokens. The platform also created the ANON token, a token previously purchased by Vitalik for anonymous posts in Farcaster. The team plans to launch Anonfun, which allows users to anonymously create tokens through two protocol functions.
• Helium passed the HIP-138 proposal, which simplified the Helium ecosystem, gradually phased out IOT and MOBILE tokens, and directly rewarded all participants with HNT.

Governance/Project Updates

• The chain abstraction network Particle Network is expected to launch on-chain transaction functions on December 3.
• Jupiter completed the first round of Jupuary voting, with 58% of voters supporting the baseline plan. However, the team hopes to reach a super majority of 70% in this proposal. A second round of voting is expected this week.
• Kaia announced that Mini Dapps on LINE will be launched in January 2025, and the Dapp Portal SDK is expected to be launched in December 2024.
• Farcaster announced the launch of Frames v2, which supports full-screen applications, browser-like rendering, on-chain transaction requests, and better user experience. More features are expected to be launched this week, and the full stable version is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2025.
• Polkadot 2.0 will be launched in the first quarter of 2025 and will include asynchronous packaging (speeding up block generation), flexible core time (optimizing validator resources), and elastic expansion (increasing network capacity on demand).
• The TON network has launched tgBTC, which is currently in the testnet stage, and the mainnet launch is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2025.
• GMX proposed to increase the repurchase and distribution ratio from 27% to 90%.
• The Berachain Foundation proposed a friendly fork of Morpho Blue.
• Instadapp proposes to use 5% of the total supply of INST to establish a protocol-owned liquidity pool.
• Synthetix proposed acquiring TLX as part of its strategy to launch a series of products called “Synthetix Vaults.”
• Sonic co-founder Andre Cronje hinted at the launch of a “real” AMM (or Solidly v2) designed to handle stablecoins, volatile asset pairs, and highly correlated volatile asset pairs.

Token Unlock

• SUI tokens will be unlocked on December 3rd, representing 2.87% of the total token supply.
• JTO tokens will be unlocked on December 7th, representing 103.9% of the total token supply.
• IO tokens will be unlocked on December 11th, accounting for 2.88% of the total token supply.
• APT tokens will be unlocked on December 12th, representing 2.11% of the total token supply.
• STRK tokens will be unlocked on December 15th, representing 2.84% of the total token supply.
• ARB tokens will be unlocked on December 16th, accounting for 2.26% of the total token supply.
• APE tokens will be unlocked on December 17th, accounting for 2.16% of the total token supply.