(10/52) Weekly Market Insights: Is there hope for cryptocurrency reserves?

Hot News

• Trump reiterated that he would impose a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico on March 4, and an additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods. Bitcoin plummeted to below $80,000 last week, and the Bitcoin ETF also recorded its largest single-day net outflow of $1.14 billion in history on February 25. The Cryptocurrency Fear and Greed Index fell to its lowest point since June 2022.
• During the weekend, Trump posted on the Truth Social platform that the presidential working group is pushing for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, SOL and ADA to be included in the strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies. After the news was released, the price of Bitcoin soared 11% in 3 hours.

Macro Outlook

• US durable goods orders rose 3.1% in January from the previous month, higher than the market expectation of 2%. The second estimate of US GDP in the fourth quarter was lowered to 2.3%, which was consistent with the initial estimate.
• The US PCE index fell to 2.5% in January, in line with market expectations. Personal income increased by 0.9% in January, higher than the market forecast of 0.3%. However, personal spending decreased by 0.2% in January, far lower than the market expectation of 0.1%.

The upcoming economic calendar includes:

• Monday, March 3, 11:00 pm: US February ISM Manufacturing PMI
• Wednesday, March 5, 11:00 pm: US February ISM Services PMI
• Thursday, March 6, 9:15pm: ECB rate decision
• Friday, March 7, 9:30 p.m.: U.S. February nonfarm payrolls and unemployment rate
• Saturday, March 8, 1:30 a.m.: Fed Chairman Powell's economic outlook speech

Cryptocurrency Market Quick Facts

• The Solana Futures ETF issued by Volatility Shares has been listed on the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
• It is reported that the US SEC has terminated its federal investigation into Uniswap Labs. In addition, the Winklevoss brothers also stated that the SEC has ended its investigation into Gemini. According to the Consensus team, the securities lawsuit involving MetaMask has also been dismissed.
• The SEC also issued a statement clarifying that meme coins inspired by internet memes, characters or trends generally lack actual functionality and are not considered securities.

Layer 1 and Layer 2 Public Chains

• The Ethereum Foundation announced Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stanczak as new co-executive directors. The Pectra upgrade is now officially live on the Holesky testnet.
• Base launched three new infrastructures, including Flashblocks (reducing block time from 2 seconds to 200 milliseconds), Base Appchains (customized Layer-3), and Smart Wallet Subaccounts.
• Avalanche launches the Avalanche Visa Card, which supports cryptocurrency payments using USDC, USDT, and AVAX.
• The Quai Network mainnet is now live, using a unique Proof-of-Entropy-Minima, PoEM mechanism to improve mining efficiency and achieve high-throughput transactions through dynamic sharding. The protocol uses a dual-token design, with QUAI as the native token of the EVM layer (fixed supply issuance mechanism), while QI uses the UTXO model (elastic supply issuance mechanism).
• Lucent Network (formerly Clover Finance) announced that it will use SOON's SAS Stack to build an AI-driven network based on SVM. The new blockchain features include an AI-driven automatic liquidity layer, token creation without coding, and an abstraction layer based on Web2 social platforms such as X and Telegram. SOON is an Ethereum SVM second-layer network with an ultra-high-performance network and Super Adoption Stack (SAS) framework ecosystem. The second-layer network using this framework can give full play to the operating performance of SOON.
• RealNOI tokenizes $570 million in real estate assets on the Chintai Network.
• Story Protocol has partnered with Space ID to launch .ip domain name services on Story Network.
• Saga launched the Liquidity Integration Layer (LIL) as a network-built liquidity mechanism to ensure that Chainlets and applications can seamlessly access liquidity.

Dapps

• MetaMask announced a new roadmap, planning to support native Solana and Bitcoin networks soon, and provide a more optimized UI, Gas abstraction, smart transactions to prevent transaction failures and MEV, a new version of MetaMask Mastercard and many other new features.
• Ondo Finance has announced a partnership with Mastercard to bring OUSG to the Mastercard Multi-Token Network (MTN) for corporate use.
• Uniswap launches fiat currency withdrawal service in cooperation with Robinhood, Moonpay, and Transak.
• Sky launched its first Star protocol, Polaris, using Agent Framework on Berachain, and successfully transferred more than $7.5 billion USDS to Berachain. Sky's Agent Framework appears to be a framework within the Sky ecosystem that specifically supports the operation of various autonomous decentralized projects (Stars).
• Kaito staking is officially launched, and 9 new projects are open for voting to compete for the opportunity to be released on the Yaps platform.
• Pendle is now available on Sonic, providing Ring Protocol’s stkscUSD and stkscETH interest rate liquidity pools. Ring Protocol is a yield strategy protocol where users can deposit ETH, BTC and stablecoins to obtain yield-generating assets scETH, scBTC and scUSD, which will be used in various on-chain liquidity mining strategies.
• Vana, a decentralized data protocol, received an undisclosed investment from YZi Labs and announced that CZ has joined as an advisor.
• Thorchain hit a record high transaction volume, with the majority of transactions coming from the Lazarus hacker group. Chief developer Pluto announced his resignation as a result. Community developers have implemented a node screening mechanism to prevent interaction with specific addresses.
• Reserve Protocol launches index market, covering Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index, CoinDesk DeFi Index, Virtuals Index, etc.
• Axelar launched the Cobalt upgrade, burning 98% of the network gas fees, and at the same time turning the Axelar Engine into a permissionless cross-chain interoperability connection. Newly connected blockchains will be required to contribute AXL to the reward pool.
• Echelon, the lending protocol on Aptos, officially supports Ethena’s sUSDe and allocates 5% of the Echelon token supply to sUSDe holders.

Governance/Project Updates

• The White House will hold a cryptocurrency summit on March 7.
• The Solana community has proposed implementing a programmatic issuance mechanism based on staking participation rate, which is expected to significantly reduce the current annual inflation rate of 4.69%.
• Sonic’s fee sharing mechanism is currently under internal review and is expected to be released soon (currently dApp smart contracts still need to be manually registered).
• Frax Finance is discussing the Frax North Star proposal, which includes token rebranding, Fraxtal Gas tokens, using a tail issuance plan to incentivize veFRAX stakers, FXTL points redemption, and the introduction of the first multi-token yield mechanism through FXBs to reward veFRAX stakers.
• DYDX proposed to use 25% of the net proceeds from the agreement to establish a buyback program, and the proposal included a 25% cut in Megavault's earnings to support the program.
• Celestia proposes setting a minimum DA fee, a move that could increase protocol revenue by 4x.
• Jupiter founder Meow proposed to use all 280 million JUP he holds to fund the jup.ag, jupiverse and jupnet teams, in exchange for which he will receive 500 million JUP in 2030.
• Cronos, the Ethereum layer 2 network developed by Crypto.com, proposed to reissue the 70 billion CRO destroyed in 2021 as part of the Cronos Strategic Reserve Program.
• The Movement public mainnet is expected to be launched soon.

Token Unlock

• JTO tokens will be unlocked on March 7, accounting for 3.84% of the total supply.
• MOVE tokens will be unlocked on March 9th, accounting for 2.08% of the total supply.
• IO tokens will be unlocked on March 11, accounting for 2.17% of the total supply.
• APT tokens will be unlocked on March 12, accounting for 1.91% of the total supply.
• STRK tokens will be unlocked on March 15th, accounting for 2.47% of the total supply.
• ARB tokens will be unlocked on March 16, accounting for 2.08% of the total supply.
• VANA tokens will be unlocked on March 16, accounting for 1.46% of the total supply.
• APE tokens will be unlocked on March 16, accounting for 1.91% of the total supply.
• IMX tokens will be unlocked on March 21, accounting for 1.38% of the total supply.
• PLUME tokens will be unlocked on March 21, accounting for 5.41% of the total supply.
• ID tokens will be unlocked on March 22, accounting for 18.1% of the total supply.