🟣 Bitcoin will you be my Valentine?

A twinge of euphoria is being felt across the land

US Stocks are bouncing back from yesterday’s stumble, with bitcoin and most top cryptos recovering even more sharply.

Tuesday’s release of Core CPI for January came in hotter than expected, the Fed’s preferred measure seeing the largest month-over-month spike in nearly 2 years. That’s fueling speculation that interest rate cuts may be delayed or entirely off the table this year.

Normally markets don’t care for that sort of surprise, but in the midst of a strong uptrend, traders seem to be taking the new data with a collective shrug.

It reminds me of the recurring joke that whatever happens, you can find some reason to justify why it’s “good for bitcoin.”

In other news, Ethereum layer-2 Starknet, finally put a date on the release of its STRK token via a community airdrop (though they prefer “provisions”) — which will be Feb. 20. The allocation cast a wide net while filtering out casual users and Sybil farmers, with particular focus on Ethereum builders and solo stakers.

A pre-spot trading market on futures dex Aevo was launched almost immediately and puts an estimated value on the token of about $1.70, which would put it among the most valuable layer-2 networks at $17 billion on a fully diluted basis.

For comparison, Arbitrum is currently at $20.7 billion and Optimism’s FDV stands at $16.2 billion. It will be interesting to track growth in TVL once the token is tradable and gauge how well they can attract new users — or retain those who were farming the (don’t-call-it-an) airdrop. 

Team and investor unlocks for STRK should commence in mid-April, and there are lots.

— Macauley Peterson (X: @yeluacaM | Farcaster: @Macauley)

STRK community allocation:

The 9% of tokens released starting next week, are supportive of builders, including members of the Ethereum Protocol Guild, a collective of highly skilled developers, researchers, and contributors who focus on the core protocol level of Ethereum.

There are, of course, some loud voices on X who are salty at being excluded from free STRK, despite the estimated 1.3 million wallets that qualified. But all in all, the powers behind Starknet certainly seem to have taken a thoughtful look at what they wanted to accomplish with this token distribution.

Attempting to reel in developers from outside of Web3, based on GitHub contributions, is a nice touch.

Liquid staking tokens prove to be an interesting beta trade to accompany ETH exposure, particularly because liquid staking protocols charge fees on ETH staking rewards.

Marinade has seen its LST market share slip away but has seen strong growth in its new product, Marinade Native, which enables anyone to utilize an automated delegation strategy.

A judge on Wednesday granted a motion from Genesis to allow the bankrupt lender to sell its shares of Grayscale’s bitcoin ETF (GBTC).

More than 1 billion messages have been sent on Wormhole, and Axelar has seen interchain transactions increase by 478%.

The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.