🟣 BTC at 50

Bitcoin continues to perform well, and is currently sitting near 50K, a little higher than the range it reached when BTC ETFs got approved back in early January.

Gm, hope you all had a nice Super Bowl Sunday!

Bitcoin continues to perform well, and is currently sitting near 50K, a little higher than the range it reached when BTC ETFs got approved back in early January. 

Last Friday, the 9th, BTC ETFs saw $541.5M USD in net inflows. As BTC continues to rally following increased inflows into ETFs, ETHBTC continues to hang around 0.05, even though Ethereum is (potentially) next in line for an ETF with a potential decision coming in May.

With increased ETH staking, the growing popularity of EigenLayer and actively validated services (AVS), and the potential for staked ETH ETFs, it’ll be important to monitor ETH demand dynamics. Our very own Pibblez covered the narratives for Ethereum over the next year (specifically cash flows and liquid staking) in his latest report.

Apart from Bitcoin, OP, up 5.7% over the past 24 hours, and SUI, up 3.5% over the past 24 hours, are performing well today. Aside from L1s and L2s, the top performing coins today are GameFi related. BEAM, a GameFi infrastructure project on Avalanche, is up 16% (following recent buyback and burns), and IMX, similarly a GameFi infrastructure provider, is up 10%.

Over in DeFi, the biggest news over the past week has been EigenLayer, who had its caps open for LST deposits from the 5th until the 9th. Currently, EigenLayer TVL is sitting just above $6.1B. As of now, EigenLayer has the 5th highest TVL across DeFi, behind Lido, Maker, AAVE and JustLend. 

Onchain activity on Base has started to pick up again. Daily transaction counts have reached 450K-a nearly 2x increase over the past 30 days. As transaction counts have increased, so have active unique addresses - and have reached 90K per day, a 50% increase compared to January. Average transaction fees hit $0.6 on Friday.

The increased activity is likely due to the increased popularity of Farcaster, a decentralized microblogging/social media application. Over the past week, there has been an increase in the amount of NFT mints and tokens posted on Farcaster, as more users have begun using the app.

Despite onchain activity increasing dramatically, it is still relatively low when compared to past September, when friend.tech reached peak popularity. Just as a comparison, at the peak of friend.tech season on Base, transaction counts were up to 1.8M daily. However, it’s important to note that all interactions for friend.tech were onchain, while Farcaster only has a limited number of actions onchain.

After the launch of a spot BTC ETF, all eyes are on Ethereum for a potential spot ETF approval in May 2024.

The market has taken an interest in high-throughput blockchains, and Sui headline metrics show positive signs of growth for the nascent layer-1.

The company repaid over $1 billion in debt, according to their quarterly shareholder letter.

The net inflows into US spot bitcoin funds nearly doubled from $700 million to $1.2 billion week over week, as GBTC outflows continue to slow down.

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.