🟣 Four red days

Don’t look now, but the Bitcoin ETFs are about to do something unprecedented

Happy Friday?

Through the close of trading Thursday, net outflows from bitcoin ETFs totaled $836 million. With over four days of straight outflows, this ties a record for consecutive days in the red from late January.

If the trend continues today — and bitcoin’s price action, down over 3%, implies that it will — it will be a full week of mostly GBTC outflows overwhelming demand from ETF buyers.

Momentum in the market is now in favor of more downside, although the longer bitcoin chops sideways without a significant continuation impulse, the weaker the bear case becomes. We’ll have to wait and see.

The dollar index (DXY) has had a strong week — up 1.75% — which also tends to put pressure on bitcoin and the crypto market.

The majors are all generally following bitcoin lower. In the tussle between Solana and Ethereum for trading volume, Solana has been on top during the past week, when compared to Ethereum mainnet. However, including volume on Ethereum rollups, Arbitrum, Base and Optimism, paints a different picture.

It’s only natural to see more trading shift to layer-2 rollups, as the fees per transaction remain significantly lower following the Dencun upgrade.

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

Starknet’s “DeFi spring” bears fruit:

Following its February airdrop, Starknet launched a campaign to boost DeFi dapps on the zk rollup using STRK incentives. The move appears to be working, as stablecoins on the network are up by 85%.

That’s a better measure than TVL, which is juiced by STRK’s token distribution, whereas stablecoins will have been bridged from Ethereum and elsewhere.

Centralized exchanges and native bridges, such as Circle’s CCTP for USDC, have yet to support direct stablecoin withdrawals to Starknet.

Parallel Colony is the first major implementation of AI agents in gaming in crypto. The incorporation of AI distinguishes it from other crypto games that have historically been more focused on farming simulators and derivatives of existing games.

Although Ondo Finance has experienced growth stagnation over the past few months, they remain a significant player in the tokenized security space, with their recent multichain expansion and their dive into broader tokenized assets through Ondo GM potentially revitalizing growth.

Bitcoin mining is a game of random chance played at an industrial scale, making timing the next halving practically impossible

Code for the Orb’s main application and private key storage were released with some redactions

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.