20 December 2024
Macro/TradFi
MicroStrategy continued their streak of weekly buying, picking up US$1.5B of BTC to bring their total holdings to 439,000 BTC (worth ~US$47B). MSTR stock is set to join the Nasdaq-100 index on Dec 23, which is set to create automated ETF-driven buying for it. This follows a ~500% year-to-date rally in the stock already.
The U.S. Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 25bps, bringing the Fed Funds target rate range down to 4.25 - 4.5%. U.S. rates are now down by 1% since the Fed conducted their first cut in September. The Fed indicated a slower, more gradual pace of cuts in 2025.
The U.S. SEC has approved the dual Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs from Hashdex and Franklin Templeton.
Osprey Funds launched the Osprey BNB Chain Trust, the first U.S. publicly quoted fund based on the BNB token.
Crypto
L1/L2:
Avalanche has released its largest-ever update, Avalanche9000. Key features include lower transaction fees and simplified Avalanche L1 launches. Avalanche L1s, formerly referred to as subnets, are additional sovereign blockchains launched within the Avalanche ecosystem. This update comes after a recent US$250M locked token sale.
Sonic Labs announced the launch of Sonic mainnet, their new EVM-compatible L1. Sonic is the new project of the Fantom team and users can upgrade their FTM to S on a one-to-one basis. Sonic features Fee Monetization, which rewards devs with up to 90% of the network fees generated by their applications.
NFT:
PENGU, the native token of the Pudgy Penguins ecosystem, launched and was airdropped to over 780K addresses. The NFT collection, which is the third largest in the market, had seen its floor price increase to its all-time high of nearly 35 ETH before falling back to ~17 ETH following the airdrop.
The founder of 5th-ranked NFT collection, Doodles, hinted at a token in a tweet later in the week, which has caused the floor price of the NFT collection to pump over 60% this week.
Stablecoins:
Ethena, the team behind the USDe stablecoin, launched their second stablecoin, called USDtb. While USDe is a yield-generating synthetic dollar created through a financial strategy, USDtb is more akin to traditional stablecoins and is majority backed by BlackRock & Securitize’s tokenized money market fund, BUIDL.
Ripple launched their long-anticipated RLUSD stablecoin, although CEX integrations have been extremely limited. RLUSD is currently trading with a ~US$55M market cap.
Others:
Plume Network, an RWA-focused tokenization platform, raised US$20M in a Series A round. Plume is building an EVM-compatible L1 to trade RWA assets, expected to release in 2025.
The firm behind the leading AI agent framework (Eliza), ai16z DAO, and the ai16z token, Eliza Labs, has announced a partnership with Stanford University. The partnership will be focused on research to explore how autonomous AI agents will transform DeFi.
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