Hot News

• Despite this being the largest daily liquidation event since 2021, resulting in over $1.7 billion in liquidations across all perpetual contracts, Bitcoin has shown remarkable resilience. Prices quickly recovered, up 3.16% over the past week.
• Ethereum ETFs continue to show strong demand, with net inflows hitting another record of $854.85 million last week. This resilience remains despite a 1.22% drop in Ethereum prices driven by a broader market liquidation event. Currently, 2.92% of the total Ethereum supply is held by Ethereum ETFs, about 16% is held by centralized exchanges, and 28.1% is staked.

Macro Outlook

• Inflation and core inflation in the United States rose to 2.7% and 3.3% in November, respectively, in line with market expectations. PPI rose 0.4%, exceeding expectations of 0.2%. Although inflationary pressures persist, as reflected by the 97% market consensus, this is unlikely to change the Fed's trajectory of a 25 basis point rate cut in December. However, combined with the possibility of tariffs introduced by the Trump administration, the probability of a rate cut of more than 50 basis points in 2025 fell from 50% to 32% in the past week.

The upcoming economic calendar includes:

• Tuesday, December 17 9:30 AM: US November retail sales
• Thursday, December 19 3:00 AM: FOMC meeting
• Thursday, December 19 11:00 am: Bank of Japan rate decision
• Thursday, December 19, 9:30pm: US Q3 final GDP
• Friday, December 20, 9:30 PM: US Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index for November

Cryptocurrency Market Quick Facts

• Binance and Circle have entered into a strategic partnership to adopt USDC in its corporate treasury and make USDC more widely available across Binance’s products and services.
• Nasdaq announced that they will be adding MicroStrategy to the Nasdaq-100 Index.
• In the past week, World Liberty Finance bought ETH, AAVE, LINK, ENA and ONDO through CoW Swap.
• Grayscale has announced the launch of two new single-asset cryptocurrency investments, one each for LDO and OP.

Layer 1 and Layer 2 Public Chains

• Avalanche raised $250 million from Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly and ParaFi Capital.
• Frax Finance announced the rebranding of the FRAX stablecoin to frxUSD and FXS to FRAX as part of its latest vision roadmap. In the second part of the roadmap, Frax announced AIVM, a parallel VM designed for AI agents on Fraxtal.
• Vana launches its VANA token economics. TGE is expected to account for 25.07%, with 66.9% allocated to the ecosystem and community. The token is used for network security, governance, gas fees, DataDAO participation, and data payments. Vana allows users to tokenize their data to their preferred, privacy-enabled DataDAO.
• ZKsync launched Roadmap 2025, which aims to simplify the developer experience, enable a web2-like experience, and interconnect public and private chains in the Elastic Network.
• Celestia has completed the Ginger upgrade on the mainnet, increasing data throughput by 2x by reducing slots from 12 seconds to 6 seconds.
• Galxe announced a $50 million fund to build a new EVM for its Gravity network.
• Kernel DAO, the re-staking protocol in the BNB chain, is launched on the mainnet.

Dapps

• Balancer launched V3, introducing the Hook framework, a new AMM design, custom pools, boost pools for earning external returns through existing liquidity, and more.
• Pendle launched PendleSwap. Users can swap up to 3 coins at a time without paying additional fees.
• Curve passed a proposal to increase scrvUSD fee share to 50%.
• The Beam Foundation has announced plans to launch a $150 million Beam Ventures to advance the gaming protocol in Abu Dhabi.
• Kaito AI launched the Yaps Points program, enabling content creators to collect points based on their contributions to crypto.
• Moonwell has launched the Moonwell Visa Card, which allows users to borrow against assets deposited in Moonwell’s core marketplace for spending.
• Boyaa Interactive, a Hong Kong-listed company, has made a strategic investment in BounceBit. Through this investment, Boyaa acquired 4.5 million BB (1.1% of the circulating supply) to develop the CeDeFi ecosystem.

Governance/Project Updates

• After the Avalanche9000 upgrade, Beam launched BeamNodes to convert the Beam network to a permissionless PoS first layer through the "Horizon" upgrade. The Horizon upgrade is expected to be launched at the end of January 2025, or no later than the end of the first quarter of 2025.
• After announcing the release of PENGU, Pudgy Penguin also announced the launch of the abstract mainnet in January 2025.
• EigenLayer proposed a slashing upgrade in its ELIP-002, empowering AVS to punish operators who fail to meet their commitments.
• After the Avalanche9000 upgrade, Beam introduced Beam Nodes and transformed the Beam network into a permissionless, PoS-based layer 1 network through the "Horizon" upgrade. The Horizon upgrade is expected to be completed by the end of January 2025, no later than the end of the first quarter of 2025.

Token Unlock

• WELL tokens will be unlocked on December 23rd, accounting for 1.21% of the total token supply.
• IMX tokens will be unlocked on December 27th, representing 1.44% of the total token supply.
• GRASS tokens will be unlocked on December 28th, representing 1.52% of the total token supply.
• PRIME tokens will be unlocked on December 31st, representing 1.47% of the total token supply.
• OP tokens will be unlocked on December 31st, representing 2.55% of the total token supply.
• SUI tokens will be unlocked on January 1st, representing 2.8% of the total token supply.