Weekly Market Insight: March Week 3

English

Market Updates

17 Mar 2025

Headline News

Bitcoin ETFs experienced the 5th consecutive weekly net outflow of $870.39 million last week, despite stablecoin market cap continued to increase by approximately $1.36 billion last week. Bitcoin price had a slight increase of 0.78% last week as macroeconomic uncertainty persisted.

The trade war widens with President Trump new 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The European Commission reimposing countermeasures on €26 billion worth of American goods, while Canada struck back with 25% levies on C$30 billion of American goods. Trump further threatened a 200% tariff on wine, champagne and other alcoholic beverages from the EU, if Brussels follows through with a 50% tax on American whiskey exports, starting on April 1. There is a 42% chance U.S. will enter a recession in 2025 according to Polymarket.
The U.S. JOLTs job opennings increased to 7.74 million in January, higher than the market expectation of 7.63 million.
The U.S. inflation rate decreased to 3.1% in February, lower than the market expectation of 3.2%. Meanwhile, PPI was unchanged in February, below forecast of a 0.3% gain. Although, the latest inflation and PPI were below market expectation, core PCE in February is expected to increase by the range between 0.29% to 0.4% according to Goldman Sachs and BofA, overall higher upcoming PCE forecast.
The market estimated 99% probability the rate will remain unchanged in the FOMC meeting this week.

The U.S. Senate Banking Committee approved the GENIUS Act, a bill aims to regulate stablecoin issuers. The bill will require further approval from the full Senate and House of Representatives.
The U.S. House passed a 292-132 resolution overturning the IRS broker rule requiring DeFi platforms to collect user tax and transaction data.
According to Fox Business, the U.S. SEC will soon resolve the legal case with Ripple Labs.
Ripple received the first blockchain-enabled payments provider license from the Dubai Financial Services Authority to provide regulated crypto payments and services in UAE.
Binance raised $2 billion from MGX, the Emirati state-owned investment firm, securing a minority stake in Binance.
World Liberty Finance purchased $2 million worth of AVAX and MNT respectively.

Solana SIMD-0228 proposal to adopt a market-based emission mechanism has failed to reach threshold for yes vote.
Nuffle (previously NEAR DA) rebranded to MoreMarket, introducing a global liquidity marketplace that enables cross-chain DeFi activities from a universal non-custodial account.
Starknet echoed its goal to settle on both Bitcoin and Ethereum, introducing more utilities with BTC and BitVM-powered bridge for Starknet to bring Bitcoin assets to the Layer 2 network.
ZKsync sunsetted the Ignite Incentive Program, citing redirect focus from Era to Elastic Network and poor market condition.
Base launched Echo, an onchain private investment platform to support startups in the Base ecosystem.
Near announced KyberSwap and Gnosis integrate NEAR Intents, bringing seamless cross-chain experience.
Plume integrated Walrus Protocol, a decentralised storage solution on Sui, as the blob storage solution and plans to develop tokenisation engine and cross-chain solution on Sui's Move stack.
Movement public mainnet beta is now live.

A Hyperliquid trader had his $290 million worth of 20x long position on ETH be liquidated by gradually removing his collateral, causing HLP vault lost $4 million from slippage while liquidating the position. Hyperliquid reduced the max leverage for BTC and ETH to 40x and 25x respectively. Currently, the trader has 40x short position on BTC and 5x long position on Melania.
Circle announced CCTP V2, significantly reduces the USDC transfer times from minutes to second and enables message attestation before source chain finalisation. CCTP V2 also enables Hooks function, allowing developers to customise post-transfer actions with smart contract integration.
Drift introduced Swift Protocol, a new trading standard designed for sub-second fills, better prices, and gasless trading across perpetuals and spot markets by consolidating liquidity from multiple sources.
Compound passed the proposal to launch Compound Blue, powered by Morpho on Polygon with $3 million in COMP and SOL incentives allocated to accelerate growth.
Lit Protocol introduced LITKEY token as the staking, gas and governance token of the protocol network. Lit Protocol provides developers to build applications with decentralised key management with secure computation.
GMX Solana is now live, users can now mint GLV with SOL or USDC with up to 700% APY.

Uniswap is likely to pass the incentive campaign to accelerate the growth of Uniswap v4 and Unichain with approximately $24 million and $21 million respectively. The voting ends on March 19.
Biconomy announced Biconomy Network, a chain abstraction layer, aims to launch the Genesis Mainnet in April 2025. Biconomy Network features Supertransaction, where users only sign once and execution implemented across multiple chains, and decentralised node networks secured by BICO.
Offchain Labs from Arbitrum announced a plan to buyback ARB over time through the open market.
Soneium announced 4 LINE onchain mini-apps Sleepagotchi LITE, Farm Frens, Moonveil and Pocket Mob are launching in coming months.
Aave founder proposed Project Horizon, a RWA-focused lending protocol that is powered by Aave instance. The proposal initially included profit sharing and new token allocation to Aave DAO, but was later reaching a consensus to be launched as a new product line.
Initia announced to allow VCs and investors locked allocation to participate in staking with constraints that the staking rewards will be subjected to a 4 year vesting schedule, and reducing the staking emission. Meanwhile, Initia increases the INIT supply to Initia VIP from 10% to 25%, increasing the impact of gauge vote by Initia VIP.

IMX token unlocked on March 21, amount representing 1.38% of the token supply.
PLUME token unlocked on March 21, amount representing 5.41% of the token supply.
ID token unlocked on March 22, amount representing 18.1% of the token supply.
OP token unlocked on March 31, amount representing 1.98% of the token supply.
GRASS token unlocked on March 31, amount representing 1.51% of the token supply.
SUI token unlocked on April 1, amount representing 2.54% of the token supply.
ENA token unlocked on April 2, amount representing 1.79% of the token supply.
JTO token unlocked on April 7, amount representing 3.7% of the token supply.
IO token unlocked on April 7, amount representing 2.09% of the token supply.

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