Weekly Market Insight: March Week 4

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Market Updates

24 Mar 2025

Headline News

Despite most investors remaining cautious on the upcoming reciprocal tariffs that could further escalate trade wars against other countries, investors had renewed interest on risky assets with expectations that the slowing pace of quantitative tightening (QT) may improve dollar liquidity conditions. Bitcoin ETFs recorded a net inflow of $744.35 million last week, effectively ending a five-week streak of consistent net outflows. Bitcoin’s price posted a weekly gain of approximately 2.9%.

Macro-Outlook

The U.S. Retail sales increased by 0.2% in February, well below forecasts of a 0.6% rise.
The Federal Reserve kept the rate unchanged in March and scaled down the monthly QT cap for Treasuries to roll off from $25 billion down to $5 billion, while the $35 billion cap on mortgage-backed securities remained unchanged. The slow down of QT will be effective on April 1.
According to the latest economic projections by the Fed, the participants expect a lower GDP of 1.7%, higher unemployment rate of 4.4% and higher core PCE inflation of 2.8% in 2025. However, participants' expectation on median Federal funds rate in 2025 remains at 3.9%, although the participants that support keeping the rate unchanged increased from 1 to 4 participants.
Despite that, the market still expects approximately 61% probability there will be 75 bps or 3 rate cuts in 2025.

Upcoming Economic Calendar including,

Wednesday, March 26, 8:30pm: The U.S. Durable Goods Orders in February
Thursday, March 27, 8:30pm: The U.S. Final Q4 GDP
Friday, March 28, 8:30pm: Core PCE, Personal Income and Personal Spending in February

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview

Strategy acquired an additional 130 BTC and a new total of 499,226 BTC in holding with average $66,360 per Bitcoin. The company also announced STRF perpetual preferred stock issuance and planned to use the $711.2 million net proceeds to acquire Bitcoin and other general corporate purposes.
Coinbase launched Verified Pools, on-chain liquidity pools on Base that are built on Uniswap v4 that can only be accessed by users that have gone through Coinbase Verifications.
Binance launched Binance Alpha 2.0, expanding the on-chain swaps directly on Binance Exchange with no trading fees.
The U.S. Treasury lifted Tornado Cash from OFAC sanctions.
The SEC stated mining and mining pool activities under the Proof of Work mechanism do not constitute securities offerings.
Bitnomial has launched XRP US Dollar Myra Futures, the first CFTC-regulated XRP futures in the U.S., featuring physical settlement.
CME announced new Solana futures trading is now available. Meanwhile, Volatility Shares LLC launched the first Solana futures ETFs on Nasdaq. Some suggest the Solana spot ETFs will likely be approved after Paul Atkins takeover the SEC office, which speculations made as soon as April after being approved by the full Senate vote.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been released. TON Foundation disclosed $400 million worth of TON is held by leading VCs including Sequoia, Ribbit, Benchmark and more. The specific raised amount was not disclosed.
Ethena and Securitize introduced Converge Chain, a new blockchain with permissioned validators, aiming to be the settlement layer for traditional finance and digital dollars. Pendle, Horizon by Aave, Maple, Morpho and Ethereal are the first batch of protocols committed to build on the network.
NEAR upgraded its mainnet shards from 6 to 8, increasing around 33% of network capacity.
Arbitrum introduced Onchain Labs, aims to accelerate innovative dapps on Arbitrum.
Plume, the RWA focus blockchain, announced strategic investment from YZi Labs. Additionally, Plume's NestCredit is integrating Goldfinch Prime private credit into its RWA vaults.
EOS plans to rebrand to Vaulta, integrating with exSat (a Bitcoin Layer 2 solution) to provide "web3 banking" services such as Bitcoin yield products, RWA, insurance and more.
Rootstock launched Lovell 7.0.0 upgraded on the mainnet, reducing 60% gas fees and increased PowPeg mechanism that secured the RBTC bridging.
MegaETH released its public testnet with 20,000 tps, featuring real-time transaction experience.

Dapps

Pump.fun launched PumpSwap, an AMM DEX on Solana. All coins that completed their bonding curve will migrate directly to PumpSwap instead of Raydium.
Fluid launched Swap frontend, aggregating Kyber Network, 1Inch and ParaSwap with no frontend fee applied.
F(x) Protocol launched the BTC market for leverage trading, enabling up to 7x leverage on BTC with 0 funding fees and minimal liquidation risk.
Ekubo, the leading DEX protocol on Starknet, launched V2 on Ethereum featuring cheaper gas, better pricing and extensions that support advance functions such as dollar-cost-averaging.
A hacker accessed a secure dashboard for aixbt and ticked the bot to send 55 ETH to the hacker. The team migrated the servers and paused the dashboard.
Moonwell introduced a new USDC lending vault powered by Morpho on Optimism mainnet.
Solera announced to be building lending vaults on Plume Network powered by Morpho.

Upcoming Alpha and Governance

Berachain is launching Proof-of-Liquidity on March 24. The first batch of rewards vaults beyond existing BEX pools will go live.
Ethereum Pectra is expected to launch on new testnet, Hoodi on March 26.
Walrus, the storage protocol on Sui, is expected to launch the mainnet on March 27. The WAL token will be used as payment token, staking and governance. The team has raised $140 million recently, led by StandardCrypto.
Billions worth of PTs are maturing on March 27 on Pendle.
Nillion revealed its NIL tokenomics, making NIL as the payment and staking token to secure and validate the privacy preserving computations provided by the network. The initial supply of NIL will be at 19.52% with major cliffs unlocked by the team and early investors around the 11th month.
The U.S. House Financial Services Committee is expected to consider stablecoin legislation on April 2.
President Trump's reciprocal tariffs is expected to be imposed on April 2.
BNB Chain has completed Pascal upgrade, introducing EIP-7702 smart contract wallet and optimizing gas fee abstraction, smart payment interfaces, and batch transactions to enhance EVM compatibility and developer experience. The next Lorentz upgrade, which will reduce block time to 1.5 seconds, is expected in April 2025.
Hyperliquid introduced fee tiers, where trading fees are determined by the rolling 14 day trading volume combined with the total amount of HYPE staked. The changes are expected to go live after April 30.
Fidelity filed for on-chain U.S. Treasury Fund with SEC on the Ethereum network. The tokenised product is expected to go live on May 30.
Raydium is reportedly working on a token launchpad similar to pump.fun, called LaunchLab.
Backpack launched its Season 1 points drop, awarding users each Friday.
Aave proposed to proceed with the Umbrella upgrade, introducing aTokens in the system to cover any bad debt arise. The new Umbrella upgrade will also set the foundation for potential future slashing hook, which introduces new slashing mechanisms for stkAAVE and stkABPT.
Andre Cronje teased releasing more details on the proof of concept of a new algorithmic stablecoin. He is also working on FlyingTulip, an adoptive curve AMM with a built-in money market and supports advance trading features.

Token Unlock

OP token unlocked on April 1, amount representing 1.98% of the token supply.
GRASS token unlocked on April 1, amount representing 1.34% of the token supply.
SUI token unlocked on April 2, amount representing 2.53% of the token supply.
ENA token unlocked on April 3, amount representing 1.78% of the token supply.
JTO token unlocked on April 8, amount representing 2.04% of the token supply.
IO token unlocked on April 12, amount representing 2.09% of the token supply.
APT token unlocked on April 13, amount representing 1.88% of the token supply.
STRK token unlocked on April 16, amount representing 4.65% of the token supply.
ARB token unlocked on April 17, amount representing 2.01% of the token supply.
VANA token unlocked on April 17, amount representing 1.47% of the token supply.

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