BTC is currently trading around $99,400 and ETH around $3,650. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are SPX, INJ, and SAND. The global crypto market cap is $3.70T, up 1.6% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$129b and BTC dominance is around 57%.
2024 was an epic year for the digital assets industry. Countries, corporations, and individuals embraced crypto like never before, highlighted by the US’s positively-changing stance towards the industry. Bitcoin underwent its fourth halving, experienced significant innovation around token standards and scaling, and saw the US spot ETFs launch to gather $35b of flows and Mt Gox commence disbursements. Ethereum joined in too, successfully executing its Dencun upgrade, while Solana usage exploded due to novel use cases and rising memecoin speculation. At the protocol level, decentralized predictions market Polymarket captured global attention, memecoin launchpad Pump.fun broke dapp revenue records, TON tap-to-earn games garnered hundreds of millions of users, restaking protocol EigenLayer kickstarted a new shared security paradigm, and experiments with crypto-enabled AI agents flourished. In the end, Bitcoin broke $100,000 for the first time, increasing 121% during the year, while ETH increased 46% and the total crypto market cap 97%.
Digital asset prices were little changed over a quiet holiday season. While investors will focus on several key releases this week, including European HICP inflation on Tuesday, FOMC meeting minutes on Wednesday, and the US employment report on Friday, key news from last week includes: The US IRS issued final regulations set to take effect in 2027 that place DeFi brokers under the same tax reporting obligations as traditional securities brokers and raise significant concerns about privacy, innovation, and the core tenets of DeFi; the BOJ’s Summary of Opinions on its December policy meeting concluded that current policy is focused on keeping things as they are despite rising inflation concerns; the PBOC’s 2024 Financial Stability Report emphasized Hong Kong’s digital assets activities; a former German finance minister advocated for the ECB to hold digital assets as reserves; a Swiss Legislator pushed a referendum plan to include Bitcoin in the Swiss Constitution; the transitional Syrian government reportedly plans to legalize Bitcoin; Malaysia banned Bybit for operating an unregistered exchange in the country; the FTX bankruptcy plan became effective; Binance was approved by the Central Bank of Brazil to acquire a locally licensed broker; Coinbase acquired the Cyprus subsidiary of BUX to provide financial products to members of the EEA; Coinbase revealed it is exploring adding tokenized COIN stock to the Base L2; FalconX is in talks to acquire Arbelos Markets; six mutual funds tracking the price of Bitcoin went live in Israel; MicroStrategy announced plans to issue up to $2b of preferred stock; the 30th richest Bitcoin address transferred $1.2b of BTC to an unknown address; HYPE token staking went live; and, Terra co-founder Do Kwon was extradited to the US and pled not guilty to fraud charges.
Notable news over the weekend includes: Trump-backed Mike Johnson was re-elected Speaker of the House; pro-crypto lawyer Deaton offered to probe the US’s Operation Chokepoint 2.0; Coinbase revealed additional FDIC crypto “pause letters”; E-Trade is reportedly considering adding cryptocurrency trading; MetaPlanet revealed a goal to own 10,000 BTC by year-end; X faced backlash after announcing a change to promote educational content; an alleged code leak fueled rumors that X will release new payments features soon; Telegram revealed plans to let users convert digital gifts into tradable TON NFTs; KuCoin added a merchant feature for crypto point-of-sale payments via QR codes; BitFuFu signed a deal to purchase 80,000 mining rigs from Bitmain; a Solana developer introduced a quantum-resistant vault to protect against quantum computing; Solana memecoin Fartcoin briefly topped a $1.5b market cap; synthetic dollar protocol Ethena revealed its 2025 roadmap that includes a Telegram payment app and an institution-focused iUSDe; Aave deposits hit a record $33.4b; and, the Frax community approved a proposal to back frxUSD with BlackRock’s BUIDL.
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Author:
Brian Rudick, Head of Research | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
Carlos Guzman, Research Analyst | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
Toe Bautista, Research Analyst | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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