The Blockchain Bulletin Edition#9

Hi, degens! A lot has happened since the last edition. The markets pumped, then crashed, and are now recovering again.

A lot of OGs in the space have made a significant amount of money through airdrops.

Bluechip NFT collections have seen renewed interest but volume on new projects has yet to come. Read on to find out where the market might lead next.

P.S: Stick around till the end for a guaranteed spot for TerpLayer. You will want to read the whole newsletter for this exciting project!  

The market roundup with Zumbah

ATH and then a flash crash in BTC

Trump’s victory led to euphoria in financial markets, and crypto has also seen a lot of green.

In just under 3 weeks, Bitcoin rallied to $99,000, and then later reaching an all-time high of $103,900.

There has been a correction since then, with a crash to $94,000 and then some recovery. BTC now hovers around the $100,000 mark.

A healthy correction is always expected after a crazy pump. Altcoin szn next?

ETF attention

There have also been significant inflows into Bitcoin ETFs since the election.

Many trade-fi companies have started disclosing their investment in BTC ETFs, or their decision to buy shares of Bitcoin ETFs in the (near) future.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) is now larger than its iShares Gold Trust (IAU), the latter of which had been trading for two decades.

BTC’s ETFs saw billions of volume each day for almost a week, as more and more people became aware of the future impact of Trump’s victory on cryptocurrencies.

There are expectations that this euphoria might continue all the way to President Trump’s inauguration.

Web3 in China and Russia

In November, both China and Russia issued official statements on cryptocurrencies, identifying the digital asset as personal property.

This is important, because it paves the way for legislation and ultimately bringing crypto to the mainstream in the two countries.

Both already have a sizable amount of the population active in web3, and formalization of the market will help onboard more users in the future.

Crypto cabinet in the US?

Reports of potential new entrants into President Trump’s upcoming cabinet has also led to some pro-crypto names being considered as candidates. 

Teresa Goody Guillen, a crypto lawyer, is a potential nominee for the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Howard Lutnick, a pretty big holder of Tether treasury bonds, might end up taking the position of the US Secretary of Commerce. Scott Bessent has been named as President-elect Trump's pick for the next US Treasury Secretary.

All of these candidates share a deeper understanding of cryptocurrency, digital markets and web3, compared to their outgoing peers (ahem, bye Gary), which is a sign of good things to come.

P.S: If you have been reading closely this far, you deserve to join the TerpLayer giveaway. To enter, just retweet Olympus’ the pinned post and comment a project that you want us to breakdown next.

The bigger picture with ZR

We told you to farm Hyperliquid 

Hyperliquid’s airdrop and launch of $hype on November 29 went very positively, to say the least. Many traders ended up with airdrops running into six figures or even more.

With 31% allocated to the community released on launch day, the token has since gone from $3 at 1 billion market cap to the current price of $18. 

Wasabi told you to farm this all the way back in September. I hope you were paying attention.

Magic Eden’s airdrop

Magic Eden also joined the last of web3 platforms sending a stimmy for their OG users.

The reports of a Binance listing before the airdrop led to hyped anticipation, and the initial price of $10-13 (depending on which exchange you were looking at) was exactly as expected. 

However, it quickly crashed as VCs dumped and the web3 community all tried claiming at the same time. By the time most claims of OG wallets went through, the price had dumped to $5 dollars.

All hope is not yet lost: many are holding their tokens from the airdrop awaiting a price rise back to the $10 level and above.

We already saw pumps to $9.5 on Jupiter and $8 on other CEXs, after which it finally settled back around $5 with many airdrop holders staking their tokens. It has now dropped to the $4.1 mark. What will you do with your tokens? Sell, stake or Hodl for a better exit? 

Memecoins

The Solana memecoin market has seen a bit of a dry spell compared to the craziness of last month.

We had our share of rug pulls with the ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl joining the long line of celebrities to try and extract max liquidity from the market. Jail szn for her?

The Virtual protocol was launched a couple of months ago alongside its platform, but it took a little while for it to gain traction and attention.

Since then, interest has developed in utility coins on the protocol. Three outlier coins on the protocol have very interesting AI agents behind them: nft_xbt (10.4 million mcap), aixbt (187 million mcap) and Polytrader_agent (7.3 million mcap).

NFTs with Bros

While most new collections on all chains are struggling to gain volume, OG collections on ETH mainnet have seen significant growth.

BAYC went up to a floor of 23.5 ETH, while CryptoPunks pumped to 44 ETH. Both have now settled at around 17.7 ETH and 40 ETH respectively. Pudgie Penguins, Doodles, VAYC and KaijuKings have all pumped as well.

Pudgie Penguins has reached a new ATH of 25.7 ETH in anticipation of their upcoming token $pengu.

We might see more stealth and degen launches soon, so it’s a good time to stay engaged with NFTs.

Monad projects are coming thick and fast, abstract mints are also looking interesting and the Berachain launch is looming ever closer. Canna Sapiens is one of the standout projects on Abstract and its whitelists (wl) are generating a lot of interests for grinders and speculators alike. The guaranteed spot is going for $120 on exaverse, while the fcfs wl is around $60 right now. Will you be minting?

Here are some projects you don’t want to miss: 

Abstract

Movement

Monad

Berachain

That’s all for this edition. Tune back in a fortnight for more! Tweet at us to send us coins, projects or potential gems that are on your watchlist!