Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [April 2025]
All asset classes had mixed performances in April, with BTC and Gold leading price increases. Trump reduced tariff rates on imports from most US trading partners and considered lowering tariffs on China.
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Executive Summary
- All asset classes had mixed performances in April, with BTC and Gold leading price increases.
- US President Donald Trump reduced tariff rates on imports from most US trading partners (except China) to 10% for 90 days on 9 April. He also mentioned that tariffs on Chinese goods will be lowered “at some point”, suggesting potential de-escalation of US-China trade tensions. Additionally, both countries agreed to substantially reduce and suspend certain tariffs for an initial period of 90 days, effective by May 14, 2025.
- US Fed Chair Powell mentioned last month that he expects the tariffs will bring “higher inflation and slower growth”, but noted that the Fed is well positioned to wait for clarity before making changes to monetary policies.
- Key macro events in May include interest rate decisions from Australia, China, and New Zealand.
- BTC’s 1-month performance correlation turned negative with most benchmarked asset classes, including Gold.
- US spot BTC ETFs saw US$3 billion in net inflows in April after two consecutive months of net outflows. This coincided with Trump temporarily reducing tariff rates on most US trading partners and optimism over a potential de-escalation of US-China trade tensions.
- ARB/OP (0.89) showed the strongest price performance correlation, followed by DOT/ATOM (0.85) and DOT/POL (0.84).
- For the BTC vs. ETH pair, the price ratio (BTC price divided by ETH price) stayed above +2 standard deviation (SD) level in April.
- Our style-factor screens track momentum, value, growth, and risk for the Layer-1 and Layer-2, DeFi, Gaming, and NFT categories. Below is the screen for selected top crypto tokens by market cap in the Layer-1 and Layer-2 category. L1 and L2 tokens had mixed performances. SOL(+17.6%), POL (+16.1%), BTC (+14.4%), and AVAX (+14.0%) led the growth, while TON (-18.2%) dropped the most.
- Our events section shows recent and upcoming events for selected tokens, as well as important macroeconomic events.
| Token | 1M Price (%) | Events |
|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin (BTC) | +24.2% | US spot BTC ETFs saw US$3 billion in net inflows in April after two consecutive months of net outflows. Trump temporarily reduced tariff rates on most US trading partners and is expected to commence trade talks with China. |
| Ether (ETH) | +18.3% | US spot ETH ETFs recorded $66 million in net inflows in April. Ethereum’s Pectra mainnet upgrade went live on 7 May. Vitalik Buterin proposed to replace the current EVM smart contract language with RISC-V to improve the efficiency of the Ethereum execution layer. |
| Cronos (CRO) | +9.1% | 21Shares launched a CRO ETP in Europe. The instrument is listed on Euronext’s Paris and Amsterdam exchanges, allowing investors to gain regulated exposure to the Cronos ecosystem. |
| Solana (SOL) | +39.3% | Solana Foundation updated policies for its Delegation Programme (SFDP). For every validator added to the SFDB, three validators will be removed if they received foundation delegation for at least 18 months and have less than 1,000 SOL in external staking. This aims to shift support to validators who acquire an external stake. |
| Synthetix USD (sUSD) | -5.86% | Synthetix protocol’s sUSD stablecoin depegged from the US dollar, falling to a new low of $0.66. This came after a month of instability following the implementation of the SIP-420 upgrade, which restructured debt handling and weakened key incentives. |
| Jupiter (JUP) | +29.7% | Jupiter announced that Ultra v2 went live as the default swap engine, with features including real-time slippage estimation, exponential moving average calculations for price volatility, dynamic execution. and gasless support for trading. |
Read the full Alpha Navigator report: Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [April 2025]
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