Etherโs supply is now higher than before the Merge upgrade; the US SEC acknowledged Grayscale Solana Trustโs 19b-4 filing and is seeking public comments; representatives across three US states introduced bitcoin investment bills.
US spotbitcoin ETFs had a net inflow of US$204 million last week, down by 64% week-on-week. Spot ether ETFs saw a net inflow of $420 million last week (vs net outflow of $45 million the week before).
On the macro side, the US added 143,000 jobs in January, lower than the 169,000 forecast from Dow Jones, but the unemployment rate dropped 0.1% to 4%. The University of Michigan consumer survey for February showed expectations that inflation would be 4.3% one year from now, a 1% increase from January, amid concerns about rising tariffs from the Trump administration. The latest CME FedWatch Tool showed a 92% probabilityof a March rate cut in the US (vs 85% last week). The Bank of England cut interest rates by 0.25% to 4.5%.
Notable updates: Ethereumโs Pectra upgrade is scheduled to activate on the Holesky and Sepolia testnets; Ondo Finance (ONDO) introduced Ondo Chain; Polygon Ecosystem Tokenโs (POL) Agglayer v0.2 mainnet is live; the Crypto.com App listed DeepBook Protocol (DEEP) and Berachain (BERA)
Notable events in the coming week: US consumer price index, producer price index and retail sales.
Weekly Market Index
Price and volatility indices decreased by -5.68% and -43.77% last week, respectively. The volume index was up by +36.90%.
Crypto prices increased at the start of last week, which coincided with US President Donald Trump reaching an agreement with Mexico and Canada to put tariffs on hold for a month and at least 30 days, respectively. Prices retraced towards the end of the week amid continuous tariff concerns, including China imposing additional tariffs on selected US imports and Trumpโs plan to announce 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports to the US.
Chart of the Week
Etherโs supply is now higher than before the Merge upgrade. Its supply as of 10 February is 120,532,693 ETH, 11,552 ETH higher than the supply on 15 September 2022, the day of the Merge, according to Ultrasound.money.
Etherโs supply turned inflationary around March to April 2024 after the Dencun upgrade, which introduced blobs to scale Ethereum and resulted in a portion of transactions shifting to Layer-2 (L2s). This resulted in a reduction in the base fee burn rate, causing the network to mint more ETH than burned on a net basis.
Weekly Performance
BTC and ETH decreased by -0.9% and -7.7%, respectively, in the past seven days. Prices of most other selected top market capitalisation tokens were down except SHIB (+2.4%) and SOL (+0.7%). Shiba Inu partnered with the United Arab Emiratesโ (UAE) Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure to integrate blockchain applications into government services.
All key categories decreased in market capitalisation in the past seven days. AI category led the decrease.
The Pectra upgrade is scheduled to activate on the Holesky testnet on 24 February and the Sepolia testnet on 5 March. Depending on the status of the implementations, Ethereum developers will decide on the mainnet date in the 6 March call.
The Ondo team introduced Ondo Chain, a Layer-1 (L1) Proof of Stake blockchain to โaccelerate creation of institutional-grade financial markets on-chainโ. The L1 will support tokenised real-world assets (RWA), including Ondo Global Markets-issued tokens, and RWAs will be used to secure the network.
Agglayer v0.2 mainnet is live, which brings pessimistic proofs to Agglayer. This enables Agglayer to connect to chains with different security models for safe cross-chain interoperability. The next release, expected by the end of Q1, will bring multistack capability for EVM chains to connect to Agglayer.
As of 9 Feb 2025 Sources: Crypto.com Research, Crypto.com Price, CoinGecko, protocolsโ websites
Berachain is an EVM-Identical L1 blockchain built on top of the modular EVM-focused consensus client framework BeaconKit, and employs a unique Proof of Liquidity consensus mechanism. BERA serves as the native gas and staking token.
DeepBook is a decentralised central limit order book (CLOB) built on Sui. As an on-chain order book, DeepBook delivers deeper and tighter liquidity, enabling better price execution for on-chain trading. It also enables more control over price orders compared to traditional automatic market maker models, making it better suited for sophisticated market makers. DEEP serves as the native token used for paying transaction fees, incentivising liquidity, and governance.
As of 9 Feb 2025 Sources: Crypto.com Research, Crypto.com Price, CoinGecko, protocolsโ websites
News Highlights
Investment Vehicles
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)acknowledged the 19b-4 filing of the Grayscale Solana Trust. It is seeking public comments within 21 days on the proposal to list the Trust, which will convert it into an exchange-traded product (ETP). In addition, the regulator delayed the decision on whether to allow options trading on BlackRockโs iShares Ethereum Trust to 9 April.
BlackRock plans to list a bitcoin ETP in Europe, according to reports from Bloomberg. The fund will be based in Switzerland, making it Blackrockโs first crypto-linked ETP outside of the US.
Kentucky State Representative Theodore Joseph Roberts introduced a bill aiming to create a bitcoin reserve, which will allow the allocation of up to 10% of excess state reserves into digital assets.
AI Agent Landscape: The AI agents sector has recently taken off, with top tokens showing an exponential increase in market cap in the past few months. This report looks into the AI agent landscape and delves into some major players and emerging use cases.
Performance Review for 2024 Highlighted Projects: In this report, we analyse the price performance of key trends in the cryptocurrency landscape that we covered throughout 2024. Artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as the best-performing sector in 2024.
How Do Political Events Affect Crypto Markets?: Discover how political events, elections, and regulatory decisions impact crypto markets, from Bitcoinโs record post-election high to ETF approvals and interest rate decisions.
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๐ ETHโs supply is now higher than before the Merge upgrade; US SEC acknowledged Grayscale Solana Trustโs 19b-4 filing and is seeking public comments
Etherโs supply is higher than before the Merge; US SEC seeks public comments on proposal to list and trade Grayscale Solana Trust; representatives in 3 US states introduced bitcoin investment bills
