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9 Apr 2025|RESEARCH

 Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [March 2025]

Asset performance was mixed. Crypto, Equities and Fixed Income decreased, while Real Assets’ performance was mixed. In March, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile.

Alpha Navigator

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Executive Summary

  • Asset performance was mixed. Crypto, Equities and Fixed Income decreased, while Real Assets’ performance was mixed.
  • The US Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged at 4.25% to 4.50%, in line with expectations, and still sees two rate cuts ahead in 2025. It currently sees the US economy increasing 1.7% in 2025 (down 0.4% compared to the previous estimate in December), while core inflation is expected to grow 2.8% annually (up 0.3% from the previous estimate). US President Donald Trump announced “reciprocal tariff” rates that will impact its trading partners. This includes a 10% baseline tariff for countries that export to the US, while some countries will face higher tariffs.
  • Key macro events in April include interest rate decisions from Eurozone, Canada, China, and New Zealand, as well as Q1 GDP announcements from China, the EU, and US.
  • BTC’s 1-month performance correlation with Gold decreased and turned negative with some equity indices, including S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100.
  • US spot BTC ETFs saw $680 million in net outflows in March. US President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order to establish a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a Digital Asset Stockpile, with no immediate planned purchases of bitcoin. Trump also posted on his Truth Social platform that the crypto reserve would include XRP, SOL, and ADA. Additionally, the President announced multiple tariff updates in the month.
  • Market-Neutral Pair Trader hunts for strongly correlated tokens and potential market-neutral pair trades. ARB/OP (0.89) showed the strongest price correlation, followed by DOT/ATOM (0.86) and DOT/POL (0.85).
  • For the BTC vs. ETH pair, the price ratio (BTC price divided by ETH price) further increased beyond the 2-standard deviation (SD) level in March.
  • 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. Most L1 and L2 tokens dropped, except for CRO (+38.1%), TON (+17.1%), ADA (+4.1%) and BNB (+2.4%). 
  • Our events section shows recent and upcoming events for selected tokens, as well as important macroeconomic events.
Token1M Price ChangeEvents
Bitcoin (BTC)-2.5%US spot BTC ETFs saw $680 million in net outflows in March. US President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order to establish a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a Digital Asset Stockpile. 
Ether (ETH)-19.2%US spot ether ETFs recorded a monthly net outflow of $389 million in March. Ethereum core developers tentatively scheduled the Pectra mainnet upgrade on 7 May, subject to confirmation during the next All Core Devs Consensus call. In addition, the Pectra hard fork finalised on the third testnet, Hoodi, on 26 March. 
Cronos (CRO)+38.1%Cronos completed its v5 upgrade on 18 March, which includes the plan to reissue 70 billion CRO that was burned in 2021 to the Cronos Strategic Reserve escrow wallet. 
USD Coin (USDC)N/AUSDC’s market cap reached a record high above $60 billion. Circle announced an expansion to Japan through local partnerships include with SBI Holdings to initiate the launch of USDC. There are also plans for local exchanges to list and distribute USDC in the near future.
Hyperliquid (HYPE)-35.4%The linking of Hyperliquid’s spot trading platform HyperCore and HyperEVM is live on mainnet, which enables composability for various DeFi interactions. Hyperliquid came under scrutiny after a vault attack on 26 March resulted in approximately $6.2 million being extracted from the platform. 
Cosmos Hub (ATOM)-7.0%Interchain Labs tested an Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) transaction from Cosmos Hub to Ethereum to boost interoperability between the two networks. This is part of the upcoming Eureka upgrade for IBC. 
As of 31 Mar 2025 Sources: Crypto.com Research, CoinGecko

Read the full Alpha Navigator report: Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [March 2025]

Author

Research & Insights Team

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