What Is Happening In Crypto?

1) XRP rallied +35% last 1w as investors are betting that a verdict on the SEC-Ripple case will soon be reached, and in late 2020, the SEC charged the Ripple Network with selling unregistered securities after the platform sold $1.3bn worth of XRP. Ripple’s CEO had previously assured investors that the platform would not be affected if the SEC won the case as they could continue to build the business offshore. However, if Ripple is successful in this case, XRP’s legality in the US market will be solidified and thus drive a price rally. A summary judgment is expected to be reached in the next few weeks or even as soon as later this week. Traders have aggressively bought perp futures ahead of any announcement this week as open interest has increased from $1bn two weeks ago to $7.5bn. The funding rate is trading at a premium of +30% annualized. Volume has also increased from $20bn (24h) to $29.7bn. Mkt cap $28.5bn;

2) Stellar rallied +17% last 1w as the Stellar Development Foundation recently announced that it has partnered with Coinme, a leading crypto technology company, to integrate USDC into its ecosystem. The new feature will allow users to send USDC free of charge for peer-to-peer transactions and access USDC at thousands of Coinme locations across the US. The rally may also be driven by Stellar’s correlation with Ripple which has surged this past week with the SEC vs. Ripple case coming to a close - Stellar and Ripple have similar purposes to support the transfer of currency across borders, with Ripple using XRP and Stellar using USDC. Mkt cap $2.8bn;

3) RocketPool rallied +19% last 1w as Ethereum staking tokens surged with the Shanghai upgrade in less than two weeks, confirmed for April 12. RocketPool is currently third in TVL with $806m locked, behind Lido and Coinbase. Earlier this month, Rocket Pool announced its new Atlas upgrade, scheduled for early April at the latest. The upgrade will enable validators to withdraw their staked ETH and will also feature mini pools, solo staker migration to RocketPool, withdrawal queues, improved user interfaces, and lower ETH requirement for validators (allows staking with only 8 ETH instead of 16 ETH). Mkt cap $884m;

4) Tron rallied +8% last 1w despite the SEC probing the Tron Foundation and Justin Sun over charges of unregistered sales of TRX and BTT, which the regulator classifies as securities. Charges also included alleged fraudulent manipulation of the secondary market for TRX through engaging in more than 600,000 wash trades. Upon the news, TRX dropped by 13%, and TVL fell by 3%, although the price has since recovered slightly. Mkt cap $5.9bn;

5) Cardano rallied +7% last 1w as the network could be on the onset of becoming an individual asset, showing signs of decoupling from the rest of the crypto market. Despite broader market trends subsiding, the price rally indicates investors’ confidence in the network’s long-term potential and utility as addresses holding more than 10k ADA have collectively accumulated 1.03bn in the past five months. Cardano has undergone significant developments this year, including the launch of its first overcollateralized stablecoin, Djed, and the success of their SECP upgrade, which aims to boost Cardano’s interoperability for DApp development. Mkt cap $13.5bn;

6) Litecoin rallied +5% last 1w upon the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)’s recent announcement classifying certain digital assets, including Litecoin, Bitcoin, and Ether, as commodities. The clarity is promising for Litecoin as the SEC has been cracking down on projects in the crypto space for issues relating to the status of their assets. Mkt cap $6.6bn;

7) EOS rallied +5% last 1w as the EOS EVM went live in public testnet and opened for testers on March 27. The EVM Code and testnet have been completed, with only a security audit to be finished before the mainnet beta launch on April 14. The EOS EVM offers users nominal gas fees and faster transaction speeds than any other EVM in the market and allows Ethereum DApps to be launched on EOS cost-efficiently. Mkt cap $1.3bn;

8) Apecoin rallied +5% last 1w as the community declined the latest proposal to launch two new NFT collections: Multi-Link Ape Coin Armory Club and Ape Coin Pet Club. Each collection would have consisted of 20,000 NFTs, with existing Apecoin holders receiving an airdrop of a non-unique version of the NFT. The collections could have also been Apecoin’s ticket into the metaverse, as the NFTs would be linked to popular metaverse projects, including Decentraland, Otherside, and the Sandbox. However, despite these upsides, the project would have cost the ApeCoin DAO $168k, resulting in over 84% of delegates voting against the proposal and only 10% in favor. Mkt cap $1.5bn;

9) Arbitrum declined -59% last 1w following the completion of Arbitrum’s highly anticipated airdrop of its new governance token ARB to community members. The ARB token has a total circulating supply of 10bn with 56% allocated to the community – about 1.27bn ARB tokens (11.5% of total supply) were airdropped to wallets and 112m tickets (1.1%) to various DAOs operating in the ecosystem. Despite users claiming over $1bn worth of ARB tokens, the airdrop event went less than smoothly; hours leading up to the airdrop, Arbitrum’s website for claiming tokens crashed due to high server demand, while service outages and high fees also made claiming tokens difficult. Mkt cap $1.6bn;

10) Synthetix declined -8% last 1w despite having recently obtained a $20m investment from its new partnership with DWF Labs, a quantitative trading firm. DWF Labs acquired $15m worth of SNX tokens (paid with USDC) on March 20 to increase SNX liquidity and market-making across centralized and decentralized exchanges. As part of the partnership, Synthetix’s perpetual futures will also be integrated into DWF Labs’ trading, with DWF committing to buy another $5m worth of SNX once the integration is complete. Mkt cap $784m.

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