Flows Remain Positive but Coinbase Premium Flips to a Discount, SOL Continues to Outperform Market
Market Update
- The weekend saw choppy price action, following the significant leverage washout in the perps market on Thursday evening. BTC revisited the $65k level, marking a roughly 12% decrease from the previous week's high of $74k. Since then, its price has partially recovered, currently trading just above $67k. ETH experienced a steeper decline and a less vigorous recovery, dropping from last week's high of $4100 to $3400, and is now trading just below $3500. SOL continues to outperform the broader market, having surpassed the $200 mark over the weekend. It has seen a 20% increase over the past five days. Few assets are outperforming today, but among them are AVAX, which may be benefiting from a rotational trade from SOL gains, and JUP, the leading DeFi platform on Solana. Equity markets are trending higher ahead of a significant week for macro data, with SPX up 0.76% and the QQQ up 0.90%. The focal point this week is the FOMC meeting. While it's unlikely that there will be any change in the policy rate, attention will be on whether the Federal Reserve adjusts its expectations for rate cuts this year when it releases its quarterly dot plot. The futures market is currently pricing in three rate cuts, with the first expected in July. Thus, any stance more dovish than this could positively impact the current rate environment.
- Bitcoin ETFs witnessed inflows exceeding $2.5 billion throughout the entirety of last week. Net flows remained consistently positive over the week, though it's important to highlight that Thursday and Friday experienced a notable decline in comparison to daily totals earlier in the week. This decrease coincided with the Coinbase premium transitioning into a discount, indicating that BTC was slightly pricier on Binance than on Coinbase. This shift suggests a diminished net-buying pressure from U.S. investors, possibly attributable to relatively reduced demand from ETFs as well. The Coinbase discount has continued into today, but has begun to show signs of a rebound in recent hours. While not the sole indicator for BTC price, the metric's return to premium status would be a promising sign.
Source: Farside Investors, Fundstrat
- Moreover, inflows into crypto via stablecoins have remained robust, with the aggregate stablecoin market cap growing by another 1.2% over the past week.
Source: DefiLlama, Fundstrat
- Despite the profit-taking observed in L2 tokens such as OP and ARB 0.00% , the fee reductions across major L2 networks following the Dencun upgrade have been promising. This upgrade, focusing on scalability and considered one of the most crucial since the Merge, introduced data blobs to optimize transaction speed and cost on the mainnet. The median fee on Arbitrum has dropped from over $0.60 to $0.05, while Optimism's median fee has decreased from nearly $0.50 to less than $0.01. Base has seen the most significant decline, with fees dropping from over $0.50 to as low as $0.002 per transaction. Much of the discrepancy is likely due to the varying amounts of data being posted to the mainnet, as costs increase with the amount of data being transferred to blobs on Ethereum, as opposed to just transaction counts. It's also probable that as competition for blob space intensifies, fees will rise from their current levels, although they are likely to remain significantly lower than pre-Dencun upgrade levels. Nonetheless, this represents a positive step towards Ethereum's endeavor to scale in a modular fashion.
Daily Technical Strategy
Mark L. Newton, CMT
Head of Technical Strategy
This past weekend's decline in ETHUSD makes further weakness likely before a technical rally can get underway. Last week's break of the rising 9-day Simple moving average (SMA) for ETH represented the first break since mid-February when its rally from $2200 up above $4000 got underway. The act of violating its uptrend from February last week as ETH slid to new weekly lows is a short-term bearish development and likely brings about a test of $3360 and undercut down to $3134 before this stabilizes and turns back higher. Wave structure on hourly ETH charts seems to show four waves having been completed which could bring about a pullback to test and violate yesterday's intra-day lows near $3414. If this were to occur this would represent the first five-wave decline in months for ETH on daily charts. This has two important implications. Initially, this would signal that the decline from mid-March was nearing conclusion. However, this also likely means that gains would not immediately push back to new highs into April but likely retrace 38-62% of this prior decline before additional weakness happens into May. Following this consolidation, it's expected that ETH should move back to new highs into this Summer/Fall 2024. Overall, it's likely that recent weakness would bring about underperformance in ETH to Bitcoin on a relative basis and could show a bit more absolute weakness before bottoming out.
Daily Important Metrics
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All metrics as of March 18, 2024 10:50 AM
All Funding rates are in bps
Crypto Prices
| Symbol | Market Cap | Last Price | Daily Change | Year to Date | Relative to BTC YTD |
 BTC | $1.32T | $66,913 | ↓ -1.88% | ↑ 58% | |
 ETH | $419B | $3,489 | ↓ -3.62% | ↑ 53% | ↓ -5.10% |
 SOL | $88B | $197 | ↑ 1.70% | ↑ 94% | ↑ 35% |
 ADA | $23B | $0.6478 | ↓ -4.59% | ↑ 9.29% | ↓ -49% |
 DOGE | $20B | $0.1403 | ↓ -7.72% | ↑ 58% | ↓ -0.80% |
 DOT | $14B | $9.68 | ↓ -3.70% | ↑ 19% | ↓ -39% |
 LINK | $11B | $18.27 | ↓ -1.52% | ↑ 22% | ↓ -36% |
 MATIC | $10B | $1.02 | ↓ -5.48% | ↑ 6.13% | ↓ -52% |
 NEAR | $7.4B | $7.02 | ↓ -14% | ↑ 95% | ↑ 37% |
Exchange Traded Products (ETPs)
| Symbol | Premium to Nav | Last Price | Daily Change | Year to Date | Relative to BTC YTD |
| GBTC | ↑ 1.04% | $64.31 | ↑ 5.24% | ↑ 75% | ↑ 16% |
| BITW | ↓ -35% | $37.40 | ↑ 1.38% | ↑ 52% | ↓ -6.15% |
| ETHE | ↓ -17% | $34.16 | ↓ -0.96% | ↑ 76% | ↑ 17% |
| BTCC | ↓ -0.21% | $13.12 | ↑ 4.13% | ↑ 60% | ↑ 1.96% |
News
MARKET DATA
CoinDesk Nearly $100M Wagered on U.S. Presidential Election on Polymarket Blockchain bettors see a clear path to victory for Trump, and are bullish on ether hitting an all-time high in 2024 – but SOL might get there first, thanks to "... |
CoinDesk Indonesia’s Crypto Market Booms as Transactions Hit $1.92B in February The country's registered crypto investors also surged to 19 million users last month. |
The Block Base network sees surge in transactions and new users following Dencun upgrade The Dencun upgrade led to reduced transaction fees, likely setting the stage for increased activity for the Base network. |
The Block Spot bitcoin ETFs reach record highs for weekly inflows and trading volume Weekly net inflows into U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs reached a record $2.57 billion last week. Trading volume also hit a record $35.1 billion. |
CoinDesk Lure of Quick Money Sees $100M Flow to Solana Meme Coin 'Presales' Some onchain watchers estimate that over $100 million worth of tokens were sent to various meme coin presales over the weekend. |
DOSE OF DEFI
CoinDesk Ether.Fi's Token Debuts at $4.13 After Airdrop and Binance Launchpad Distribution Liquid restaking protocol Ether.Fi has issued its governance token (ETHFI) in the form of an airdrop and an over-subscribed Binance Launchpad round. |
NFTS
The Block Dogwifhat memecoin’s iconic photo sold as NFT for $4.3 million Crypto trader Gigantic Rebirth Ventures (GCR) made the winning bid of 1,210.8 ETH on the Foundation platform. |
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