Market Update
- Equities are mixed today but on track for the seventh straight week of gains, the longest winning streak since 2017. The Nasdaq gained .38% while the S&P fell .49%. Both indices are in striking distance of all-time highs following comments from Fed officials about inflation coming down and potential rate cuts in 2024. BTC has pulled back to $41.8k, down 3.3% after facing resistance at $43.4k. ETH is performing in line with BTC, falling 3.2% to $2.2k. Solana’s top memecoin BONK has outperformed the top 100 on both daily (+79.2%) and weekly timeframes (136.9%). Momentum that started on chain continued with major CEX listings, after an initial sell-off the rally continued following a listing on Coinbase. Three of the top five weekly performers were Cosmos based assets, driven by investors buying network tokens to stake for potential airdrops. Decentralized exchange OSMO and layer-ones INJ and KUJI were the top beneficiaries. The run was preceded by TIA climbing over 6x from its airdrop price, also due to anticipation of potential airdrops for stakers.
- Sales of Solana’s Saga phone have exploded, largely due to the Solana-based memecoin BONK. New phone owners are receiving an airdrop of 30 million BONK tokens, valued at approximately $700, which is more than the phone's $599 cost. This has caused a significant increase in Saga phone sales, which have grown more than ten times in just two days. The demand is so high that it's anticipated all units will be sold before the new year, as mentioned by Solana co-founder Raj Gokal on social platforms. The demand spike has led Anatoly Yakovenko, Gokal's colleague, to suggest raising the phone's price. The Saga is a blockchain-enabled smartphone featuring advanced crypto storage capabilities through its integrated hardware. Owners of Solana wallets that have the Saga Genesis Token, received when activating the Saga phone, are eligible to claim 30 million BONK tokens via the Bonk DApp, accessible through the Saga's exclusive DApp store.
- Arbitrum (ARB N/A% ), a layer-2 blockchain, encountered a "partial outage" on Friday due to a significant increase in transaction traffic. This disruption primarily affected the blockchain's sequencer, a crucial component likened to "air traffic control" for managing transaction order in layer-2 networks like Arbitrum. The sequencer's failure during the traffic spike caused confusion and worry among the Arbitrum community, leading to the cancellation of a scheduled "ask me anything" event on Twitter and a flurry of anxious messages on Arbitrum's Discord. This isn't the first time Arbitrum's sequencer has experienced problems; a similar incident in June led to a backlog of unprocessed transactions, though it was resolved within hours. Despite these technical difficulties, the market for Arbitrum's ARB token remained largely unaffected, showing declines of 4.9% today, largely line with the rest of the alts market.
Daily Technical Strategy
Mark L. Newton, CMT
Head of Technical Strategy
RNDR has broadly outperformed in recent weeks, highlighting a period of above-average relative strength for many of the Decentralized tokens. Despite Friday's -1.8% decline, RNDR is still likely to close the week higher than 18% and has lifted more than 240% since late August. At current levels, RNDR has surpassed the 50% retracement level of its consolidation from 11/2021 into June 2022, and given that RNDR is set to close well up off early week lows, should push higher to near-term targets to an initial resistance zone at $5.41 up to $6.06. Above $6.06 would have little resistance until $8.24 but seems difficult to get above this level without some consolidation in prices likely starting in Q1. Momentum per MACD is overbought on weekly charts, but until prices show evidence of making a reversal to close well down off the early week highs, the path of least resistance remains higher, and expect this can climb to $6 sometime in the next 1-2 weeks before resistance takes hold. Dips should find solid support near $2.90-$3.05 before pushing higher.
Daily Important Metrics
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All metrics as of December 15, 2023 1:54 PM
All Funding rates are in bps
Crypto Prices
| Symbol | Market Cap | Last Price | Daily Change | Year to Date | Relative to BTC YTD |
 BTC | $822B | $42,023 | ↓ -2.41% | ↑ 154% | |
 ETH | $269B | $2,242 | ↓ -2.25% | ↑ 87% | ↓ -67% |
 SOL | $33B | $76.76 | ↑ 4.29% | ↑ 675% | ↑ 522% |
 ADA | $22B | $0.6163 | ↓ -3.51% | ↑ 150% | ↓ -4.01% |
 DOGE | $14B | $0.0950 | ↓ -2.40% | ↑ 35% | ↓ -118% |
 DOT | $8.9B | $7.08 | ↓ -4.18% | ↑ 63% | ↓ -91% |
 LINK | $8.2B | $14.80 | ↓ -3.36% | ↑ 167% | ↑ 13% |
 MATIC | $8.2B | $0.8595 | ↓ -1.65% | ↑ 13% | ↓ -141% |
 NEAR | $2.3B | $2.27 | ↓ -0.98% | ↑ 79% | ↓ -75% |
Exchange Traded Products (ETPs)
| Symbol | Premium to Nav | Last Price | Daily Change | Year to Date | Relative to BTC YTD |
| GBTC | ↓ -9.43% | $33.85 | ↓ -2.98% | ↑ 308% | ↑ 155% |
| BITW | ↓ -33% | $22.01 | ↓ -5.90% | ↑ 310% | ↑ 156% |
| ETHE | ↓ -15% | $18.48 | ↓ -1.97% | ↑ 288% | ↑ 135% |
| BTCC | ↑ 0.31% | $7.67 | ↓ -2.29% | ↑ 153% | ↓ -0.53% |
News
QUICK BITS
Decrypt.co BONK Spikes 101% Amid Solana Saga Sales Frenzy to Claim Airdrop Solana-based meme coin BONK has continued to soar in value and hit new all-time highs—and the Saga smartphone is an unexpected beneficiary. |
CoinDesk Arbitrum Hit by 'Partial Outage' Due to Traffic Surge The layer-2 blockchain stopped working as intended Friday morning. |
REGULATION
Bitcoin Magazine SEC Chair Gary Gensler Tells CNBC The Commission Is Taking A "New Look" At Spot Bitcoin ETFs Gensler's statements may have signaled a potential shift in regulatory stance towards spot Bitcoin ETFs. |
FUNDRAISING AND M&A
CoinDesk Early Ethereum Backers Cyber.Fund to Invest $100M in 'Cybernetic Economy' Cyber.Fund, which also backed Cosmos, Solana and Polkadot, is focused growing the "cybernetic economy," in which blockchain is the bedrock. |
NFTS
CoinDesk 'Bitcoin NFT' Hysteria Comes to Sotheby's as Super-Mario-Style Mushroom Character Tops $200K In the historic auction house's first-ever sale of the Ordinals inscriptions known as "NFTs on Bitcoin," a batch of three pixelated images from a mushroom-theme... |
