Crypto Market Update

U.S. equities are flat in today’s trading ahead of tomorrow’s market closure in recognition of Juneteenth. This morning’s retail sales report showed consumer spending slowing, with MoM sales reading +0.1% versus +0.3% expected and core sales at -0.1% versus +0.2% expected. Rates and the DXY are declining in response to the data, while crypto assets continue to show weakness. BTC 1.24% fell to the low $64,000s this morning and ETH 3.17% briefly dropped to $3,350. Altcoins continue to perform poorly, with the TOTAL3 index decreasing 12.15% thus far in June. ZKsync is among the worst performers in the top 100 after 41% of the top 10,000 airdrop addresses have sold their full allocations over the last 24 hours. ZK -0.30% has dropped approximately 24% since token claims went live yesterday.

Coinbase Enables Pre-Launch Markets

Coinbase International has enabled the trading of pre-launch markets. Pre-launch markets are tokens that have not had their token generation event (TGE) yet, allowing users to speculate on the future price of new tokens. Pre-launch markets will only allow for up to 2x leverage compared to the usual 10x, and have a maximum notional position limit of $50,000. Once the underlying token is launched, the pre-launch contract will convert into a traditional perpetual futures contract. Pre-launch markets are only available to Coinbase International institutional clients and Coinbase Advanced customers outside the US, Canada, and UK. The first pre-launch market listing is EIGEN, the native token of restaking protocol, EigenLayer. EIGEN-PERP went live this morning at an opening price of $7.31, implying an FDV of $12.2 billion.

Hashkey Group Reveals Platform Token Details

HashKey Group plans to list its platform token, HSK, on its exchanges in the third quarter as well distribute its community airdrop later this month. Hashkey Group is an Asian digital asset firm comprised of different business including Hashkey Capital, Hashkey Cloud, Hashkey Tokenisation, Hashkey NFT, and two Hashkey-branded crypto exchanges. Hashkey Group recently raised capital in a Series A round, valuing the group at over $1.2 billion.  HSK will be an ERC20 with one billion total supply. 65% will be allocated to ecosystem growth, 30% to staff, and 5% to a reserve fund. Hashkey plans to implement a buy-and-burn mechanism where they are authorized to use up to 20% of net profits to purchase and burn HSK. HSK will be used across Hashkey products and services, including incentivizing activity on Hashkey’s layer-2 network, Hashkey Chain. Similar to how Coinbase has Base, Hashkey hopes to provide its customers with cheap, scalable, on-chain services with its Ethereum rollup. Hashkey Chain is expected to go live on testnet in the next few months.

Technical Strategy

Despite the ongoing consolidation across the Crypto space, Ethereum has actually grown technically stronger in recent weeks in relative terms, and it’s dominance chart shows ETH 3.17% to be nearing a potential breakout. Thus, any move above highs from early June would allow for some better relative strength out of Ethereum in the weeks to come.  At present,  ETH 3.17% dominance chart has been basing over the last six months and similar to ETHBTC in this regard.   While a breakout would be needed to favor Ethereum relative to Bitcoin as well as relative to other Coins, it’s absolute weakness has proven minor in recent weeks following just a fractional selloff from May peaks. Overall, I feel that ETH should hold up relatively better than many coins during this consolidation, and upon proof of a breakout in its market dominance chart, would be correct to overweight in larger size.

Daily Important Metrics Crypto Size Bullish signal is tied to the crypto market growing Market cap 2.35T $-45.1B (-1.89%) BTC Dominance 54.92 % (1.34%) Stablecoins Increase in circulating stablecoins is a Bullish signal In Circulation +$113B (-0.01%) In Exchanges +$20B (0.23%) BTC Metrics A decrease in Bitcoin on exchanges is bullish, indicates investors are moving coins to cold storage # BTC Exchanges +$2.3M (0.16%) Funding Rates Positive funding rates indicate traders are Bullish Aggregate +0.5173 (0.0327) Binance +0.3900 (0.5317) Bitfinex +0.0265 (0.0622) Bitmex +0.9936 (-0.0064) ByBit +0.2426 (0.2719) Deribit +0.0147 (0.0134) Huobi +1.0000 (1.0000) Kraken +0.2959 (-0.8687) Mean +0.5173 (0.0327) OKex -0.2135 (-0.4028) Sentiment BMI : 38 (100.00%) Futures A positive spread between Futures Prices and Spot Prices is Bullish CME Price $65,490 (-0.68%) Spot Basis +$57 (0.09%) Volume 597,209 (230.61%) Open Interest 294,175 (-0.96%) Options all exchanges Higher open interest change in a bull market is bullish for the sector Volume 22,231 (306.64%) Open Interest 263,091 (4.11%) Vol. Put/Call Ratio 0.5409 (-24.66%) OOI Put/Call Ratio 0.4549 (-2.12%) All metrics as of 2024-06-18 12:00:26 All Funding rates are in bps Crypto Prices Symbol Market Cap Last Price Daily Change Year to Date Relative to BTC YTD BTC $1.28T $64,689 -1.03% 53.17% ETH $416B $3,406 -3.35% 49.69% -2.27% SOL $63B $135 -5.51% 33.12% -13.09% DOGE $1.2M $0.0012 -40.88% -98.67% -99.13% All prices as of 2024-06-18 11:00:08 Exchange Traded Products (ETPs) Symbol Prem. to Nav Last Price Daily Change Year to Date Relative to BTC YTD BITW -32.38% $35 -2.97% 50.21% -1.93% ETHE -0.37% $32 -3.69% 64.16% 7.18% News Quick Bits The Block HashKey to list platform token in Q3, community airdrop planned for this month HashKey Group, an Asia-based crypto financial services firm, said it will list the token in Q3 and launch a community airdrop in late June. The Block 41% of top ZKsync token airdrop recipients sold full allocation: Nansen 28.8% of addresses held onto all of their claims, with 30.1% offloading at least some of their allocation, according to Nansen. Decrypt.co Futures Funding Rates Show Bitcoin Traders Are Still Bullish Despite Rout It's an indicator there are more traders opening long than short positions—and they think their gains will eventually outweigh the cost. The Block Coinbase starts offering pre-launch markets trading on its international and advanced exchanges Coinbase International has added a pre-launch markets feature that allows some users to trade perpetual futures contracts on tokens that are not on spot exchanges. Market Data The Block Spot bitcoin ETFs see $145 million exit as outflows persist The ETFs experienced $580 million in weekly outflows last week amid the hawkish FOMC meeting, according to CoinShares. Regulation The Block US SEC pushes back against Ripple’s efforts to lower its fines saying the firm ‘is agreeing to nothing’ The SEC rebutted Ripple's push for lower fines in its case against the regulator and said circumstances were different than past penalties. Product Updates and Partnerships The Block RISC Zero rolls out production-ready zkVM RISC Zero has introduced a new general-purpose zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) that is production-ready. The Block Solana creator platform DRiP Haus targets July for mobile app release, says founder The collectibles platform is hoping the mobile app will make it easier to digest new types of content, such as podcasts.