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What happened today?

Interesting moves in the market today as the S&P500 lost $1.5T in market cap while crypto actually looks to have gained on the day. As we mentioned in Monday’s edition, it really does feel like there has been a sentiment shift within the space. Looking at data from Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas, the major reason BTC has performed so well in light of the laundry list of catastrophes that have occurred YTD is that the ETFs and Michael Saylor have gobbled up every dump. Whereas previously, most of the market would just move reflexively around BTC’s price action, altcoins have significantly underperformed it this cycle. This fact is likely due to the aforementioned buyers which don’t exist for any other coin in the market. ETH of course has spot ETFs on the market, yet the volume pales in comparison to what the BTC ETFs do.

Something else that I feel like I have to comment on from today is the official Base account promoting a coin which ran to $15M before a second one was launched, dropping the price by 90% in a matter of seconds. First off, saying that Base rugged the coin is not accurate. It was launched to represent a post they made on the Zora platform, a company they have heavily promoted over the last few months. Zora’s value prop is to give back to content creators via trading fees, meaning that posts (anything from images to articles) made on Zora have a tradable coin attached to them. If this sounds odd to you, I would agree, but that’s besides the point.

The problem here is traders viewed the launch as something to speculate on, and when a new post was made along with a new coin, the speculative value of “the only coin launched by Base” was gone. Whether the Base team didn’t see this coming or simply don’t understand the psychology of traders is uncertain, as I think any of us could have predicted how this would go. I’ve seen the founders of some of the top chains in this industry regularly promote scams, yet rarely is there pushback to this degree. I think the reason is just how out of touch this was — in the aforementioned scams, it wasn’t the blockchain that ended up crashing the price but rather the team behind the underlying token. In this case, the reason it crashed was singularly due to the launch of another Zora coin by the Base account. How you end up viewing this situation is up to you, but I think this should be a real wake up call for their team to re-examine their strategy and get more crypto-native.

Trading Talk

I’ve pointed out the impressive growth of stablecoins a few times, but given the release of Bitwise’s Q1 ‘25 report today and the outperformance of Curve DAO (CRV) I want to take a look at this again. First and foremost, if you want to check out the Bitwise report for yourself you can find it here, although fair warning it is not short. Many of the slides later in the report depict the progress the industry has made over the last few years, but one chart in particular stood out to me which you can see below.

For the first time in history, the volume done in 2024 by stablecoins onchain was higher than the volume done by Visa’s payments network. This is just one metric, and the use cases for stablecoins are much broader than Visa payments which could lead to more potential sources for volume, but it’s very interesting nonetheless. Bringing it back to the first line of this section, we can also see CRV is trading up 10% on the day despite poor performance in equities and quiet times in crypto. For those who haven’t been following this trade, Curve is the leading platform for stablecoin swaps. It’s also one of the only businesses in crypto with steady cashflows that justify its valuation, which I believe is the reason it’s holding up so well relative to the rest of the altcoin market. It still trades very far off it’s all-time-highs, so I think this is an interesting one to keep an eye on as the year goes on.

Tweet of the Day

Oof.

Biggest Headlines

The Beluga intern has been hard at work gathering all the most important crypto news stories so you have them in one place!

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Alt Coins and Stocks

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The content on this site is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. While Beluga strives to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information, there may be discrepancies when comparing our data to that of financial institutions, service providers, or specific product websites. Always consult with a professional before making any financial decisions.

Will McKinnon is the Head of Content for Beluga and has spent every day for many years trading coins. For that reason there are too many to name, however his largest holdings by a significant margin are Ethereum and Bitcoin. NFA DYOR