Welcome to the Beluga Brief, where we deliver data-driven insights to your inbox every week, spending our time in the crypto trenches and combing through thousands of crypto news feeds so you don’t have to.

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What happened today?

For the first time in a while, we woke up to a sea of green this morning with Bitcoin climbing as high as $89,000 and now sits up 15% from its lows at the beginning of the month. Despite the strong price action of the day traders remain cautious, and likely with good reason given every bounce over the last few months has been met with further moves to the downside. As we all know the crypto market loves doing what we least expect it to — the aforementioned weakness seems to have resulted in traders expecting dumps to come after bounces, and this is precisely the time that moves higher tend to happen. It’s impossible to predict market movements off of short-term sentiment changes alone, but it’s important to identify these moments when it is more likely to happen.

In Friday’s edition we recapped Trump’s speech at the Blockworks Digital Assets Summit, however I want to highlight one piece of the admittedly short talk here: Trump endorses and sees the value of tokenized USD in the form of stablecoins. In fact, today it appears that World Liberty Financial (backed by Trump) has released their very own stablecoin. They may not be sexy, and they may not generate the 100x returns memecoins can, but I firmly believe the future of the dollar is tokenized and these events support that thesis. We are now within smelling-distance of $250B in stablecoins on chain and the issuance rate doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon — it’s clear people like having more control of their funds, and the ability to send them anywhere in the world instantly at virtually no cost.

Trading Talk

Sonic has once again gained a spot on the daily top gainers list, a nice respite from the brutal price action that took us from $1 to lows around $0.40. We’re now trading at the 60 cent mark, mostly due to Bitcoin itself bouncing however it’s clear Sonic has gained significant mindshare recently. While a low-volume market is bad for prices, it tends to make people look for safer yield-bearing places to leave their capital. Sonic seems to becoming the hub for that, no doubt spurred on by the CTO Andre Cronje’s development of new protocols and financial primitives.

For the last few days Andre has been openly discussing his plans for a new algorithmic stablecoin which definitely has my interest piqued, however the phrase “algo stable” sends shivers down my spine as I’m sure it does many other crypto natives. Every single previous attempt at this has ended in absolute shambles, but hey maybe this time is different? If Sonic can produce a top stablecoin, the effects it will have on the ecosystem cannot be understated — this is much easier than it sounds though, and with all the new companies entering the stablecoin space it gets harder everyday.

Tweet of the Day

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!

The Majors

• Standard Chartered swaps Tesla for bitcoin in ‘Mag 7’ test, finds higher returns and lower volatility

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Kraken considers $1 billion debt raise with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan ahead of possible IPO

• China’s CPIC rolls out $100M tokenized fund with HashKey as RWA trend expands in Asia

Miscellaneous

• Donald Trump’s crypto business launched a dollar coin called USD1: What we know so far

• Wall Street created Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs. Now crypto is going after equities like Tesla and Nvidia

New Beluga Starterpack

Beluga has teamed up with Walrus Protocol, a blockchain-based data storage solution incubated by Mysten Labs aiming to make onchain data storage cheaper and more efficient by leveraging the low fees and throughput of the Sui network.*

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