🐳 Daily Edition: Did the SEC Just Open the Door For Altcoin Season?

Despite tensions being quite high heading into today’s FOMC, it didn’t seem to have much of an impact on prices which stayed largely stable through the meeting. Since then, however, Bitcoin has reclaimed the $116k mark while Ethereum is once again trading around $4,600. More interesting are the moves in the altcoin sector with signs of life across the board, presumably due to the SEC approving “generic listing standards” for crypto ETFs. What this means is rather than needing each individual application to be judged separately, filings for the same asset can be jointly approved. The hope is that this makes approvals more streamlined than the current multi-month (or even multi-year) process we’ve been subject to. With several filings for Solana, XRP, and other altcoins currently out, we could be seeing these go live much sooner than anticipated.

Speaking of altcoins, it seems that Binance (or at least CZ, its former CEO) is entering the “Hyperliquid competitor” space with today’s Aster endorsement. It’s still unclear how much use the platform could gain given anecdotal reports from traders saying the UX is terrible, but either way the weight CZ carries in this industry can’t be understated: Aster’s token looks like it will end the day up +450% with a $3.7B FDV. Of course this is still far from Hyperliquid’s valuation of $58.3B, but an impressive gain on a highly liquid token nonetheless. The reason I’ve mentioned this story in addition to the above ETF news is that to me, it looks like the stars are aligning for an altcoin season to finally arrive. It’s been a while since we saw a liquidity event like Aster, and its encouraging to see the so-called “OG’s” of the industry like CZ continue to have market moving power. It may have looked like the memecoin teams took the space over for a second there, but it seems capital is interested to move back into utility coins provided they make the right value proposition.

Incredible rage bait from Maven

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

• Bitcoin steady as Fed cuts interest rates for first time since December

Altcoins and Stocks

• Movement to pivot to standalone Layer 1 blockchain after past controversy

• Kalshi partners with Solana and Base to boost ‘onchain innovation’ as platform closes gap with Polymarket

Regulatory

• SEC makes spot crypto ETF listing process easier, approves Grayscale’s large-cap crypto fund

Miscellaneous

• Suspect in Coinbase hack kept data for more than 10,000 customers on her phone, court filing alleges

This week Beluga is featuring the ether.fi Cash program, the latest product addition to a leading DeFi protocol which has already amassed over $5B in TVL. The best part of ether.fi's offering is the ability to use the card as either a high-reward debit account or a credit account that lets you borrow against your balance without having to sell — it's like having Aave in your pocket where each swipe of your card creates a new lending position against your collateral. To learn more about the card, check out our full review here or go directly to their site!