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.

As the Beluga Brief grows we’ll try out new content sections and schedules to find what is best for our readers — since Memecoins are all the rage these days, we’ve added a section to cover all the craziness in the market from Marc Andreessen-funded AI memecoins to the most profitable traders turning $100 into millions. If you have other suggestions for things you’d like us to cover, feel free to leave a reply on our Twitter!

Fundstrat Solana Report

Our partners at Fundstrat, a leading market strategy and sector research fund, have just released their report on the cutting edge technology being developed on the Solana blockchain. They have also been kind enough to make it available to Beluga Brief subscribers for free!

If you’re interested in a deep dive into topics like the slide above, you can download the full report from the link below. You can expect more reports like this from our partners in the future, so be sure to stay tuned if you’re interested in getting ahead of the market!

What happened today?

After a long period of underperformance, it seems Ethereum started to wake up today hitting almost $3,700 at time of writing, up 10% on the day. Coinciding with the increase in price, onchain activity is also picking up with L2 volume on Uniswap hitting an all-time-high. For a long time, there was a lot of FUD around L2 networks sucking liquidity and volume off of Ethereum itself, however given this data it seems like the L2’s are doing exactly what they were designed for: scale Ethereum.

While it’s nice to see Ethereum get some love, it was a great day for the market as a whole. We’re continuing to see increased bids on alt-coins, and Bitcoin has rallied back to almost $96,000 once again. One of the most exciting parts of this BTC pump has been seeing public companies try to emulate the MicroStrategy formula by adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets — according to data from River, there are now 62 publicly traded companies holding Bitcoin, and this number is only increasing.

Between these companies and the massive bid on the Bitcoin ETFs, BTC now has quite a bit of sticky capital involved. We are now in a different paradigm than what we saw last cycle where most institutions were not really allowed to participate in crypto. There’s still plenty of speculative capital in BTC so I’m not sure what this means in the short term, but as the pool of sophisticated investors grows I expect BTC to exhibit more stable price action versus the wild -85% dump we saw off the highs in 2021.

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

• Why won’t Bitcoin reach $100,000 already?

• Bitcoin price could hit $740,000 by 2028: Pantera Capital CEO

Alt Coins and Stocks

• This public company’s stock price just doubled after revealing Bitcoin buying plan

Regulatory

• Appeals court rules against OFAC, says Tornado Cash sanctions unlawful

• Ex-CFTC Chair Chris Giancarlo, in running to become first ‘Crypto Czar,’ says crypto ‘considerable priority’ for Trump

New Launches

• Bitcoin Layer-2 GOAT network will let users stake Dogecoin to earn crypto

Miscellaneous

• Someone just took out a $2.75 million loan against this one-of-one crypto NFT

Memecoin Corner

Another wild 48 hours for memecoins is in the books, and it seems like AI agents are all the rage again despite the previous drama around the Eliza team. The Virtual protocol, a launchpad for tokenized agents on Base, has been a particularly large beneficiary of the agent crazy as well as the heightened volume on Base.

In fact, Ethereum-based memes have all seen some love today as the price of ETH itself rose — could we be seeing a rotation from Solana memes to their ETH counterparts? “OG Memes” $JOE, $KEKEC, $BITCOIN (HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu), and $SPX all sit up double digit percentages on the day, which is a great indicator as to the onchain health of Ethereum. The meme story this year has been almost entirely on Solana, so it’s interesting to see this activity spike.

Recent Beluga Content

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