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What happened today?

Bitcoin has experienced a surge back over $100k to start the week off, with the rising sentiment seemingly due to the impending “changing of the guard” on the regulatory side once Trump takes office towards the end of the month. Interestingly, while we saw alts show strength during BTC weakness over the last 2 weeks, today is the opposite with BTC leading the charge. Bitcoin ETF flows have also returned in strength with over $370M added to the Fidelity FBTC ETF today, indicating renewed interest from mainstream investors despite the brief period of outflows last week.

The unprecedented interest in the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs has put ETF providers into an arms race to try to catch the next big filing, and the growth in assets like XRP, Solana, and even LTC over the past year make them likely candidates for next to be approved. It really is only a matter of time before we see more of these, and an incoming administration which is FAR more accepting of crypto will help the process along.

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

• Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs have already added $585 million in 2025

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Solana proposal promises to bring support to billions of users

• Dogecoin to a Dollar? Galaxy predicts meme milestone as DOGE continues surge

Regulatory

• US prosecutors estimate over 1 million victims in Do Kwon’s criminal case

• Crypto industry waves goodbye to top Fed regulator as resignations pile up

New Launches

• New ETFs that combine bitcoin exposure and options are coming in 2025

Trading Talk

AI agent tokens remain the focus of most traders, with $AIXBT retaining 3% of the mindshare on crypto twitter (3x higher than the second place account, Mert), and with a majority of this activity happening on Coinbase’s Base network we are now at an interesting crossroads. For the last 2 years, while sometimes we would see some onchain activity move away from Solana, it was always for a brief period — for example, Sui meme season in Fall of 2023 lasted a few weeks, TON and XRP sharing a similar fate this year. The reason this was likely always so temporary is because the only thing people were trading were memecoins, and the hold that pump.fun (the largest token launcher in crypto) had and still has on the memecoin market was too strong for traders to stay away.

We now have added AI coins into the mix, and while many of them may share quite a few similarities with memecoins, these are not being deployed on pump.fun. Rather, most of attention lies within the Virtuals Protocol ecosystem on the Base network. In the same way pump.fun has become the standard for memecoin launching, it seems Virtuals is taking up that mantle for agents. Up until now Base seemed like it was still searching for its killer app that would keep users around, but I think they have now found it — now the question is how do they capitalize?

I along with many friends believe the $BASE token will be coming at some point, as the benefits for them are too high to pass up. They already have the users and onchain activity from this AI craze, and I think it would be foolish to pass up on the opportunity presented to them… especially given a far more relaxed regulatory environment. At the end of the day though this is just speculation, and they’ve been very tight-lipped about anything token related.

Tweet of the Day

Trading agent coins is definitely not easy mode. Seems like this meta has brought out all the scammers, be careful onchain.

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