Weekly Beluga Insights

It may feel like Beluga is bringing up the Solana pump every week, but we simply can’t help it. At time of writing SOL is up 17% on the day and racing towards the $100 mark. On-chain activity continues to skyrocket as Solana DEX weekly volume has flipped that of Ethereum for the first time in history. Solana ecosystem certainly feels euphoric at the moment which has Beluga a bit worried, however a slew of upcoming token airdrops on the chain may prove to be enough of an incentive for traders to stick around. We discussed everything going on with Solana and much more in this week’s Beluga Podcast, so be sure to check it out via the link at the bottom of this newsletter!

As Solana has drawn a ton of interest from ETH traders, it has also opened the market’s eyes to some of the smaller chains that were launched during the bear market. Many Layer 1 networks completed large funding rounds, yet with a launch date in the midst of the worst crypto bear market ever they’ve sat fairly dormant - until now that is. Beluga’s favorite example of these tokens is Aptos, a fast and cheap Layer 1 network which has raised $350M over three rounds.

We’ve started to see some signs of life in APT price over the last few weeks, and as on-chain activity noticeably picks up it seems Aptos may benefit from the next liquidity rotation. Aptos is also party to a number of prevalent narratives including the aforementioned massive treasury, parallelized transaction execution, and a young ecosystem that has yet to release tokens for many of its apps. There are a number of token plays within the ecosystem such as Thala, the top Liquid Staking protocol on Aptos, however when we are this early to a network it is hard to predict which will be the ultimate winners.

For this reason Beluga is looking at accumulating Aptos itself provided we continue to see the alt coin rotation that has occurred over recent weeks. It currently sits at a $2.6B market cap at time of writing after some positive movement, but as we are heading into tax season we don’t believe there is a need to rush into the trade. Of course, we’ll keep our readers updated every week as things progress!

Quick Quips: Catch Up on What You Missed

• Trader turns $250 into $250k in one day

• Solana breaks DEX volume records

• Tether reveals ties to FBI, Secret Service

• Arbitrum goes down due to inscription attacks

Did you know?

In 2010, a man paid 10,000 bitcoins for a pizza to commemorate one of the first real-world transaction via Bitcoin. This amount is now worth over $400M by today’s prices, making it quite the expensive pizza.

Chart of the Week

Sei Network’s TVL sees its first surge in months as traders move funds on chain to trade memecoins.

Recent Beluga Content

This week we published our first Beluga Product Review as well as our first Spotlight! Check them out below:

• https://heybeluga.com/articles/spotlight-chris-akhavan/

• https://heybeluga.com/articles/intentx-product-review/

And of course be sure to watch our weekly Beluga Podcast where we cover everything that happened this week in crypto in under 5 minutes, and dive deeper into the important things after.