Hi, Degens! Quite an eventful week it was. 

Outages, breakdowns, ETFs making new records - the crypto world witnessed several developments. And as the halving nears, the market seems to be gathering momentum. 

Let’s begin the camaraderie. 

Bitcoin spot ETFs see $700 million in weekly inflows

Bitcoin Spot ETFs, including GBTC and the New-Born Nine ETFs, are still thundering along after a fortnight of their trading on exchanges. 

The 10 $BTC ETFs registered $700 million in inflows last week after successfully absorbing the FTX-led $1 billion GBTC liquidations the week prior. But a similar threat from Genesis’ bankruptcy plans looms over the ETF’s fate.  

Genesis wants to liquidate $1.3 billion of GBTC to repay its creditors. 

GBTC continues to shed. However, the bleeding looks stanched a bit. A total of $920 million flowed as redemption from Grayscale’s GBTC last week. Fidelity Investments and BlackRock Bitcoin ETFs emerged as the winners with $1.4 billion in inflows last week. 

GBTC still leads the pack with $27.6 billion in AUM. 

On Day 17, the net positive flows amounted to $1.63 billion. The ETFs have added over $7.7 billion in 17 days, excluding GBTC outflows. 

Meanwhile, BlackRock’s IBIT has made it to the 0.2% of ETFs. $40 billion of liquidity is expected to flow into Bitcoin ETFs in the next 3 years. 

GBTC outflows to the tune of $6 billion since the ETF launch have suppressed Bitcoin prices and we haven’t seen a jump as was expected after the launch. Bitcoin is nearing its final squeeze before halving and we may see historic halving trends help reach $BTC reach a new ATH soon. 

Meanwhile, Microstrategy raised its BTC stash to 190K bitcoins recently. Could Microstrategy stock be an alternative to Bitcoin ETFs? Read the full story here. 

Solana Breaks Its 364-day ‘No-outage’ Spree

2023 belonged to Solana with almost 1100% gains. Interesting project launches, multiple upgrades, reviving NFT markets, and a thriving community – Solana had what makes a crypto project the ‘gold standard.’ but for its old nightmares coming back! 

After 346 days of no network outages, the network witnessed its first outage for 5 straight hours. The official notification cited  ‘performance degradation’ as a cause. But we can only guess what that means.

The network restarted after 80% of the validators had upvoted a patchup upgrade. 

Solana token fell by 4% in response to the outage. The last outage happened on February 25 2023.

What’s the hype around Jupiter’s airdrops? 

It’s the airdrop season! Solana’s DEX aggregator Jupiter airdropped  $700 million worth of JUP tokens to early adopters this week. Jupiter has been a favorite among Solana’s project lineups. But the recent airdrops have riled the crypto community more than creating hype. 

The platform is being accused of cashing out behind the veil of airdrops. The controversy revolves around LFG Launchpad, developed by Jupiter and the one facilitating the JUP token sale. The Jupiter team seeded the launch pool with 250 million JUP, 18.5% of the total circulating supply.

At the $0.61 quoted price, the Jupiter team will take away $100M in USDC and 50M JUP. The team planned to withdraw liquidity, and Arkham Intel shows it has already begun to phase out the liquidity from the JUP pool. The team is also being criticized for paying LFG 100M JUP. 

People can trade USDC for JUP and vice versa at a predetermined exchange price between $0.40 and $0.69. 

The pool was open for seven days since Jupiter airdropped 1 billion JUP on Jan 31. Whatever is left in the pool now goes to the Jupiter team. Users could sell the airdropped JUP to the LFG pool during these 7 days. Let’s cancel the FUD. Jupiter isn’t running anywhere, after all. 

Notably, Jupiter surpassed Uniswap in trading volume in January. 

More news from the decentralized world 

• Dencun is now live on the Holesky testnet: Dencun Upgrade went live on the Holesky testnet on February 7 and now awaits a date for its mainnet deployment. The 9-step upgrade will bring proto-dank sharding to the Ethereum mainnet and help build scalability for faster transaction throughput and lower costs. 

• Ordinals are ruling the charts: 3 Bitcoin Ordinal projects have entered the top 13 NFT projects by market cap. RSIC Metaprotocol, Bitcoin Frogs, and Node Monkeys are the three Ordinal projects linked up in the coveted 13. Interestingly, RSIC metaprotocol was given as an airdrop 7 days ago. 

• GoDaddy partners with ENS (Ethereum Name Service): Hosting and domain company GoDaddy is partnering with ENS to help Ethereum users create flexible domain and ENS names. Users will be able to associate their domain name (.com, .xyz, etc.) with their Ethereum address. 

• Bitcoin reaches a four-week high: After the initial slump, Bitcoin is looking up, clawing its way past $44k and eyeing a $45K target next led on by whale activity. Also,  data from Glassnode revealed a multi-month high of 73 wallets holding over 1,000 Bitcoins. 

• Are Ether ETFs coming any soon?: The SEC has delayed another ETF application jointly filed by Galaxy Digital and Invesco.  SEC says It won’t ever approve an ETF with an underlying security. Though, thankfully, SEC has never called Ether a security, further clarity is much needed. 

In for a bonus shot? 

Did you hear about the Braavos x Starknet challenge? 

An X post invited hackers and developers by revealing the Seedphrase of a wallet and challenging them to hack it. The catch is the Wallet is secured by Braavos' Hardware Signer 2FA. Cool marketing to grab eyeballs, isn’t it? 

Also Read:

• Stablecoin regulations underway in the United States 

• Metamask and Robinhood join hands to make crypto transactions simpler

• Disney is set to buy a $1.5B stake in Epic Games 

Thanks for tuning in! We’ll see you next Thursday. 👋