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Driven by euphoria around Donald Trump's upcoming inauguration, crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) saw $2.2B in inflows last week, with Bitcoin ETPs contributing $1.9B and total crypto ETP assets under management reaching a record $171B. While BlackRock's iShares ETFs attracted $897M in inflows, Grayscale's crypto ETFs faced $145M in outflows.
Bitcoin reached a new all-time high of $109,333 ahead of Trump's inauguration, with the price surge following Trump's Sunday speech, which highlighted crypto performance and his campaign promises to establish a strategic national Bitcoin reserve. BTC briefly dipped below $100,000 following the launch of Melania Trump's memecoin but quickly recovered. Its market dominance approached 60% with a record $1.75 trillion market cap differential over Ethereum. Some experts are anticipating this rally to continue as Trump's pro-crypto policies are implemented.
InfinityPools has launched on Base. It introduces a novel approach to leverage trading that eliminates liquidations by borrowing concentrated AMM liquidity to create built-in downside protection. InfinityPools allows for theoretically unlimited leverage by treating concentrated liquidity positions as implicit put options at the liquidation price, allowing traders to maintain positions regardless of price movements while paying ongoing interest. It aims to generate better yields for liquidity providers through continuous borrowing of out-of-range liquidity to protect levered positions.
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is undergoing a leadership restructuring to improve technical expertise, ecosystem communications, and faster execution while maintaining its commitment to user privacy and censorship resistance. The foundation explicitly rejects becoming a lobbying organization or centralized power and wants to remain neutral for both individual and institutional users. The EF has previously faced criticism for not taking a more proactive stance toward promoting ETH and the ecosystem, especially as Solana continues to gain momentum and adoption.
Delphi Digital predicts Bitcoin's bull run will continue based on monthly RSI patterns and institutional interest and that Solana will continue to outperform Ethereum due to superior UX and SVM adoption. The analysis anticipates major shifts in multiple sectors: NFTs resurging through tokenization of real-world assets, DeFi evolving into DeAI with automated capital allocation, and agents becoming major market players. The report highlights technological developments expected to drive 2025 growth, including zkVM adoption improving cross-chain interoperability, high-throughput chains like Hyperliquid and Sui enabling new experimentation, and consumer DeFi expansion through zkTLS technology enabling private onchain data integration.
This post critiques the scalability challenges of Ethereum rollups compared to high-performance blockchains like Solana and "Based rollups," arguing that rollups are inherently limited by Ethereum's upgrade pace. It emphasizes Solana's superior throughput trajectory, including innovations like Firedancer, and contends that Ethereum scaling will require more aggressive and riskier trade-offs to compete effectively in the global demand landscape.
This thread addresses common critiques of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), debunking myths about its engagement, use of the chain, funding practices, and transparency. It highlights EF's initiatives, like staking ETH to fund clients, using Ethereum for grants and events, and supporting core developers, while emphasizing the need for constructive dialogue and collaboration within the community.
Solana is under heavy pressure from TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins, which are causing transaction fees to spike and failure rates to double to 40% despite low compute unit utilization. This highlights scalability challenges, likely because of network bandwidth bottlenecks and overestimated app resource needs, with block propagation and signing also affected.
World Liberty Fi made strategic cryptocurrency investments to celebrate Donald J. Trump's inauguration as the 47th U.S. President, including $47M each in ETH and wBTC and $4.7M in Aave, LINK, TRX, and ENA.
Coinbase's retail borrow product has seen rapid adoption, with Bitcoin supplied by borrowers increasing by 110.76 BTC ($11.63M) in just two days, showing the transparency and growth of onchain finance.
Trump's crypto allocation could either fund major fiscal projects, boosting crypto's reputation and sparking a golden age, or serve personal gain, fueling skepticism and chaos.
Solana's infrastructure is facing major issues, with 40% of transactions failing, key platforms like Coinbase and Binance struggling, and tools like Phantom and Jupiter breaking down.