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• 13F Filings Disclose Wall Street’s FOMO
• Crypto Soars as Inflation Shows Signs of Cooling
• Chainlink Continues Powering Tokenization
Crypto Soars as Inflation Shows Signs of Cooling
While inflation shows tentative signs of easing, both Bitcoin and Ethereum surged on positive macro data and market forecasts suggesting potential rate cuts. However, Fed officials seem to be less optimistic. We’ll explore the conflicting signals, unpack the Fed’s next move, and highlight key events that could impact markets this week.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) dipped to 3.4% in April, down from March’s level of 3.5%. Similarly, Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, also slightly declined to 3.6%. This decrease, coupled with weaker-than-expected retail sales data, suggests consumer spending may be easing, further dampening inflationary pressures. However, the Producer Price Index (PPI), which reflects wholesale costs, exceeded expectations in April, suggesting price pressures persist and may eventually reach end-consumers.
Nevertheless, the CPI news on May 15 was followed by a daily surge in Bitcoin’s price, jumping 7.5% to around $66K. Furthermore, on May 20, speculation around a potential ETH spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the U.S. sent the market on an even bigger rally, with Bitcoin and Ethereum surging by 13.6% and 24%, respectively over the past week.
Figure 1 – Bitcoin/USD Performance Against Last Week’s Events
Source: TradingView
Still, the high-for-longer sentiment seems to be the overarching theme in the Fed. Last week, high ranks of the Federal Reserve like Chair of Supervision Michael Barr and Vice Chair Philip Jefferson reiterated that although April’s reading may be considered encouraging, it’s still not enough to change the Fed’s stance on cutting interest rates.
Later today, members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) have a busy schedule of events where they’ll speak about economic outlook and monetary policy, which will be closely monitored given their effect on the general market sentiment.Coming out tomorrow, the minutes from the FOMC meeting earlier this month are expected to reveal further clarity on the Fed’s next move regarding interest rates and money supply. Should this reveal a dovish stance, investors may be pushed towards riskier assets. According to CME FedWatch, market participants are currently pricing a 60% chance of rate cuts in September and 88.5% in December.
13F Filings Disclose Wall Street FOMO
Beyond the macro news, on Wednesday the deadline for the 13F filings concluded, revealing significant Bitcoin holdings among investment managers. There are 937 professional investors holding $11B in the U.S. Spot Bitcoin ETFs, representing 18.7% of the ETFs’ assets under management. In comparison, Gold ETFs had a modest 95 professional firms invested by the first quarter following the launch. Hedge fund Millennium Management is the largest institutional holder of the new funds, with roughly $2B invested, however the reach extended beyond traditional investment firms.
It has also been made public that the State of Wisconsin Investment Board purchased more than $160M in shares of Bitcoin ETFs in Q1, with the majority of that representing assets in the Wisconsin Retirement System, a growing trend that exemplifies the demand for Bitcoin as a store of value. Additionally, some of America’s biggest banks who had voiced adversary stances towards crypto have also reported Bitcoin ETF holdings. Morgan Stanley has recently disclosed it has $270M worth of shares while JP Morgan has invested $1.2M.
These disclosures are coming from the Wall Street giants who claimed Bitcoin was a bubble not so long ago. This level of adoption shows how Bitcoin’s fundamentals have pushed the world’s largest players to change their stance. Institutions are now mitigating their reputational risk by not delaying their Bitcoin adoption any further, which could otherwise be deemed unsound from an investment standpoint. On that front, last week Bitcoin ETFs crossed $1B in inflows, the best weekly performance since March, illustrating that Bitcoin adoption is not slowing down since the 13F filings. For instance, on a monthly basis, the ETFs have purchased over 21,700 BTC which is almost three times the new supply coming from miners, in the same time frame, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 – US Bitcoin Spot ETF Flows vs. Bitcoin Block Rewards
Source: 21Shares, Glassnode
Chainlink Continues Powering Tokenization
Chainlink is the leading decentralized oracle network, bridging the gap between blockchains and the external world. While blockchains are powerful, they live in siloed environments, meaning they cannot access information or data that exists off-chain. Chainlink offers an expansive set of Oracle-based services and leverages its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to integrate data from existing external systems across any blockchain securely. For instance, by providing Proof-of-Reserves for traditional assets or executing Verifiable Random Functions to fairly mint NFTs. Chainlink’s innovative solution has enabled over $10T in transactions across 22 separate blockchain networks, showcasing the reach this innovative protocol has on the wider industry.
Last Thursday, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the world’s largest securities settlement system which processed $3 quadrillion in securities in 2023, announced it successfully completed a pilot project in collaboration with Chainlink and major financial institutions such as BNY Mellon and JP Morgan. The project builds upon the existing DTCC Mutual Funds Profile Service I (MFPS I), which serves as the industry standard for transmitting NAV data, such as fund price and rate. The pilot does not affect initial workflows such as calculating fund data, as the focus was to create a standardized way to disseminate fund information across different blockchains. The project is likely to expedite real-world asset tokenization, which has become an increasingly important industry segment, showcased by tokenized government securities growing 10x in assets under management since the start of 2023, from nearly $100M to almost $1.4B.
Figure 3 – Market Landscape of Tokenized Government Securities by Product
Source: 21co on Dune Analytics
Every day, the DTCC’s service oversees the transmission of price and rate data for tens of thousands of mutual fund securities. In the current architecture, the DTCC links funds and service providers to distributors, collecting relevant fund data via a message queue and file-based methods, and finally disseminates them at regular intervals, as shown below.
Smart NAV extends the dissemination capabilities of MPFS I, where in addition to data being sent through existing channels, it is transformed into a modern JSON-based data structure. The newly formatted data is wrapped into a blockchain transaction, signed by DTCC’s private keys, and finally routed to Chainlink’s CCIP, allowing relevant fund data to be sent across almost any blockchain, private or public. Once the fund data is transmitted to these networks, a CCIP based smart contract forwards the data to the Smart-NAV-specific smart contracts responsible for validating permissions and storing data for the interested parties to consume.
The dissemination process highlighted above has an effect on traditional funds, as well as those represented on-chain. For instance, the real-time API sits off-chain and pushes fund data to all those integrated with the service. As soon as the relevant data is available, the API can be queried for both real-time and past information, which is impossible with the current MPFS I service. This distinction is crucial, as while the solution is inherently blockchain-based, it can clearly benefit participants who are not yet exploring tokenizing their funds, by allowing for faster and historical data dissemination. Additionally, Single Fund Consumer Smart Contracts and Bulk Consumer Smart Contracts, allowed participants to simulate tokenized funds, or a grouping of funds, which are instantly enriched with the respective data, as soon as available for the off-chain counterparty. This prevents users needing to store NAV data in a separate database that references the fund itself, thus allowing for a more streamlined tokenization process.
The collaboration between the DTCC and Chainlink represents a significant leap forward in the realm of tokenization. Chainlink’s CCIP abstracts away the need for the DTCC to directly connect to every blockchain network where tokenized funds may live on. This would be difficult for the DTCC to execute alone, given the potential costs and technical nuances that exist across chains. Hence, the use of Chainlink is vital as we envision a cross-chain tokenized landscape. The project presents a glimpse into the future where the process of distributing data is hosted on-chain, allowing for quicker, dynamic and historical distribution, empowering investors to make more informed investments. The project could be taken further to automate workflows, for instance the Bulk Consumer Smart Contract could represent a model portfolio, enabling the respective smart contract to rebalance these automatically. While the project is still young, any developments will be closely monitored, given the effect it would have on the growing industry segment of tokenization.
This Week’s Calendar
Source: Forex Factory, 21Shares
Research Newsletter
Each week the 21Shares Research team will publish our data-driven insights into the crypto asset world through this newsletter. Please direct any comments, questions, and words of feedback to research@21shares.com
Disclaimer
The information provided does not constitute a prospectus or other offering material and does not contain or constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy securities in any jurisdiction. Some of the information published herein may contain forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties and that actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. The information contained herein may not be considered as economic, legal, tax or other advice and users are cautioned to base investment decisions or other decisions solely on the content hereof.
• Cryptoassets rallye on increasing Ethereum ETF approval odds and futures short liquidations
• Our in-house “Cryptoasset Sentiment Indicator” has increased but still signals neutral levels in sentiment
• Ethereum futures short liquidations spike to the highest level since March reversing much of ETH’s underperformance vis-à-vis BTC this year
Chart of the Week
Performance
Over the past week, cryptoassets outperformed traditional assets like equities and commodities by a very wide margin buoyed by institutional buying interest and higher odds of an early Ethereum spot ETF approval in the US.
While last week accelerating net fund flows into cryptoasset ETPs and large net spot exchange outflows provided a major tailwind, this week the major focus has been on an earlier-than-expected spot Ethereum ETF approval in the US.
More specifically, it seems as if the issuers are doing last-minute revisions to their 19b-4 filings to meet the upcoming final deadline for the SEC to decide on VanEck’s application for a spot Ethereum ETF which officially ends on the 24th of May (Friday this week).
Based on the latest comments by Bloomberg ETF analysts, an approval appears to be likely by Wednesday this week already.
Except for Galaxy Digital, the applicants are comprised of the same companies that filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF as well including iShares and Fidelity.
The short-term increase in approval odds mostly came as a surprise as Bloomberg ETF analysts increased their odds from 25% originally to 75% due to the fact that the SEC asked exchanges to update the 19b-4 filings on an accelerated basis.
Polymarket – a popular betting website – is currently implying a 54% chance of an approval by the end of May, up from 10% only a couple of days ago.
The unexpected increase in approval odds also took Ethereum futures short sellers by surprise as short liquidations on Ethereum futures contracts spiked to the highest level since March (Chart-of-the-Week). This propelled Ethereum’s price higher by more than 10% within hours and reversed much of Ethereum’s underperformance vis-à-vis Bitcoin this year. Short liquidations were also a major factor behind Bitcoin’s rise past 70k USD again.
In general, among the top 10 crypto assets, Solana, Ethereum, and Avalanche were the relative outperformers.
However, overall altcoin outperformance vis-à-vis Bitcoin still remained relatively low, with only around 25% of our tracked altcoins managing to outperform Bitcoin on a weekly basis.
Sentiment
Our in-house “Cryptoasset Sentiment Index” has increased following the latest developments but overall remains at neutral levels in sentiment.
At the moment, 10 out of 15 indicators are above their short-term trend.
Last week, there were significant reversals to the upside in the 25-delta BTC option skew and the BTC futures long liquidations dominance.
That being said, the Crypto Fear & Greed Index already signals ”Extreme Greed” as of this morning.
Performance dispersion among cryptoassets has continued to remain low, i.e. most altcoins are still highly correlated with Bitcoin.
Altcoin outperformance vis-à-vis Bitcoin was also still subdued, with only around 25% of our tracked altcoins that have outperformed Bitcoin on a weekly basis despite the recent comeback of Ethereum vis-à-vis Bitcoin.
In general, increasing (decreasing) altcoin outperformance tends to be a sign of increasing (decreasing) risk appetite within cryptoasset markets.
Meanwhile, sentiment in traditional financial markets remains relatively elevated, judging by our own measure of Cross Asset Risk Appetite (CARA).
Fund Flows
Last week, we saw continued positive net inflows into global crypto ETPs with around +793.2 mn USD in net inflows across all types of cryptoassets (week ending Friday). Yesterday, we also saw very strong inflows into global crypto ETPs of around +280.2 mn USD in a single day.
Global Bitcoin ETPs saw net inflows of +826.4 mn USD last week of which +882.3 mn (net) were related to US spot Bitcoin ETFs alone. Yesterday also saw very significant inflows of around +241.1 mn USD into US spot Bitcoin ETFs. So, last week’s acceleration in fund flows seems to continue this week so far.
Hong Kong spot Bitcoin ETFs continued to experience net outflows of around -81.4 mn USD last week, according to data provided by Bloomberg.
The ETC Group Physical Bitcoin ETP (BTCE) also saw net inflows equivalent to +0.5 mn USD while the ETC Group Core Bitcoin ETP (BTC1) saw net inflows of +1.1 mn USD last week.
The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) continued saw minor net inflows of approximately +12.4 mn USD last week while other major US spot Bitcoin ETFs continued to attract new capital, e.g. iShares’ IBIT with net inflows of around +131.8 mn USD.
In contrast to Bitcoin ETPs, Global Ethereum ETPs continued to see declining ETP flows last week, with net outflows of around -41.7 mn USD. Yesterday we still saw continued outflows from global Ethereum ETPs of around -13.2 mn USD. This might reverse over the coming days due to the latest performance reversal in Ethereum.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong spot Ethereum ETFs that saw minor net outflows last week of around -1.5 mn USD, according to data provided by Bloomberg.
Furthermore, the ETC Group Physical Ethereum ETP (ZETH) saw minor net outflows of -0.6 mn USD last week. The ETC Group Ethereum Staking ETP (ET32) shares outstanding remained flat over the past week.
Besides, Altcoin ETPs ex Ethereum continued to see minor net inflows of around +14.5 mn USD last week.
Besides, Thematic & basket crypto ETPs still saw some minor net outflows of -5.9 mn USD, based on our calculations. The ETC Group MSCI Digital Assets Select 20 ETP (DA20) managed to attract some net inflows last week (+0.3 mn USD).
Besides, the beta of global crypto hedge funds to Bitcoin over the last 20 trading days continued to increase to around 1.09. This implies that global crypto hedge funds have significantly increased their market exposure and have currently a slightly more than neutral exposure to Bitcoin.
On-Chain Data
This week’s focus will be on Ethereum’s on-chain developments.
The general status quo of Ethereum is currently as follows: There is generally an increasing disparity between (bullish) Ethereum Layer 2 developments and (rather bearish) Layer 1 developments.
Ethereum’s stablecoin dominance has recently declined in favour of Tron. At the time of writing, Tron accounts for 55% of stablecoin transfer volumes 89% of stablecoin transfer count. Solana has recently also leapfrogged Ethereum in terms of Layer 1 network revenues for the first time ever.
In general, Ethereum’s Layer 1 network activity indicators such as active addresses or transfer count remain relatively flat relative to the start of the year.
Meanwhile, Ethereum Layer 2s are continuing to see significant increase in network activity and usage. For instance, Ethereum’s Layer 2 active users continue to increase to new all-time highs. This is mostly related to the increasing usage of Base due to Coinbase’s recent integration of the L2 within its platform.
Moreover, ETH exchange balances continue to hover near multi-year lows, and we only saw a minor uptick in aggregate ETH exchange balances, which implies net transfers to exchanges, over the past week.
Net buying minus selling volumes on exchanges over the past 7 days has recently flipped positive but still remains relatively subdued compared to the net buying volumes we saw until mid-March 2024. A positive catalyst to change this picture more significantly would certainly be an approval of the ETH spot ETFs in the US.
Futures, Options & Perpetuals
Last week, both BTC futures open interest saw a significant increase in BTC-terms which seems to be related to a net increase in long open interest. The same is true for Ethereum’s futures open interest which recently increased to the highest level since January 2023 in ETH-terms.
Meanwhile, both BTC and ETH short futures liquidations spiked significantly following the latest ETH ETF approval rumours.
The Bitcoin futures basis continues to increase from its recent lows. At the time of writing, the Bitcoin futures annualized basis rate stands at around 12.7% p.a. Perpetual funding rates also increased significantly to the highest level since early April 2024.
Bitcoin options’ open interest also increased significantly last week as BTC option traders seem to have increased their downside protection via puts as we approach earlier all-time highs again. Relative put-call volume ratios also increased significantly especially on last Sunday.
In contrast, the 25-delta BTC 1-month option skew continued to drift lower, implying an increased demand for calls relative to puts. The same is true for the ETH 1-month option 25-delta skew.
BTC option implied volatilities have increased only slightly over the past days. Implied volatilities of 1-month ATM Bitcoin options are currently at around 54.3% p.a.
In contrast, Ethereum’s 1-month implied volatilities have recently spiked significantly to year-to-date highs and are currently at around 79.2% p.a.
Bottom Line
• Cryptoassets rallye on increasing Ethereum ETF approval odds and futures short liquidations
• Our in-house “Cryptoasset Sentiment Indicator” has increased but still signals neutral levels in sentiment
• Ethereum futures short liquidations spike to the highest level since March reversing much of ETH’s underperformance vis-à-vis BTC this year
To read our Crypto Market Compass in full, please click the button below:
This is not investment advice. Capital at risk. Read the full disclaimer
© ETC Group 2019-2024 | All rights reserved
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