 | 2/29/24 |
Bitcoin broke past $64,000 on Wednesday, approaching its all-time high price near $69,000. [Image via Getty Images]
What’s up? It’s Coinbase Bytes
There’s never a dull moment on the blockchain. Here’s what you need to know this week:
- BTC and ETH hit fresh highs for the year. ETF narratives, blockchain updates, and more catalysts aiding the recent crypto rally.
- Pudgy Penguins are heating up the formerly icy NFT market. What their resurgence could mean for the digital collectibles market.
- This week in numbers. The total funding crypto startups have received since 2017, the percent of Singaporeans who hold crypto, and more stats to know.
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Price changes are for the past week, ending on Feb 29, 2024 at 11:19 PM UTC
 | MARKET UPDATE |
Bitcoin chases all-time high as crypto markets rally
Crypto markets surged back to life this week, as BTC climbed above $64,000 for the first time in well over two years on Wednesday, and ETH broke $3,400 for the first time in 22 months.
Meanwhile, spot BTC ETFs keep eclipsing sales records, AI-related tokens spiked after chipmaker Nvidia’s blockbuster earnings report, and a Wall Street giant offered a new crypto prediction.
Here’s what you need to know.
Bitcoin crossed the $64,000 mark for the first time since November 2021.
Bitcoin, which had stalled below $53,000 since mid-February, saw massive gains this week. Prices reached as high as $64,100 on Wednesday, up about 45% over the last month. On Thursday morning (EST), BTC was still hovering around $62,000 — within striking distance of its all-time high near $69,000, set in November 2021.
What’s driving bitcoin’s 2024 boom? It can be attributed in part to the massive early success of new spot bitcoin ETFs, which began trading in the U.S. in January.
On Wednesday, the bitcoin products saw a staggering $7.7 billion in trading volume as BlackRock’s IBIT broke its volume record for a third consecutive day: Roughly $3.3 billion worth of IBIT shares were traded, more than double Tuesday’s total of $1.35 billion. According to Bloomberg ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas, BlackRock’s sales have already amounted to an “insane number for a newbie ETF.”
Ethereum is setting news highs for 2024.
On Wednesday, ETH climbed to $3,492 — well away from its all-time high above $4,600, but approaching two-year highs.
Over the last couple of weeks, ETH has spiked as traders increasingly anticipate that spot ETFs for the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap will arrive later this year. Bloomberg analysts are predicting a 70% chance of approval by the end of May.
As traders have flocked to ETH, “open interest” in ETH futures has also hit record highs, indicating that ETH’s price could see big upward or downward swings in the near-term. And indeed, in the two weeks prior to this week’s rally, ETH’s daily price fluctuation of more than 2% was twice the average daily price movement of bitcoin.
On top of the potential arrival of spot ETH ETFs, a planned network upgrade should make the blockchain faster and cheaper.
As a result, institutional investors appear to be increasing their ETH allocations. According to a recent survey, ETH was the most widely held asset by institutional investors on one trading platform (a change from December, when BTC was most popular).
AI-related tokens rally after Nvidia’s earnings report.
Among altcoins, one niche category has done exceptionally well recently: AI-related tokens.
Last week, after chipmaker Nvidia reported a staggering $22.1 billion in revenue for the final quarter of 2023, a number of AI-related tokens saw major price spikes. Tokens including Render, Fetch.ai, and The Graph all saw double-digit gains as some traders believe that crypto and blockchain technology can complement AI.
Earlier this month, Fetch.ai inked a partnership with German communications giant Deutsche Telekom, which cited blockchain’s potential to enhance AI capabilities by providing access to reliable data sets (because blockchain data can’t be changed). The company also noted Fetch.ai’s potential to help companies deploy “AI agents” that can rely on blockchain data to automate tasks such as conducting transactions or managing traffic flows.
The bottom line…
Spot BTC ETFs have boosted crypto markets with a fresh infusion of institutional capital. Now, eyes are returning to individual traders, who have been major drivers of past bull markets.
According to analysts at JPMorgan, there’s been a recent surge in retail interest:
“The revival of the retail impulse in February perhaps reflects the anticipation of three main crypto catalysts over the coming months: the Bitcoin halving event, the next major upgrade of the Ethereum network, and the prospect of approval of spot Ethereum ETFs by the SEC in May.”
| MARCH OF THE PENGUINS |
Pudgy Penguins leads 2024 NFT revival with hit Walmart toy collection
At the peak of the last bull run in 2021, one of the big promises of NFT collectibles was that the intellectual-property ownership that came with the NFTs could benefit holders in a wide variety of ways.
For holders of the Pudgy Penguins collection, at least, those promises have arrived, with toys based on the chunky birds now available at 3,100 Walmart stores.
The new plush collectibles can benefit NFT holders directly (in the form of royalties paid to the owners of the NFTs each toy is based on) and indirectly (by potentially boosting the value of the NFTs on the secondary market). Each toy also comes with a QR code that will give customers access to an interactive online experience called Pudgy World.
Here’s what you need to know about Pudgy Penguins’ march toward mainstream success — and other key NFT news of the week.
The floor price for Pudgy Penguins briefly overtook Bored Apes.
Over the last four months, as the number of Walmart stores selling the toys rose by 50%, the entry-level (or “floor”) price for a Pudgy Penguins NFT jumped about 320%, from 5 ETH to around 21 ETH by mid-February.
Meanwhile, floor prices for the leading NFT collection, Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), have declined from a peak of around 160 ETH in 2021 to around 22 ETH.
On February 17, the Penguins’ floor even briefly exceeded the BAYC floor, inspiring BAYC founder Gordon Goner to tweet, "Proud of @pudgypenguins. I remember the feeling the team must feel today, and it was beyond surreal. I miss working with that singleness of purpose. Miss the hustle.”
Art-world powerhouses Christie’s and Taschen are prepping major NFT projects.
On March 12, Christie’s will host an auction of 400 NFT works by pioneering digital artist Robert Alice.
According to the Christie’s manager of digital art, Sebastian Sanchez, the work in the SOURCE [ON NFTs] collection will be “auctioned and minted live on the blockchain [and] uses an algorithm called NLP, or natural language processing, that is one of the backbones of machine-learning models and is adjacent to AI.”
The auction will utilize a new platform built for sales of digital art that requires crypto for purchases.
Meanwhile, leading art-book publisher Taschen has just put out a 600-page art history book, edited by Alice, that he describes as one of “the first major survey publications on blockchain-based art and the wider onchain cultural ecosystem.” In a first for the publisher, Taschen is accepting crypto for online orders of the new NFT book.
The bottom line…
There are lots of signs that NFT markets are waking up.
NFTs on the Solana blockchain just crossed $5 billion in all-time trade volume — with monthly sales in December hitting $365 million, just a few months after sales struggled to hit $40 million. Meanwhile, a new restaurant built on Bored Ape IP called Bored Cuban opened this month in Miami, and Pudgy Penguins are seeing real-world success.
As Axios put it, “Non-fungible tokens have made something new in the world: a proven means to get a new IP brand off the ground as early supporters profit from its success.”
| NUMBERS TO KNOW |
$90 billion
Total amount of funding that crypto and blockchain companies have received since 2017, according to The Block Research. Since the beginning of 2024, more than 230 deals totalling $1.3 billion have boosted NFTs/gaming, DeFi, infrastructure, and web3 projects. Among the largest investors this year are Animoca Brands, Polychain Capital, and Frameworks Ventures.
$3.5 billion
Amount of USDC that has been minted since the start of December — for a total market cap of $28 billion. According to a new Coinbase report, USDC’s growth is in part due to an “overall pickup in both retail and institutional demand” following the launch of spot bitcoin ETFs in the U.S.
21 million
Number of crypto holders eligible to vote on Super Tuesday (which comes on March 5), a number that represents 40% of all American crypto holders. Want to see how candidates in your area stack up on crypto issues? Check out Stand With Crypto’s voter guide.
3,000 BTC
Amount of BTC, worth around $155 million, that MicroStrategy added to its balance sheet in February. The software firm, which is the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, now has a total of 193,000 BTC (worth around $10 billion, including $3.8 billion in unrealized profit).
57%
Percentage of Singaporeans who reported holding digital assets in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to new research from Seedly and Coinbase. The survey of over 2,000 adults found that staking was the most cited use-case among crypto holders, with 55% reporting staking crypto through a centralized exchange and 38% saying they staked assets with a decentralized finance (DeFi) app.
| TOKEN TRIVIA |
When is the next Bitcoin halving expected?
| A | March |
| B | April |
| C | May |
| D | June |
Find the answer at the end of the email.
| NOW TRADING ON COINBASE |
| RENDER |  |  |
The Render Network is a decentralized GPU rendering platform that enables distributed graphics processing.
| STRK |  | |
Starknet is a zk-rollup Ethereum scaling solution.
| ZETA |  | |
ZetaChain is a blockchain built on the Cosmos SDK focused on enabling interoperability among all blockchains.
| MOBILE |  | |
Helium Mobile provides cellular service through its decentralized wireless infrastructure.
Trivia answer
| B | April |
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