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Bitcoin Hits All-Time-High Again |
Bitcoin (BTC) made new highs on Tuesday as Wall Street rolled out its latest product, almost guaranteed to increase the exposure of the digital currency among financial institutions: options trading on spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). At press time, the top crypto was trading above $93,750, up more than 3% in the last 24 hours. This breaks its previous record of $93,450, set on Nov. 13. Meanwhile, the CoinDesk 20 — an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization except for stablecoins, memecoins, and exchange tokens — is down about 0.5%. The index’s biggest winner was (HBAR), up 4.5%, while the biggest loser was (NEAR), down 5%. Options contracts allow investors to buy or sell an asset at a specific price and at a pre-determined time. While the CME already offered bitcoin options, the spot bitcoin ETF options are a big deal for retail participants and financial institutions alike, according to Noelle Acheson, former head of market insights at Genesis. “A deeper onshore derivatives market will enhance the growing market sophistication,” Acheson posted on X. “This will reinforce investor confidence in the asset, bringing in new cohorts while enabling a greater variety of investment and trading strategies.” “Institutions will be attracted to the greater flexibility and access to high-volume exposure," Acheson added. "Options offer deeper granularity in expressing an investment opinion, and can boost exposure relative to outlay, making them especially attractive to large players.” Only one of the eleven U.S.-based spot bitcoin ETFs — BlackRock’s IBIT — currently has options available so far, and the demand has been strong. “A few hundred million so far in options volume on IBIT (a ton for day one),” Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas posted on X. Balchunas further noted that the vast majority of the contracts were calls, meaning bets that bitcoin’s price will keep rising. |
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It's said that the best trades occur when the tape, or the direction of the price trend, aligns perfectly with the fundamentals. The solana-bitcoin (SOL/BTC) ratio appears to be one of those rare cases, showcasing a solid bullish price pattern supported by equally impressive activity on the Solana blockchain. The SOL/BTC ratio rose over 1% last week, moving out of a narrowing price range, referred to as triangular consolidation in technical analysis. The breakout indicates that the bulls are finally willing to lead the price action, having been in a stalemate with the bears for eight months. In other words, a sustained uptrend looks likely. The moving average convergence/divergence (MACD) histogram, a indicator used to identify trend changes and strength, has crossed above zero, indicating a renewed bullish shift in momentum. Whether Solana will ultimately replace Ethereum as the top smart contract blockchain remains a hot topic of debate. However, one thing is clear: Solana has established itself as the go-to-place for retail investors to trade memecoins, as evidenced by the surge in trading volumes which supports the bullish outlook for SOL. Solana-based decentralized exchanges (DEX) have registered cumulative trading volume of $41.6 billion in the seven days to Nov, 17, more than double the preceding week and the highest on record, according to data source Artemis. |
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Ethereum's ether (ETH), once viewed as the shiny silver to bitcoin's (BTC) gold, has only risen 36% this year, significantly trailing behind BTC's impressive 109% surge. Such is the investor aversion toward ETH that, at the going market rate of $3,100, the cryptocurrency is still well below the record price of $4,832 in 2021, while BTC trades at lifetime highs above $90,000. The underperformance, which makes ETH feel more like palladium struggling to keep pace with gold, is expected to continue well into the year's end, as new research by Amberdata shows only a 10% chance of ether topping the first quarter high of around $4,000 while traders bet on BTC setting new highs above $100,000. The chart shows the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF), highlighting the probability of ether trading at various price levels over several time frames. The graphic is derived from ether options trading on the dominant crypto options exchange Deribit. A taller peak at a certain price indicates a greater probability of prices reaching that level and vice versa. At press time, traders assigned just a 10% probability of ether topping the $4,000 mark by the Dec. 27 expiry. It's a sign that the expected regulatory shift away from enforcement actions against decentralized finance and other crypto sectors under Trump's presidency is yet to galvanize investor interest in ETH, even though it has done so for the so-called DeFi coins. "ETH faces serious headwinds as the value proposition of “sound money” (aka deflationary supply due to transaction fee burn) has flipped to inflation supply as nearly all DeFi transactions are being executed on L2s as opposed to ETH L1 itself. I believe that’s drastically dragging prices down," Amberdata's Director of Derivatives Greg Magadini said in a newsletter to clients. Last week, at the Ethereum community's biennial Devon gathering, influential researcher Justin Drake proposed an ambitious overhaul of the oldest smart contract blockchain. Among other things, the Beam Chain proposal would cut block times to four seconds from the current 12, which would allow for more blocks, therefore more transactions to be processed. Those improvements, in theory, could lead to more transactions being conducted on the main Ethereum chain rather than auxiliary layer-twos, which in turn might conceivably mitigate the supply issue identified by Magadini. However, Beam Chain could take years to see the light of day, if it does at all. Irrespective of Ethereum's fundamentals, however, a potential acceleration in bitcoin's uptrend could eventually drag ETH above $4,000, while maintaining its underperformance relative to BTC. |
El Salvador Starts Tokenized Treasuries |
Tokenized U.S. Treasuries are a booming market, and now they are coming to the nascent crypto hub of El Salvador. NexBridge Digital Financial Solutions S.A de C.V, a digital asset issuer based in El Salvador that recently won digital asset service license from local regulators, has teamed up with Bitfinex Securities to offer the first regulated public tokenized T-Bill offering in the country. Opening for business on Tuesday, the new offering aims to give access to T-Bill investments for individuals and organizations who were previously unable to invest in these products, the companies said. The product's goal is to raise at least $30 million of deposits, Bitfinex Securities said in a press release. The initial subscription for the product begins on Tuesday, and will be open until November 29. Investors can purchase the token with Tether's stablecoin (USDT), with plans to make it available in bitcoin {{BTC}], too. Following the subscription period, the tokens will trade on Bitfinex Securities' secondary market under the ticker USTBL. The token's value is backed by BlackRock's short-term Treasury bond ETF (iShares Treasury Bond 0-1yr UCITS). Tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is a rapidly growing sector in the intersection of digital assets and traditional finance that involves placing assets such as bonds, credit and funds on blockchain rails. Participants do so in pursuit of faster settlements and increased efficiency compared to traditional financial plumbing. Token versions of U.S. Treasury notes spearheaded tokenization efforts, tripling in market size in a year to $2.4 billion currently, rwa.xyz data shows. "The inclusion of USTBL tokens in investment portfolios will enable investors to balance digital asset exposure with the stability of traditional finance, offering a new level of diversification that can help reduce overall portfolio risk," Jesse Knutson, head of operations at Bitfinex Securities, said in a statement. |
The Takeaway: AI Agents and Crypto |
By Jesus Rodriguez, CEO IntoTheBlock Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming one of the most significant paradigms in the new era of foundation models. By agentic, we refer to AI systems that can not only produce outputs but also execute actions in a given environment. Consider automation scenarios like responding to emails, interacting with a database, calling an API, or performing physical tasks in an embodied AI setting such as robotic tasks.
Unlike previous automation paradigms, agentic AI has the potential to enable agents to achieve semi- or full autonomy within their environments. We can envision a near future where tens of millions of semi-autonomous agents become integral to business and personal ecosystems. Crypto assets could serve as a fundamental representation of the world these AI agents interact with.
In other words, crypto holds the potential to become the currency of AI. But, while this notion is frequently promoted as a way to show the promise of crypto in powering a new intelligent economy, significant practical challenges lie ahead. To understand the potential of AI agents using crypto, it’s essential to assess the fragmented state of the current agent market. The promise of semi-autonomous agents has triggered an explosion of frameworks for building them, far surpassing market readiness. While most organizations recognize the potential of autonomous agents, they remain in the early stages of adoption. As a result, we see numerous agent demos but very few production-ready products.
This is significant because the intersection of crypto and autonomous agents relies heavily on the maturity of the latter market. In a world where millions of autonomous agents augment our business and personal tasks, crypto could enhance these capabilities. There are several hypotheses about this augmentation, ranging from coordination to monitoring. But the greatest opportunity lies in the financial domain. Read the whole thing |
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