🚀Weekly Recap: BTC At New All-Time Highs, ETH At $4K

Bulls continued to control the crypto markets this week, with BTC surging 22% to trade 6% shy of its record high, ETH gaining 17.5%, SOL spiking 30%, and DOGE rallying 68% in the past seven days. However, the flurry of activity disrupted the operations of popular centralized platforms, with Coinbase, CoinGecko, and Crypto.com suffering outages as digital assets peaked.

The market momentum was fueled by record action surrounding spot Bitcoin ETFs. Both daily trade volume and inflows to the fund posted new all-time highs this week, with more than $8 billion worth of shares traded and inflows exceeding $637 million on Feb. 28.

The combined market cap and total value locked in DeFi projects also pushed into multi-year highs, with the capitalization of DeFi tokens breaking above $100 billion and TVL surpassing $160 billion for the first time since May 2022. The TVL of Bitcoin-based DeFi projects rallied to a new high of almost $2.5B amid a surge of activity surrounding Merlin Chain, an upstart Layer 2 accounting for 72.5% of Bitcoin’s TVL.

The price action inspired Kyle Davies and Su Zhu, the disgraced founders of the insolvent VC firm, Three Arrows Capital, to resurface on Twitter to espouse their “Supercycle” theory once again.

Restaking remains the hottest narrative in DeFi, with EigenLayer’s TVL growing to $10B while liquid restaking tokens (LRTs) broke above $5B for the first time. MEV Capital, an asset manager serving institutional investors, discussed its LRT farming strategies in an exclusive interview with The Defiant.

EtherFi, the top LRT protocol accounting for 36% of the sector’s TVL, closed a $23M Series A funding round led by Bullish Capital and CoinFund.

Blast the controversial Ethereum L2, completed its long-awaited mainnet launch on Feb. 29. Despite amassing more than $2B in TVL since deploying a one-way deposit contract in November, three-quarters of assets have since exited the network.

Plus, Aave’s decentralized social protocol Lens is now permissionless, Uniswap is rolling out new features including a browser extension and limit orders, Robinhood Wallet users can now execute trades on Arbitrum-based decentralized exchanges, the market cap of DePIN projects is up 150% in six months, and Telegram announced a new revenue-sharing program that will distribute funds via the TON token

And don't miss our podcast with Avery Ching, the co-founder and CTO of Aptos, to learn more about the roadmap of the Layer 1 network developed by former Facebook engineers.

Enjoy!

Help us make The Defiant even better! ✨ Share your feedback with our team 💚✊🏼