🚀Weekly Recap: BTC Stuns With New All-Time High Above $70,000

Market action continues to dominate the narrative of web3, with Bitcoin posting new all-time highs on multiple occasions this past week. BTC briefly traded above $70,000 on Friday and remains trading within 2% of the record high.

Unprecedented activity surrounding spot Bitcoin ETFs helped to propel the rally, with four funds investing in Bitcoin now populating the top 11 commodity ETFs by assets under management.

Bitcoin wasn’t alone in posting impressive gains for the week, with Ether pushing above $4,000 for the first time since December 2021. Memecoins also outperformed the broader digital asset sector, with the top six meme tokens by market cap all posting triple-digit gains over the past fortnight.

However, not every web3 segment was on fire this week, with the floor prices of many leading NFT collections posting double-digit drawdowns as collectors look to rotate in cryptocurrencies. The NFT sector’s weak performance came in spit of last week hosting the second most-expensive CryptoPunk trade on record at $16 million.

Activity on Ethereum Layer 2 is pumping, with weekly active L2 users jumping to roughly 3.5 million. The milestone coincides with Arbitrum Nova dominating Layer 2 throughput, with the network hosting 50% of the more than 100 transactions per second processed by L2s on average in recent days.

Daily active dApp users across the web3 sector also jumped to record highs during February, with the bullish market movements driving a surge in activity on decentralized exchanges.

The SEC delayed the deadline for its verdict on pending spot Ether ETF applications from BlackRock and Fidelity, with many analysts continuing to speculate that the SEC may greenlight a cohort of Ether ETFs come May. The SEC is also facing internal dissent from two commissioners regarding its aggressive campaign of regulation-by-enforcement targeting web3.

Sushi’s core team is again facing community criticism, with many onlookers decrying an alleged lack of transparency surrounding team remuneration in addition to purported efforts to ignore the will of DAO governance.

Plus, Wormhole published its airdrop eligibility criteria and tokenomics for its W token, Fantom Foundation plans to pursue the liquidation of Multichain’s foundation after notching a default judgment, active Farcaster users are down 60% as SocialFi adoption sinks, and Pantera announced plans to launch a new fund that aims to purchase undervalued SOL from the FTX bankruptcy estate.

And don't miss our podcast with Guy Young, the founder and CEO of Ethena Labs, to get the low-down on their controversial yield-bearing stablecoin, USDe.