“On the threshold of liberty” ------ Rene Magritte

Introduction:

The GDP of the United States in the first quarter fell short of expectations, while the core PCE exceeded expectations, indicating a slowdown in economic growth and inflationary pressures. The market predicts that there may only be one interest rate cut in 2024, leading to a weak adjustment in the overall market trend.

1. Investment and Financing Observation

Last week, there were a total of 32 investment and financing events in the crypto market, a decrease of 5.8% month-on-month, with a total funding scale of $206 million, an increase of 43% month-on-month :
In the DeFi sector, 3 investment and financing events were announced (-72%), with the liquidity re-staking protocol YieldNest announcing it has completed a new round of financing of $5.2 million on platform X;
In the blockchain gaming sector, 9 investment and financing events were announced (+200%), including the Web3 3D LBS game L3E7, which has completed nearly $10 million in Series A financing, led by Spartan Group and SevenX Ventures;
In the infrastructure and tools sector, 9 investment and financing events were announced (+12.5%), with the Ethereum L2 blockchain Movement Labs announcing it has completed $38 million in Series A financing, led by Polychain Capital;
In the DePIN sector, 3 investment and financing events were announced (+50%), with the decentralized infrastructure network (DePIN) Natix Network, focused on map data, completing $4.6 million in strategic financing, led by Borderless Capital;
In the AI-related fields, 4 investment and financing events were announced (+400%), with Prime Intellect raising $5.5 million in seed funding, co-led by Distributed Global and Coinfund;
In other areas such as Web3/cryptocurrency, 3 financing events were announced (-66.6%), including the one-stop Web3 search engine Adot, which has completed $6 million in financing;
From the month-on-month data, the number of investment and financing events in the cryptocurrency market decreased last week, but the total funding scale increased significantly, with market enthusiasm beginning to focus on infrastructure and DeFi sectors. Among VCs, Hack VC, IOSG Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures are primarily focused on blockchain gaming and infrastructure sectors.

About Movement
Movement is a modular framework for building and deploying Move-based infrastructure, applications, and blockchains in any distributed environment. The framework is compatible with Solidity, connects EVM and Move liquidity, and allows builders to customize modular and interoperable application chains out of the box.
About Aligned Layer
Aligned Layer is a ZK verification layer developed on top of EigenLayer. As Eigen Layer AVS, it promises affordable verification and multi-functional proof systems for L2 and bridges, meeting key needs in the blockchain ecosystem. The project is developed by Yet Another Company.
About Roam
Roam is a decentralized global WiFi network that provides enterprise-level WiFi roaming to the public, ensuring uninterrupted, low-cost access to Web3 and the Metaverse compared to cellular services. This investment will further promote Roam's ecosystem in the DeWi sector and the construction of global WiFi roaming network nodes.

2. Industry Data

BTC Spot ETF Experiences Net Outflow for Three Consecutive Weeks

According to data from HODL15Capital, the U.S. Bitcoin spot ETF experienced a net outflow of 5,176 BTC in the 16th week, marking three consecutive weeks of net outflow. On-chain analyst @EmberCN (余烬) provided data showing that on April 26, the U.S. BTC spot ETF experienced a total net outflow of $83.61 million, indicating that after the U.S. stock market opened on April 29 (Monday), these ETFs' custody addresses would collectively net outflow approximately 1,310 BTC.
Since reaching an all-time high on March 15, BTC has experienced two significant price declines, which are typically seen in the market as signals of exhaustion in upward momentum. Currently, its price is at a short-term high in a downward trend, and according to this trend, there is a high probability of entering a downward path pointing to $52,000. However, there are many factors influencing BTC's price movement, requiring continued careful tracking and analysis.
According to 10X Research analysis: BTC currently faces certain downside risks, potentially further declining to an expected range of $52,000 to $55,000. This risk assessment stems from multiple market structural data, including reduced BTC miner income, which reflects that BTC's fair value may be in question.

ETH Re-staking Protocol TVL Surpasses $9.5 Billion

According to DeFiLlama data, the TVL of Ethereum liquidity re-staking protocols has rebounded to $9.501 billion. The top five protocols by TVL are:
ether.fi Stake TVL is $3.95 billion, with a 7-day increase of 5.11%;
Renzo TVL is $2.423 billion, with a 7-day decrease of -2.75%;
Puffer Finance TVL is $1.38 billion, with a 7-day increase of 4.08%;
Kelp DAO TVL is $835 million, with a 7-day increase of 3.98%;
Swell Liquid Restaking TVL is $385 million, with a 7-day increase of 3.22%;
The rebound in liquidity re-staking TVL reflects the growing enthusiasm in the re-staking sector, while also indirectly indicating a wait-and-see attitude among people regarding the current market situation. More people believe that liquidity re-staking is the optimal way to preserve and increase value at this stage, and the weakening trend of USD inflows also corroborates this sentiment.

ezETH Price Severely Decouples from ETH

On April 24, Renzo's announcement of overly "centralized" token economics triggered strong dissatisfaction in the community, leading to a massive sell-off of ezETH and causing it to decouple, briefly dropping to 0.8510 ETH. Many took this opportunity to buy the dip, with one whale using 2,400 ETH to purchase 2,499 ezETH during the decoupling, valued at $6.98 million, netting a profit of 99 ETH. Many others shared their successful bargain-hunting results, and ezETH has now basically restored its peg, rising to 1:0.9875 ETH.
The Renzo incident highlights the fragility of the current Restaking sector, especially as various Restaking projects are still in their early stages, with their models and security needing time to be validated. Particularly under the condition of continuously adding leverage, potential risks require participants' heightened attention.

Justin Sun Frequently Increases ETH Holdings

On April 25, Justin Sun purchased 21,547 ETH ($67.5 million); on April 28, a suspected address of Justin Sun again increased its holdings by 6,743 ETH ($22.3 million); currently, this address holds a total of 14,146 ETH, valued at $46.76 million, with an average cost of $3,205. Since December 2023, Justin Sun has been continuously accumulating a large amount of ETH through CEX and on-chain purchases.
Justin Sun's ongoing accumulation of ETH reflects both his support and recognition of ETH's long-term position in the industry and suggests that he may believe the current ETH price is undervalued by the market, expecting stronger performance in the subsequent market.

According to data provided by @EmberCN (余烬):
Justin Sun currently holds approximately $4.165 billion in massive token assets through multiple Tron and Ethereum addresses, mainly including: 598,900 ETH ($1.902 billion), 5.364 billion TRX ($602 million), 458 million USDD, 315 million TUSD, 300 million USDT, and 158.9 trillion BTT ($209 million), among others.

Binance 11.05% of Investment Projects Launch on Launchpool

According to RootData: Since November 2021, Binance has launched a total of 30 Launchpool projects, with Binance Labs investing in 21 of them, accounting for 11.05% of its 190 investment portfolios, while the average proportion of projects invested by other investment institutions or individuals that launched on Binance Launchpool does not exceed 2%.
Binance's high proportion has previously been controversial, with claims of a lack of fairness. In the recent 8 Launchpool projects, only 2 received investment from Binance Labs, indicating that Launchpool seems to be becoming fairer, allowing more projects the opportunity to receive investment.

More Binance Launchpool Data:
Among the 30 Binance Launchpool projects, Coinbase Ventures, OKX Ventures, Polychain, Dragonfly, and GSR have participated in more than 5 projects;
Among the 288 investors surveyed, the average proportion of projects they invested in that launched on Binance Launchpool does not exceed 2%, while the proportion for Gemini Frontier Fund, Draper Dragon, Lightspeed Venture, and Folius Ventures exceeds 5%;
For individual investors, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick's hit rate reached 8.77%. Next is EthHub co-founder Anthony Sassal with a hit rate of 8.57%.

3. VC Holdings

Note: The above data is sourced from https://platform.arkhamintelligence.com/, with the statistical time: April 29, 2024, 10:00 (UTC+8).

4. This Week's Focus

April 29

• Bitlayer's $50 million developer airdrop registration is open until April 29;
• The deadline for withdrawal requests for BlockFi's initial bankruptcy assets is April 29 at 7:59;
• The all-chain AI gaming ecosystem Cellula will announce the winning addresses for BNB Chain users participating in Cellula mining for energy on April 29;
• The Web3 social platform friend.tech will release version 2 on April 29;

April 30

• The Hong Kong Stock Exchange will begin trading the spot ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum from Jiashu Fund;
• CZ Zhao Changpeng's sentencing hearing;
• The OP_CAT protocol is expected to launch on the Bitcoin testnet Signet on April 30;
• The blockchain game Illuvium Private Beta 4 will take place from April 30 to May 28, 2024;

May 1

• U.S. April ADP employment figures;
• U.S. April ISM manufacturing PMI;
• Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings will issue NFTs on the XRP Ledger for the 2025 World Expo;
• Theta Network plans to launch the first phase of its cloud computing platform EdgeCloud on May 1;
• The Farcaster Developer Conference FarCon 2024 will be held from May 1 to 5 in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, USA;

May 2

• Federal Reserve interest rate decision;
• Powell will hold a monetary policy press conference;
• U.S. initial jobless claims for the week;
• Pragma Sydney will be held on May 2, 2024, in Sydney, Australia;
• Shiba Inu's L2 solution Shibarium network will undergo a hard fork on May 2 to improve network speed and reduce costs;

May 3

• U.S. April unemployment rate;
• U.S. April non-farm payroll data;
• The social platform UXLINK announces the upcoming first quarter airdrop event, expected to cover 10% of active users;
• ETHGlobal Sydney will be held from May 3 to 5 in Sydney, Australia;

May 5

• The verification date for the Avail token airdrop continues until May 5, with plans to distribute 600 million AVAIL tokens to 354,605 wallet addresses;

5. Conclusion

Last week, influenced by the slowdown in U.S. GDP growth in the first quarter and the core PCE index exceeding expectations, the number of investment and financing events in the cryptocurrency market decreased, but the total funding scale increased significantly, showing that the capital market continues to be optimistic about the infrastructure and DeFi sectors. Meanwhile, the BTC spot ETF has shown three consecutive weeks of net outflow, with insufficient upward momentum in the market, and there is a high probability of entering a downward path pointing to $52,000.
This week, the market trend still shows a downward fluctuation, especially with the SEC's frequent actions, including issuing Wells notices to Consensys, accusing MetaMask of operating without a license, and attempting to classify Ethereum as a security, leading to a high likelihood of continued "chilling effects" in the market. However, we observe that the progress and plans of projects we are tracking, such as TON, PYUSD, Renzo, and Avail, have not been affected, especially the progress of modular blockchain projects is rapidly advancing towards implementation.
Additionally, Justin Sun's frequent accumulation of ETH, James Fickel's renewed purchase of ETH, and borrowing WBTC from Aave to long ETH/BTC may reflect optimism in the industry regarding ETH's future performance, potentially bringing a rebound to the entire market. Investors are advised to pay close attention.
Finally, tomorrow CZ will face the final sentencing hearing, wishing everything goes as everyone hopes, and may good people have peace throughout their lives!
Note: All opinions above are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. If there are any objections, please feel free to contact us for corrections.

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