(17/52) Weekly Market Insights: Gold or E-Gold?

Hot News

• Bitcoin prices rose 1.7% last week, showing greater resilience than the S&P 500, which fell 1.5% over the same period. Bitcoin's market share has risen for seven consecutive weeks, and despite macroeconomic uncertainty, Bitcoin ETFs still attracted net inflows of $15.85 million last week.

Macro Outlook

• President Trump is considering providing temporary relief from current 25% tariffs on autos and auto parts that are expected to take effect on May 3. Meanwhile, a minerals agreement with Ukraine is expected to be signed on Thursday.

• There was no further progress in the US-China international trade dialogue, with Chinese officials insisting that they would not push for further negotiations until the US showed respect. Meanwhile, the White House proposed tariffs of up to 245% in response to China's countermeasures. However, Trump later clarified that negotiations were ongoing with China.

• The European Central Bank cut interest rates by 25 basis points to 2.4%. Due to the depreciation of the US dollar, the market value of the euro stablecoin on the chain increased significantly by 26% in April.

• Federal Reserve Chairman Powell reiterated his cautious wait-and-see stance on monetary policy. Trump expressed his dissatisfaction with Powell on social media. Market prediction platform Kalshi shows that the probability of Powell being replaced this year is only 24% , because the government's replacement of Federal Reserve officials will affect the essence of the US Constitution.

• U.S. retail sales grew 1.4% in March, slightly higher than the market expectation of 1.3%.

Upcoming economic calendars include:

• April 24 (Thursday) 8:30 p.m.: U.S. durable goods orders data for March released

Cryptocurrency Market Overview

• Visa will reportedly join the USDG issuance consortium led by Paxos, which also includes Robinhood, Kraken, Galaxy Digital, Anchorage Digital, Bullish and Nuvei.

• Canary Fund has submitted an application for a pledgeable TRX ETF to the US SEC.

Layer 1 and Layer 2 Public Chains

• Solayer launches the first Emerald Rewards Program , where users can earn LAYER tokens as rewards for shopping with Emerald Visa cards.

• Converge, a RWA blockchain project jointly issued by Ethena and Securitize, released technical specifications and development roadmaps, using ENA as a pledge token and USDtb and USDe as gas tokens. The new blockchain will be developed in collaboration with Arbitrum, Celestia and Conduit.

• Arbitrum has launched a Timeboost mechanism that allows users on Arbitrum One and Nova to bid on private mempools to speed up transaction inclusion.

• Astar Network launched a dynamic inflation mechanism, reducing the annual inflation rate of tokens from 4.86% to 4.32% and increasing the weight distribution of AdjustableStakersPart.

• Babylon announced that Sui will become the Bitcoin Secured Network (BSN), thereby inheriting the security and liquidity of Bitcoin to ensure the security of the Sui network.

Dapps

• a16z announced an additional investment of US$55 million in ZRO , with a three-year lock-up period.

• Balancer v3 is officially launched on Avalanche , and introduces Boosted Pools and programmable Hooks features.

• Avantis has launched zero-fee perpetual contract trading on the Base mainnet, charging fees only for profitable transactions.

• The Felix protocol, a forked version of Liquity v2 on the Hyperliquid chain, has begun to support the minting of stablecoins using UBTC as collateral.

• The F(x) protocol deposits the protocol treasury’s own wstETH and USDC into Aave , creating additional income for Stability Pool stakers.

• Euler is officially launched on BNB Chain and launched a $100,000 incentive plan. Euler's TVL exceeded $1 billion last week.

• Spark Finance allocated $50 million to Maple's SyrupUSDC, which may be expanded to $100 million in the future. Maple's TVL also exceeded $1 billion.

• Jupiter launched Jupiter Pro , an advanced trading platform built on the Solana chain, providing real-time analysis and transaction fees as low as one-tenth of the original. Jupiter also launched a new aggregator, Juno , which will increase execution by 4.6 times through a new router algorithm and additional aggregation sources.

• Raydium launches LaunchLab , a token issuance platform similar to Pump.fun.

• Defi App has integrated Sonic chain , supporting free gas transactions and cross-chain functions without the need for a bridge.

• ElizaOS launches auto.fun , a code-free token issuance platform. After the market value reaches 6 SOL, it will transfer liquidity to Raydium and use the transaction fees of the successfully transferred tokens for the repurchase mechanism of AI16Z.

• Glow Finance has launched a low-collateralized lending platform on Solana through margin accounts.

Governance/Project Updates

• GMX has chosen LayerZero as its cross-chain partner for multi-chain expansion through a proposal, covering cross-chain GMX tokens, cross-chain GM tokens and cross-chain governance functions.

• Zora, the SocialFi platform on Base, allows users to tokenize posts and is expected to launch the ZORA token on April 23. Base published a tokenized post titled " Base is for everyone " last week, which is currently worth about $8 million.

• While Arizona’s bitcoin reserve bill is still awaiting a final vote in the House of Representatives, Texas has scheduled a bitcoin reserve hearing for April 23.

• Dolomite, the leading lending protocol on Berachain, is expected to launch the DOLO token on April 24, with an initial circulating supply of 36%.

• As a new public chain, Initia's second-layer network can customize VM, Gas tokens and transaction sorting mechanisms, as well as share built-in transaction liquidity. It is expected to launch the mainnet and launch theINIT token on April 24. INIT's current FDV in the perpetual market is approximately US$750 million.

• Solana will host theCrossroads conference in Istanbul on April 25-26.

• Pendle announced that it will increase the YT fee from 3% to 5% starting May 2. All fees will be distributed to vePENDLE holders in the form of stablecoins. This adjustment is expected to increase the overall protocol revenue by 30%, or increase vePENDLE's APY by 60%.

• Aptos proposed reducing the staking reward rate from 6.8% to 3.79% over three months, aiming to encourage more DeFi activity.

• Vitalik proposed to replace EVM with RISC-V architecture to increase the performance of Ethereum's execution layer to 100 times its original level.

Token Unlock

• PLUME tokens were unlocked on April 21, accounting for 5.48% of the total supply.

• RON tokens are expected to be unlocked on April 27, accounting for 5.28% of the total supply.

• GRASS tokens are expected to be unlocked on April 30th, accounting for 1.35% of the total supply.

• OP tokens are expected to be unlocked on April 30th, accounting for 1.99% of the total supply.

• SUI tokens are expected to be unlocked on May 1st, accounting for 2.71% of the total supply.

• ENA tokens are expected to be unlocked on May 2, accounting for 1.69% of the total supply.

• JTO tokens are expected to be unlocked on May 7, accounting for 3.54% of the total supply.

• MOVE tokens are expected to be unlocked on May 9th, accounting for 2.04% of the total supply.

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