Weekly Market Update: Altcoins baby!

Altcoins have been ripping this week, with the highlight being the long suffering XRP army finally being repaid for their faith.  XRP wasn’t alone, with some calling this the early stages of rotation out of BTC into other assets. As a result Bitcoin prices took a breather this week.

In what’s been another big news week for crypto, we are starting to see some price predictions come through for the top of this cycle. We also saw a court rule against the US Treasury over the Tornado cash sanctions, Brazil and Hong Kong made some big moves to get more involved in crypto and some call outs on Memecoins.  Probably warranted.  

ETF volumes continue to be strongly positive, particularly for ETH which is playing catch up somewhat. Celsius is paying out more to creditors and Curve is working with BlackRock to bridge Tradfi and Defi.  

In macro market news, this was dominated by tariff talks with many scrambling to get ahead of the Trump administration’s plans.  Global manufacturing looks like it has picked up too. 

In the US, the strong jobs market is leading to more house buying, and the PCE inflation measure came in as expected.  

In Europe, things are frankly looking quite unstable. On top of Germany’s political uncertainty, we now have France’s government collapsing. Ironically economic sentiment is improving. In Russia, the value of the Ruble continues to deteriorate. 

Turning to APAC, Korea’s central bank cut rates, meanwhile Japan is signalling rate rises and India’s economy looks like it is starting to slow.  China’s manufacturing picked up but their long term prospects look muted. 

In Australia, CPI was unchanged, but the data should be sending alarms to the RBA; manufacturing improved but debt levels are rocketing. In New Zealand the job market and building consents both showed healthy declines, however consumer confidence has ticked up.

Like prices, market sentiment has retraced from last week’s heady numbers, however we remain in extreme greed territory.

Highlights this week: 

• This week has seen BTC edge within a few hundred dollars of the $100k mark, only to retrace back to the low 90’s.  ETH finally caught a run while a few Alts have been absolutely flying. 
• In aggregate, there is a pretty even spread of gainers and losers on the 7 day chart.
• This has been reflected in the Buy-Sell ratio with it coming in about even. However, by value there is a clear trend towards the sell side. 
• Large cap altcoins, led by SOL, ETH and XRP have been traded way above their averages, particularly on the Sell side. 
• At the time of writing BTC was down 1.5% for the week. XRP up another 24%, while ETH was up 5%. Meanwhile, SOL and BNB went backwards. 
• Stellar (XLM) went on a wild ride this week, up 94%.
• BONK was the worst performing asset, down 25% this week. 

View all top gainers: Visit the top gainers page to find out more. 

Highlights from the crypto space

XRP continues its fantastic resurgence, not only has it flipped SOL (and USDt) to regain the crown of number 3 by market cap, but it also had more volume than even Bitcoin! 

R7 research is showing that BTC available on exchanges is declining by 30k BTC per week,  which is about the same as that the ETFs are ingesting.  Or MicroStragegy, which bought another 15k BTC. 

ETH ETF inflows hit record levels this week with some claiming we are in the beginnings of an Alt coin rotation cycle. 

It’s that time of the cycle when people start crystal balling what is next.  Ledns chief crystal baller used Elliot Wave theory to predict the next few months for BTC. Another put out a US centric view of the world. 

Base has confirmed they have no plans for a token. 

How Libra got killed is an interesting story;  “There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions.” 

A Federal appeals court has ruled that the US Treasury overstepped when sanctioning Tornado Cash; “the appeals court ruled Tuesday that Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts cannot be classified as a sanctioned entity, its broader designation and blocked status remain intact.”  This is big news for the DeFi space in particular. 

Avalanche’s largest upgrade ever went live on testnet, the goal is to reduce transaction costs and simplify blockchain operations. 

Some people are calling out the Memecoin frenzy, going so far as to challenge it to do something useful. This is off the back of some of the awful livestream stuff on pump.fun last week. 

Curve + Elixir + BlackRock are building a bridge between TradFi and DeFi. 

Brazilian lawmakers have proposed adding Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset. Hong Kong is planning to reduce tax on Crypto. 

Celsius is paying out $127m in its second tranche to creditors, this will get them to about 60%. 

After announcing USDC rewards to US customers, Coinbase is cutting them for Europeans due to MiCA.  Tether has discontinued support for its Euro denominated stablecoin (EURt) due to MiCA. 

Other notable highlights:

• Coinbase is paying you yield to hold USDC on the CEX.
• A number of companies are copying MicroStrategy and adding (albeit small) amounts of BTC to their balance sheet. 
• One of Tether’s most important banking partners, Cantor Fitzgerald, bought a 5% stake of the company and is supposedly doing so because they are politically connected to the Trump administration. 
• Sui has teamed up with Franklin Templeton to scale its network and make decentralized tech more accessible.

Additionally, Sui is partnering with Babylon Labs and Lombard to launch Bitcoin staking in December. The partnership will bring BTC liquidity to the ecosystem, boost DeFi with LBTC as collateral, and give Bitcoin holders more ways to put their assets to work.

Macro news

Tariffs are back on the agenda and the war of words is already heating up with both Mexico and China firing salvos. Barclay’s bank is warning of the blowback on the US vehicle sector stating; “ investors under-appreciate how disruptive this could be”….

Global manufacturing PMI for November came in at 50.

U.S. (and North America ) economic news

Initial Jobless claims fell again, while mortgage applications ticked up, both signs of a healthy economy.  The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, PCE,  ticked up to 2.3% in October as expected. Core PCE was up slightly more, but this was also in line with expectations. 

Canadian Q3 GDP came in at 1% headline, however GDP per capita is in decline, its 6th such decline in a row. 

Over in Europe….

There are concerns that France’s government may be collapsing as well as Germany.  House prices in the UK rose for the first time in 2 years. 

Economic sentiment in the EU block is stable. CPI on the other hand ticked up to 2.3%, this was in line with expectations. 

Russia’s central bank had to intervene in the currency markets as the Ruble hit free fall. Unfortunately for them this hasn’t helped as the Ruble continues to fall. 

And in Asia Pacific…

The Korean reserve bank cut rates to 3.0%. The BoJ has signalled they are getting close to making a decision to raise rates from 0.25% to 0.5%.  India’s Q3 GDP slowed to 5.4%, well below the 6.5% expected.  Their manufacturing PMI also eased to 56.5. 

CAXIN manufacturing PMI for China had a robust bump in November, getting to 51.5.  Yields on 10 year Chinese bonds dropped to 2%, their lowest on record. Essentially investors are signalling that more rate cuts are needed and running for the safe returns of bonds. 

In Australia, headline CPI for October came in unchanged at 2.1%.  Markets were celebrating but this layman is not so sure, most of the categories appear to be running at significantly higher inflation rates, with a few notable exceptions. 👇.  Australian private debt levels are running at very high levels as well. Manufacturing PMI improved to 49.4 in November.  The chart below shows the percent change (%) of monthly and annual electricity prices in Australia.

Stats New Zealand are reporting that the number of filled jobs has declined for the 7th month running.  Building consents are down 16% year on year, and 33% on 2022. However, according to ANZ -Roy Morgan,  there has been a big jump in consumer confidence with it nearly balanced. 

That’s a wrap for this week. 

Stay tuned for the next update.

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