(49/52) Weekly Market Insight | December Week 3 | Key Economic Data Ahead

Headline News: Key Economic Data Ahead

• Bitcoin closed last week down 2.51%. While the Fed cut interest rates by 25bps, hawkish projections for 2026 stifled any bullish momentum. Investors remain cautious ahead of this week’s key economic releases, which will provide the first clear view of the economic landscape following the government reopening in November.

Macro-Outlook: Resistance to Future Rate Cuts

• The Federal Reserve lowered the interest rate by 25bps to a range of 3.5% to 3.75% during the FOMC last week, together with a $40 billion monthly purchase of Treasury bills for the purpose of “Reserve Management Purchases”.
• The latest economic projections showed the Fed expects the median rate for 2026 to be 3.4%, unchanged from the September projection. Chair Powell expressed concern about the downside risk of unemployment rate, despite raising the expected economic growth forecast in 2026.
• The market expects a 75% probability that the interest rate will remain unchanged in January 2026.

The upcoming Economic Calendar includes,

• Tuesday, December 16, 9:30pm: US Non-Farm Payrolls in October and November; The US Unemployment Rate in November; The US Retail Sales in October
• Thursday, December 18, 9:30pm: The US Inflation Rate in November
• Friday, December 19, 11:00am: Bank of Japan Interest Rate Decision

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: Resurgence of the ICO-Era

• The SEC Chair Paul Atkins stated that many Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) should not be considered securities and suggested they fall under CFTC jurisdiction.
• CFTC Acting Chairman Caroline Pham launched a digital-assets collateral pilot program, allowing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDC to be used in US derivatives markets.
• DTCC received a No-Action Letter from the SEC to tokenize stocks, ETFs and bonds.
• Interactive Brokers began allowing eligible US retail clients to fund brokerage accounts directly with stablecoins, powered by Zero Hash.
• Strategy Inc confirmed it will remain in the Nasdaq 100 index for another 12 months, with Global index provider MSCI set to decide on its inclusion in January.
• Coinbase released x402 V2, expanding beyond single-call payments to a general payment layer with wallet-based identity, multi-chain by default, extensions, automatic API discovery, dynamic payment recipients and more.

Layer 1s and Layer 2s

• Firedancer, the high performance validator client for Solana, is officially live on the mainnet. Firedancer demonstrated the ability to handle over 1 million TPS in a controlled environment.
• Ethereum activated the BPO-1 upgrade, increasing blob capacity to 15 per block to provide more space for Layer 2 rollups without requiring a hard fork. BPO-2 with maximum blob capacity of 21 is expected in January 2026 with the goal of progressively increasing to 48 throughout 2026.
• Sei Network announced that a built-in wallet and Sei-based app will be integrated into the Xiaomi mobile ecosystem, coming pre-installed on new devices.
• Polygon completed its Madhugiri upgrade on the mainnet, introducing adjustable blocktimes, faster consensus, and increased throughput to enhance network stability.
• Plume Network launched institutional-grade vaults on Solana with assets from issuers like WisdomTree and Hamilton Lane to bring real-world yield onchain.
• Aleo launched USDCx on testnet with Circle xReserve, introducing a private and programmable stablecoin solution for confidential real-world transactions.
• Horizen went live on Base as a Layer-3, bringing faster and cheaper privacy preserving solutions to applications on Ethereum and Base.

Dapps

• Coinbase partnered with Chainlink CCIP as the exclusive bridge provider to bring Coinbase Wrapped Assets to new blockchain ecosystems. Coinbase also enabled direct trading of Solana ecosystem tokens on Coinbase apps.
• xStocks launched xBridge using Chainlink CCIP to enable cross-chain transactions of tokenized equities while preserving rebasing capabilities for events like dividend distribution and stock splits.
• Farcaster announced a strategic pivot from a “social-first” approach to a “wallet-driven” growth model to better achieve product-market fit.
• Pendle launched new OKX exchange funding rate markets for Bitcoin and Ethereum on Boros.
• Kamino rebranded its brand logo and unveiled six new products including fixed rates and terms product, intent-based credit market, off-chain collateral, private credit, RWA DEX, and a plug-and-play buildkit.
• Loyal launched its Solana transfer feature on Telegram. Users can send Solana to friends by their Telegram handle, and the transactions are shielded without exposing the users’ public addresses.
• dYdX launched spot trading for Solana assets with zero fees.
• Worm.wtf launched a leverage prediction market on Solana.
• Pyth Network introduced the PYTH Reserve, using revenue from products like Pyth Pro to systematically buyback PYTH tokens on the open market.
• DeBridge announced a new execution model, deBridge Bundles, introducing intent cross-chain execution design by attracting gas payments, slippage, retries and more.
• Based launched private-beta HyENA, a perpetual exchange with USDe as the quote asset, offering yield on idle collateral and a HLPe vault.
• LayerZero introduced ZeroOS, a universal modular Library OS for zkVMs and enables zkVM builders like Succinct and RISC Zero to unlock compatibility with Linux applications.
• Arcium introduced C-SPL, enabling SPL tokens to be encrypted and transferred, and Cerberus Protocol, increasing the multi-party computation (MPC) security assumptions with only one honest participant.
• Brevis launched ProverNet mainnet beta, a decentralized marketplace for zero-knowledge proof generation.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• Coinbase is expected to make a major announcement (reportedly related to prediction markets) on December 17.
• Synthetix is expected to launch decentralised perpetual exchange on Ethereum on December 17.
• INFINIT is expected to launch Prompt-to-DeFi, enabling AI-generated DeFi strategies using user prompts, on December 18.
• Jupiter revealed multiple upgrades at Solana Breakpoint, including the launch of JupUSD this week, upgrading execution tools, and acquiring Rain.fi to integrate its Offer Book money market.
• Meteora announced DLMM V2, offering a new rebalancing tool, on-chain limit orders, preferred fee tokens and more, which will be released in Q1 2026.
• Project 0, the DeFi native Prime Broker on Solana, where users can collateralise their portfolio on different dapps and borrow against the portfolios, is expected to be launched in Q1 2026.
• Curve Finance has approved the crvUSD credit line for Yield Basis from $300 million to $1 billion. A new $50 million cbBTC cap-raise on Yield Basis filled within a few hours.
• The Official Trump Meme announced launching a new mobile game soon.
• Hey Anon is expected to launch a permissionless prediction market supporting all EVM networks, allowing anyone to create markets without KYC this month.
• IO.net introduced Incentive Dynamic Engine (IDE), a new tokenomics design where USD-stablecoin will be used as the payment and reward tokens for predictability, at least 50% of revenue will buyback IO and burn, and dynamic pricing based on utilisation.
• Hyperliquid announced that portfolio margin is now live on testnet in pre-alpha mode, with a full mainnet launch coming in an upcoming network upgrade.

Token Unlock

• VANA token unlocks on December 16, amount representing 19.9% of the token supply.
• ZRO token unlocks on December 20, amount representing 10.3% of the token supply.
• KAITO token unlocks on December 20, amount representing 3.46% of the token supply.
• LISTA token unlocks on December 21, amount representing 13.1% of the token supply.
• XPL token unlocks on December 25, amount representing 4.94% of the token supply.
• SAHARA token unlocks on December 26, amount representing 7.42% of the token supply.
• TREE token unlocks on December 29, amount representing 6.16% of the token supply.
• IO token unlocks on December 31, amount representing 6.09% of the token supply.
• KMNO token unlocks on December 31, amount representing 6.92% of the token supply.
• EIGEN token unlocks on January 1, amount representing 7.52% of the token supply.