(10/52) Weekly Market Insight | March Week 3 | Navigate The Volatile Markets

Headline News: Navigate The Volatile Markets

• Despite heightened geopolitical headwinds and elevated crude oil prices, Bitcoin demonstrated notable relative strength last week, advancing approximately 10% against a 1.6% decline in the S&P 500. This outperformance was structurally supported by $767.33M in consecutive net inflows to spot Bitcoin ETFs. These flows suggest an exhaustion of selling pressure and highlight a growing institutional willingness to utilize digital assets for portfolio diversification amid a high-volatility macroeconomic environment.

Macro-Outlook: Largest Supply Disruption in Global Oil Markets

• The US struck Kharg Island, Iran’s major export hub, in response to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly 20% of global oil consumption was trapped due to transit halt and production cuts. Despite the fact that the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced releasing a record 400 million barrels of emergency crude reserves, WTI crude oil price increased by 8.8% last week.
• The US inflation rate remained at 2.4% in February, in line with the market expectations. The PCE price index decreased to 2.8% in January, lower than the market expectations of 2.9%. However, these figures no longer provide an accurate trend after the Middle East conflict escalated. The markets estimated at about 25% probability the Fed will enact a second rate cut in 2026, well below the estimation before the war at 80%.
• The US Q4 GDP decreased by 0.7%, below the market forecasts of 1.4%.
• The US durable goods orders were flat in January, compared to market forecasts of a 1.2% rise. The US personal income and spending both increased by 0.4% in January. Personal income was below expectations of 0.5%, while personal spending beat expectations of 0.3%. Michigan consumer sentiment decreased to 55.5 in March, slightly above market expectations of 55.
• The JOLTs job openings in the US increased to 6.946M, higher than the market forecasts of 6.7M.

The Upcoming Economic Calendar,

• Wednesday, March 18, 8:30pm: US PPI in February
• Thursday, March 19, 2:00pm: FOMC Meeting

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: 20 millionth Bitcoin Mined

• The 20 millionth Bitcoin was mined last week, leaving only 1 million Bitcoin to be mined over the next ~114 years.
• BlackRock’s staked Ethereum ETF, ETHB, was launched, introducing staking rewards as monthly cash dividend in USD.
• HSBC and Standard Chartered could receive Hong Kong’s first stablecoin licenses from the HKMA as early as March 24.
• The Federal Reserve signaled a new Basel III draft (opening 90-day comment period) that would keep Bitcoin at a 1,250% risk weight for large US banks.
• The CFTC issued new guidance for prediction markets, urging exchanges to engage regulators before opening markets vulnerable to manipulation and insider trading.
• Smarkets, a UK sports betting company, applied to the US CFTC for DCM and DCO licenses to enter the US prediction market sector by the end of 2026.
• Polymarket partnered with Palantir Technologies to develop an AI monitoring tool (using Vergence AI) for real-time trade screening, compliance, and anomaly detection in sports prediction markets.
• Paxos announced that Aon, the second largest insurance broker worldwide, settled real insurance premiums in an industry-first pilot using PYUSD on Solana.
• Coinbase is in talks with Bybit for an investment partnership that could help Bybit in compliance to enter the US market.
• xStocks announced that its framework will power a new gateway connecting Nasdaq’s tokenized equity markets with blockchain networks through a collaboration with Nasdaq and Payward (Kraken), enabling 24/7 programmable equities trading.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• Sonic launched USSD, its network-native USD stablecoin built on Frax Finance infrastructure and backed 1:1 by US Treasury bills.
• Starknet introduced STRK20, a native privacy capability giving any ERC-20 token confidential balances and private transfers with built-in compliance.

Dapps

• Pump.fun launched Automated Buybacks for Tokenized Agents, enabling onchain agents to allocate revenue toward token buybacks and burns to align with community value accrual. The platform also registered subdomains on Base, BSC, Monad, and Ethereum and removed “Solana” from its X profile tag, signaling potential multi-chain expansion.
• Jupiter introduced Jupiter Offerbook, a peer-to-peer money market for every onchain asset on Solana (tokens, NFTs, RWAs) with fixed-term loans and no price-based liquidations.
• Brevis launched Brevis Vera, a ZK-powered provenance system built on C2PA that cryptographically verifies original media capture and legitimate edits to combat deepfakes.
• Vanish integrated with Titan Exchange, enabling instant private trading of any token on Solana via its meta-aggregation engine.
• GSR completed the first confidential OTC trade on Ethereum using Zama protocol with fully KYC’d counterparties.
• Duel Duck launched the ability to create predictions with any SPL token on Solana.
• Virtuals Protocol collaborated with Ethereum Foundation, developing ERC-8183, the open standard for Agentic Commerce defining trustless Job primitives with escrow and evaluator attestation.
• LI.FI, one of the leading cross-chain aggregators, released its API for Agentic Commerce, a complete toolkit (MCP server, agent skills, documentation) for building onchain AI agent workflows.
• Perena launched the Glow Vault, its first curated USDT vault on Solana in collaboration with ConcreteXYZ, running delta-neutral quant strategies across perps and lending for ~8.5% APY.
• Lido launched EarnUSD, its first stablecoin product offering instant access to transparent onchain USD rewards from protocols including Aave, Ethena, Morpho, Spark, and Maple.
• Avantis implemented a systematic revenue-linked buyback and burn program, allocating 30% of daily opening/closing/win fees to purchase and burn AVNT.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• Aave proposed reducing the annual buyback program from ~$50M to ~$30M, including ETH-correlated assets as part of the buyback funding, and reducing token reward emissions. Aave is seeking community feedback and risk analysis for deploying Aave v4 to mainnet soon.
• Sky proposed reducing the SKY buyback from 300K USDS to 37.6K USDS per day.
• Aptos proposed Confidential APT, enabling institutional-grade confidential transactions for payments, trading, and asset management.
• Across proposed “The Bridge Across,” a temp-check exploring evolution from DAO + token structure to a US C-corp via token-to-equity exchange and buyout.
• Stargate announced that beginning next month 100% (from 50%) of revenue will be directed to ZRO buybacks.

Token Unlock

• ZRO token unlocks on March 20, representing 10.3% of the token supply.
• KAITO token unlocks on March 20, representing 7.29% of the token supply.
• XPL token unlocks on March 25, representing 4.94% of the token supply.
• SAHARA token unlocks on March 26, representing 4.56% of the token supply.
• FF token unlocks on March 29, representing 5.26% of the token supply.
• EIGEN token unlocks on April 1, representing 5.71% of the token supply.
• EDGE token unlocks on April 2, representing 50.2% of the token supply.
• ZAMA token unlocks on April 2, representing 5.21% of the token supply.
• LINEA token unlocks on April 10, representing 4.31% of the token supply.
• BABY token unlocks on April 10, representing 23.5% of the token supply.