(14/52) Weekly Market Insight | April Week 3 | No Peace Deal

Headline News: No Peace Deal

• Bitcoin erased the partial of its peace-deal-driven gains and ended the week with a 2.53% gain, following the breakdown of negotiations over the weekend. Attention is squarely back on assessing the trajectory of the Middle East conflict, potentially overshadowing the start of Q1 bank earnings this week.

Macro-Outlook: Record Low Consumer Sentiment

• The US and Iran failed to reach a peace deal over the weekend, as misalignment regarding authority over the Strait of Hormuz and nuclear development program. Shortly after the announcement, President Trump announced that the US Navy will immediately begin enforcing a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, intercepting vessels attempting to transit the strategic waterway and aggressively targeting any ships paying unauthorized tolls to Iran.
• The latest minutes revealed committee members cited sticky inflation metrics and rising geopolitical risks as primary concerns.
• The US Core PCE index rose by 0.4% in February, matching market expectations of 0.4%. US annual headline CPI surged to 3.3% in March 2026, matching market expectations. The inflation rate was the highest since May 2022. The acceleration is almost entirely driven by spikes in energy costs, as gasoline soared 21.2%. The preliminary Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index crashed to an all-time record low of 47.6 in April, severely missing the market consensus of 52.
• The US Services PMI registered at 54.0% in March, falling short of market expectations of 54.9% and declining from February’s 56.1%. US Durable Goods Orders fell by 1.4% in February, a significant miss compared to market expectations of a 0.5% decline.
• The final reading for US Q4 GDP was revised lower to 0.5%, falling short of previous estimates of 0.7%. US Personal Income unexpectedly declined by 0.1% in February, falling well below market expectations for a positive print of 0.3%. Meanwhile, personal spending rose by 0.5% in February, inline with market expectations.

The Upcoming Economic Calendar includes,

• Tuesday, April 14 8:30pm: US PPI in March

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: Departure of Core Contributors

• White House Council of Economic Advisers released its stablecoin yield study, concluding a yield ban would boost bank lending by only 0.02% while imposing net welfare losses on consumers and insignificant deposit-flight risks.
• CME Group announced plans to launch Avalanche and Sui futures on May 4.
• Binance launched prediction markets on Binance Wallet via Predict.fun integration, enabling bets on crypto, politics, sports and more.
• Circle launched Circle Managed Services and CPN Managed Payments, letting businesses stay fully fiat-native and access global USDC settlement through a single API.
• Hong Kong Monetary Authority issued the first two stablecoin issuer licenses to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial (joint venture of Standard Chartered, Animoca Brands and Hong Kong Telecom).
• UBS, Sygnum and PostFinance joined other banks in the Swiss franc stablecoin sandbox.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• Solana Foundation launched STRIDE (24/7 threat monitoring) and SIRN (incident-response network) for better on-chain security.
• Polygon introduced 1-click payments, letting users send any token to any wallet anywhere with easy integration via trails.build. Polygon also launched six onchain FX liquidity pools with Frax, Curve and DFB, offering deep liquidity for BRZ, KRWQ, IDRX, tGBP, AUDF and USDT against frxUSD base for low-cost cross-border stablecoin swaps and LP rewards.

Dapps

• Covenant AI, the largest decentralized 72B LLM (Covenant-72B), announced its full departure from Bittensor, citing unfair governance control by Bittensor co-founder.
• Chaos Labs stepped down from its Aave risk-management mandate after three years of zero material bad debt, citing misalignment on V4 scope, resourcing, and operational philosophy.
• Aave’s sGHO received a full architecture upgrade to a standard ERC-4626 vault with fixed 4.25% APR.
• Aster DEX partnered with World Liberty Financial to position USD1 as the base quote for RWA pairs, launching commodity markets at reduced 1 bps taker / -0.5 bps maker fees.
• Ethena proposed four new collateral additions for USDe reserves on overcollateralised institutional lending, high-quality liquid RWAs beyond T-bills, equity & commodity basis exposure, and prime lending to reduce concentration risk.
• Saturn launched its public mainnet with its STRC-backed sUSDat at 11.5% APY.
• Pyth Network launched its Data Marketplace with six major institutions (Euronext, EDI, Fidelity, OTC Markets, SGX FX, Tradeweb) directly distributing proprietary spot FX, precious metals, crude swaps, OTC pricing, fixed income and corporate action data onchain.
• Venus Protocol introduced the Pendle Fixed Rate Vault, enabling users to perform looping strategy with Pendle’s PT on BNB Chain.
• GMX launched Gold and Silver perpetual markets, offering up to 100x leverage, backed by WETH-USDC liquidity on Arbitrum.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• Polymarket announced plans for its entire CTF and CBOL V2 upgrade over the next 2-3 weeks, introducing new contracts, matching engine, builder codes, 1271 signatures integration, and Polymarket USD as the collateral token.
• Velora (formerly Paraswap) wound down DAO operations, transferring its $415K treasury to Laita Labs, discontinuing 20% protocol-fee routing to the DAO, and retiring staking/governance rights.
• Arc unveiled its post-quantum roadmap with four phased upgrades (post-quantum wallet signatures, quantum-secure private state, post-quantum-safe infrastructure, validator hardening) to make blockchain resilient ahead of quantum threats.
• StarkWare CPO Avihu Levy published a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction scheme that requires no softfork, using a ~118-bit hash-to-signature puzzle solvable via GPU for legacy UTXOs. However, the transaction cost per transaction is expected to be over $100, and the proposal was not applicable to addresses which public keys were exposed.

Token Unlock

• DBR token unlocks on April 17, representing 12.5% of the token supply.
• KAT token unlocks on April 18, representing 8.08% of the token supply.
• ZRO token unlocks on April 20, representing 9.78% of the token supply.
• KAITO token unlocks on April 20, representing 7.29% of the token supply.
• AVNT token unlocks on April 23, representing 7.84% of the token supply.
• XPL token unlocks on April 25, representing 4.94% of the token supply.
• ZORA token unlocks on April 30, representing 3.73% of the token supply.