Weekly Market Insight: May Week 4

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Market Updates

19 May 2025

Headline News

Bitcoin rose by 2.27% last week, with the broader crypto market trading largely sideways following the announcement of a 90-day tariff pause between the U.S. and China. While initial optimism provided some support, it remained unclear whether this was sufficient to justify a sustained rally. However, over the weekend, Bitcoin surged to $105,951, just shy of its all-time high of $109,354, and extended gains to $106,637 at the Monday open. The continued upward momentum, alongside a strong opening in gold prices, potentially linked to the credit rating downgrade by Moody’s after Friday’s market close.

Macro-Outlook

The US inflation rate in April increased to 2.3%, lower than the market expectations of 2.4%. While core inflation increased by 0.2% in April, lower than 0.3% market expectations. The US PPI also decreased by 0.5% in April, significantly lower than the market expectations of a 0.2% increase.
Based on the latest CPI and PPI data, forecasters anticipate a 0.2% increase in April PCE, and 2.6% year-over-year.
The US retail sales increased by 0.1% in April, slightly higher than market expectations of no change.
The University of Michigan consumer sentiment for the US dropped to 50.8 in May, the fifth consecutive monthly decline and well below market expectations of 53.4.
The US Federal Reserve is conducting its monetary policy framework review, potentially increasing emphasis on the response to global supply chain. The review is expected to be completed by August or September 2025.
Moody's downgraded the US credit rating from AAA to AA1 due to concern on the US fiscal path. The US 10-year treasury yields edged up about 8bps after the announcement.
President Trump will be speaking with President Putin on Monday, at 10pm SGT.

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview

The SEC Chair Paul Atkin expressed his support on tokenisation, cited "I am in favor of allowing registrants to trade a broader variety of products on their platforms and in response to market demand, activities which previous Commissions had prevented."
Dubai Finance has signed MOU with Crypto.com to allow users to pay Dubai government services fees using cryptocurrencies.
Coinbase will be included in the S&P500 on May 19, the first crypto exchange to be listed in S&P500.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs has vetoed the Bitcoin Reserve Bill, SB1373, citing volatility in crypto market doesn't not fit for general fund investment.
Robinhood announced acquiring WonferFi, a crypto services platform, valued at CAD 250 million.
The cryptocurrency and stock trading platform EToro has listed on Nasdaq with valuation at approximately $4.2 billion.
Coinbase announced investing in Canadian stablecoin issuer Stablecorp to promote its QCAD stablecoin.
The SEC has postponed Grayscale Spot Solana ETF and Grayscale Spot LTC ETF applications. The SEC also delayed the review of Blackrock's proposal to implement in-kind creation and redemption to its spot Bitcoin ETF.
Nakamoto, founded by CEO of Bitcoin Magazine, raised $710 million with plans to merge with KindlyMD to launch a public Bitcoin treasury strategy. Twenty One Capital announced the company acquired $458 million worth of BTC on May 5. Meanwhile, GD Culture Group announced plans to raise $300 million through sales of equities to invest in BTC and TRUMP. Strategy and Metaplanet acquired an additional 13,390 and 1,241 BTC last week.
DeFi Development Corp acquired an additional $23.6 million worth of SOL, totalling its holding to $102.7 million worth of SOL holding.
Coinbase disclosed less than 1% of users' data, including name, email, masked social security, government-ID images etc, were compromised by an unknown hacker. The company plans to spend from $180 million to $400 million on remediation costs and reimbursements related to this incident.
Franklin Templeton has received approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to launch the tokenised USD Money Market Fund on-chain.
Mastercard partnered with MoonPay to enable users to pay and be paid using stablecoins across the Mastercard payment network.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

SMBC, Japanese Bank, partnered with Fireblocks, Avalanche and TIS to launch Yen-backed stablecoin and RWA settlement experiment.
Cardano founder Charles Haskinson revealed the team is exploring a privacy-focused stablecoin designed to offer cash-like anonymous payment.
Sonic raised $10 million with S sales from Galaxy to strengthen Sonic Labs's position in the US market and provides support for DeFi ecosystem development.
Chintai announced the launching of the $100 million tokenised fund of Patel Real Estate Holdings' (PREH) Institutional Real Estate Fund on the RWA Layer-1.
Nansen has joined Mantra Network as a validator to promote network transparency.
Omni Network repurchased 6.77% of tokens from investors with financing surplus from Seed and Series A rounds.
Celo has partnered with Forta Firewall to screen every transaction on blockchain and increase blockchain security.
Starknet announced it has become Stage 1 ZK Layer-2.
Astar Network introduced tokenomics 3.0, transiting ASTR to fixed supply, burning 50% of all transaction fees, and establishing Protocol-Owned Liquidity to generate revenue and secure Polkadot coretime slots.
Plume Network announced the Plume Alpha phase, onboarding projects and partners to Plume Mainnet to ensure seamless user experience at launch. No incentive introduced at this phase, retail users are not required to take any action.

Dapps

Believe, a tweet-to-token model launchpad, introduced the Internet Capital Market (ICM) idea, where developers with application ideas would tweet, get funded with 50% fees goes to token creators, graduated tokens move to Meteora, and stand-out applications are featured in Believe App.
Pump.fun introduced Creator Revenue Sharing, which token creators will earn 5bps trading fee in SOL for the token they created.
Ondo Finance, Kinexys by JP Morgan, and Chainlink partnered to establish a cross-chain Delivery versus Payment (DvP) settlement using OUSG on Ondo Chain testnet. Chainlink helps with cross-chain orchestration between the delivery of OUSG and Kinexys Digital Payments.
Securitize launched sBUIDL vaults on Euler, enabling users to deposit BUIDL as collateral and borrow USDC or AUSD on Avalanche.
Virtuals updated its tokenomics, enabling VIRTUAL holders to stake for veVIRTUAL. veVIRTUAL holders will be entitled to 20% of all Virgen Points, Genesis Airdrops, and governance power. Axelrod, an AI-native hedge fund, airdropped its AXR token to veVIRTUAL as the first Genesis Airdrop protocol.
Maple Story launched Maple Story N, the first game launch within the Maple Story Universe, which is powered by Nexpace Protocol to host its game ecosystem IP such as items and mechanics.
Tether announced plans to launch QuantumVerse Automatic Computer (QVAC), a development platform to enable AI agents to run on local devices, and transact BTC and USDT through WDK framework.
Backpack onboarded to Sui with $200,000 worth of incentive campaigns.
Uniswap introduced "one-click swap" on the Uniswap Web App for smart wallets, significantly improving users swapping experience with EIP-5792 which is live after Pectra upgrade.
Brevis and PancakeSwap partnered to launch a ZK-powered, dynamic trading fee feature on PancakeSwap. Brevis will verify if the users fulfil certain trading volume or hold certain tokens to qualify for a trading fee discount.
0x Protocol acquired Flood.bid to optimise its trade route execution on Solana and Ethereum.
Hivemapper announced that Lyft, the ride hailing giant in the US, integrates Bee Maps into the OpenStreetMap for high-fidelity street-level data.
Rumpel Labs, a tokenised point platform, introduced the "Auto-Seller" feature, enabling points from Ethena, Symbiotic, Karak and Zircuit to be sold to USDC automatically.
Obol introduced Obol Stack, offering a modular framework for developing and operating dapps and infrastructures efficiently.

Upcoming Alpha and Governance

Liquity V2 will be relaunched on May 19.
Avalanche will hold Avalanche Summit in London on May 20.
CoWSwap is upgrading its single Batch Auctions to the Fair Combinatorial Auction (FCA), allowing solvers to submit multiple solutions, so CoWSwap can evaluate more execution paths to get a better price, minimum slippage and more. The upgrade will begin on May 20 and is expected to be completed on June 3.
Maple Finance proposed reopening MPL to SYRUP conversion for 48 hours (from May 19 to May 21), MPL price recovered from $0.87 to above $30. Maple is also expected to release an announcement related to "The future of asset management" on May 21.
Stacks delayed the sBTC Cap-3 to May 22. Stacks will announce its upcoming roadmap on May 20 as well.
Jupiter is expected to release an announcement related to Jupiter Mobile on May 22.
FTX is expected to release the second distribution of $5 billion to creditors on May 30.
Alchemy Pay introduced Alchemy Chain, a dedicated stablecoin payment blockchain, featuring fixed gas fee model for predictability, FIFO, larger block sizes for high transaction volume, native conversion rate oracle, and hybrid data storage architecture.
Huma Finance proposed to provide exclusive pre-sales to JUP stakers for its 1% token supply and a $250,000 worth of Huma tokens swap for JUP at $75 million valuation.
Synthetix introduced a proposal to acquire decentralised option platform Derive for $27 million with newly issued SNX tokens. The proposal raised debate on the justification of the acquisition given Derive generates more revenue than Synthetix lately.

Token Unlock

MELANIA token unlocked on May 20, amount representing 5.67% of the token supply.
PYTH token unlocked on May 20, amount representing 58.4% of the token supply.
PLUME token unlocked on May 21, amount representing 5.43% of the token supply.
INIT token unlocked on May 24, amount representing 1.68% of the token supply.
GRASS token unlocked on May 31, amount representing 1.34% of the token supply.
KMNO token unlocked on May 31, amount representing 22% of the token supply.
OP token unlocked on May 31, amount representing 1.94% of the token supply.
SUI token unlocked on June 1, amount representing 1.75% of the token supply.
DYDX token unlocked on June 1, amount representing 1.85% of the token supply.
ENA token unlocked on June 2, amount representing 1.62% of the token supply.
JTP token unlocked on June 7, amount representing 3.43% of the token supply.

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