Dear all,
Happy New Year to all the readers! Bitcoin surges once more as anticipation grows for imminent spot ETF approval. Let us bring you the customary NFT and digital market overviews for final two weeks of 2023.
🌐 Two Weeks Market Brief
Bitcoin for the past 2 weeks ending 1st January rose 3.57%, Ethereum 5.99% and the rest of the market 13.09%. Ethereum and its related coins outperformed as Bitcoin surged once again.
As we commented on in the last newsletter, Ethereum and its related coins such as $ARB and $OP generally outperformed the market as they were the initial underperformers. We anticipate that they will continue to outperform in the coming months, barring any significant "sell the news" event affecting BTC. The critical question now is whether BTC will indeed experience a "sell the news" event with the imminent approval of the spot ETF. Usually these kind of events in crypto tend to result in a “sell the news” scenario. However, some argue that institutional adoption in the US will help BTC’s ongoing ascent. The CME futures being in a premium (Figure 1) is one evidence supporting this notion.
Figure1: The CME Bitcoin futures contract (BTC1!) maintains a significant premium compared to Binance spot and perpetual futures (BTCUSDT, BTCUSDT.P). / Source: Tradingview
The overarching macro environment continues to provide strong support for
the ongoing rally in the digital asset space. The U.S. bond yields and the
dollar are on a consistent decline, while gold prices are edging closer to
record highs once more. The Nasdaq 100 had its best year since 1999 in
2023. Absent an unforeseen tail-event, this trend is expected to persist.
NFT Market Overview
Looking at the Ethereum daily NFT market volume, we are up slightly from two weeks ago, when 2023 ended with $23.6 million, up from $19.7 million. On the Solana side, the rally that was building up in mid-December seems to have died out towards the end of the month. The Bluechip index remains relatively flat in the past two weeks.
Here are top 5 collections based on trading volume over the past week including the floor price and the floor change(%) of each collection.
Here are top five sales in the Ethereum NFT market in the past 7 days:
- Autoglyph #113: 175 ETH
- CryptoPunks #4506: 130 ETH
- CryptoPunks #9478: 90 ETH
- Fidenza #57: 75 ETH
- Fidenza #951: 70 ETH
As we begin a new year - 2024, here is the end-of-year NFT roundup poll for 2023, conducted by NFTstats.eth on x(Twitter) for those who are interested!
