Here comes Friday, May 24th. It’s Friday, May 17th. As the ongoing week cones to a close, we can reflect on the industry highlights over the past few days.
Investments in crypto firms skyrocket by 40%
According to analysts at PitchBook, crypto startups generated $2.4 billion between January and March 2024, up 40% compared to Q4 2023.
As for infrastructure startups, these turned out to be dominant here. Among the largest funding rounds were led by restaking protocol EigenLayer ($100 million) and France-based project Zama ($73 million). Early-stage funding averaged $5m, while the late-stage one totaled $5.8m, a 25% surge since 2023.
The team at PitchBook anticipates investments will maintain momentum in terms of volume throughout the ongoing year, with venture capital funds (VCs) are expected to be steady in the crypto market.
Small traders are road-block for Bitcoin, Santiment says
The leading crypto data platform Santiment revealed that small wallets are dumping their BTCs, hindering the coin’s growth.
According to experts, last week, as bitcoin’s price surged past $67,000, tokenholders with fewer than 0.1 BTC in their wallets got rid of 0.46% of the coins they owned. Meanwhile, humble traders ramped up their holdings during the April bearish trend and started locking in profits as early as April 24, at the local peak moment.
Notably, at the same time as BTC shares were depleting, small traders saw a decrease in the number of non-zero balance wallets.
The rate at which the total number of wallets shrinked appeared to be the second fastest on record, however beaten by the rate recorded between March 7 and March 13, 2024.
Ethereum jumps by 21% amid potential ETF
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now asking stock exchanges to speedily update Form 19B-4 filings aimed at launching spot Ethereum-based exchange-traded funds (spot ether ETFs). This may indicate the regulator’s intention to approve the documents early.
May 23 is the next pivotal date, as the regulator pushed back the deadline for a ruling on investment firm VanEck’s application to that same date. Approval to launch spot ETH-ETFs is generally pending from a number of firms, including BlackRock, ARK Invest, Fidelity, Invesco and Hashdex.
Following this news, the ETH exchange rate spiked 21% in the last 24 hours, reaching its new high since April 9 at $3710. Bitcoin soars over 6% overnight We couldn’t be happier about all that since ETFs promote the fund flow into the crypto market, thereby stimulating BTC’s growth.
$TRUMP memecoin goes through the roof, 50,000% since Sept. 2023
The hike of the TRUMP token, which is not directly linked to Donald Trump, has created a new class of millionaires in the PoliFi, a crypto sector related to the US election, an analysis by network data provider Nansen shows.
The Trump campaign announced it would begin to accept crypto donations, including widely known Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), as well as meme tokens such as Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB).
While the issuance of the TRUMP token has absolutely nothing to do with the former U.S. President Donald Trump, traders are using the tokens as a speculative bet on his ongoing presidential campaign.
In fact, a wallet supposedly associated with Trump received 579 000 TRUMPs from the meme coin’s developers between August and October 2023.