Weekly Market Insight: April Week 2

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Market Updates

07 Apr 2025

Headline News

Bitcoin declined by 4.88% last week, showing relative resilience compared to the S&P 500's 9.08% drop. While equities remain closely tied to economic fundamentals, global trade, and tariff impacts, Bitcoin appeared less affected. The sharper-than-expected reciprocal tariffs offered no indication that the Trump administration would ease its stance, signaling that disruptions to global supply chains and higher expected prices are likely to continue weighing on markets.

Macro-Outlook

President Trump announced a 10% baseline tariff, 25% on all automobiles, and reciprocal tariffs on multiple countries which effective on April 9. Notably, 34% new tariff on China (on top of the existing 20% tariff), 20% on EU, 46% on Vietnam and more. Canada and Mexico appeared not subjecting to the new reciprocal tariffs. Trump also indicated tax cut policies are coming next. The US equities reacted negatively after the announcement.
China announced an additional 34% tariff on all goods from the US as countermeasures.
The chances of recession in 2025 increased from 40% to 67%, according to Kalshi. Meanwhile, Polymarket predicts a 65% chance.
The Fed Chair Powell said the Fed does not need to be in a hurry. However, the market estimated the probabilities of 4 rate cuts by the end of 2025 has increased from 18.7% to 53.6%. The probability of a 25bps cut in May has also increased from 18.5% to 36.5%.
The US ISM manufacturing PMI fell to 49 in March, pointing back to contraction, below forecasts of 49.5. The US ISM service PMI fell to 50.8 in March, well below the market expectations of 53.
The US non-farm payrolls increased by 228K in March, beating forecasts of 135K. Meanwhile, the US unemployment rate increased to 4.2% in March, higher than market expectations of 4.1%.

Upcoming Economic Calendar including,

Thursday, April 10, 2:00am: FOMC Minutes
Thursday, April 10, 8:30pm: The US inflation rate in March
Friday, April 11, 8:30pm: The US PPI in March
Friday, April 11, 10:00pm: Michigan Preliminary Consumer Sentiment in April

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview

Circle filed Form S-1 with the SEC for IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CRCL.
The US SEC announced that "covered stablecoin" is not considered securities, which is designed to maintain 1:1 peg and primarily used for payments, transfers and value storage.
Fidelity launched a no-fee crypto IRA, allowing investment in BTC, ETH and LTC.
DTCC announced the launch of a new AppChain for digital collateral management and enable institutional-grade digital collateral market infrastructure.
Binance announced reducing leverage and margin tiers of several altcoins including ACT, which resulted in massive unwinding of carry trades and substantial amounts of selling in spot assets. FDUSD experienced depeg as the result of Justin Sun's accusation of First Digital Trust (FDT), the custodian of FDUSD, being insolvent. FDT defended the allegations made are false and currently have a dispute with Sun on TUSD.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

Babylon, the largest BTC restaking protocol, announced tokenomics details of BABY token. The token serves as the gas token, dual staking asset together with BTC to strengthen network security, and governance. The locked allocations can be staked and subjected to 3 to 4 years unlocking schedule. The first cliff unlock will be at the first anniversary of the network launch.
Everclear, the clearing layer for intent-transactions across chains, started its CLEAR buyback program with 75% of protocol revenue. Everclear has the majority of their volume from Ethereum, Blast and Base, with an estimated $27,000 fee generated in March.
Lens Chain mainnet is now live, using GHO as gas and enabling modular architecture for developers to be plugged-in the SocialFi platform.
Neura, the Ankr-backed high performance Layer-1, which is designed to address DeFi cross-chain interoperability and AI use cases, released its first Litepaper. The paper includes technology details, and reassuring ANKR as the native token.

Dapps

Chainlink launched Payment Abstraction on the mainnet, enabling user fees to be paid by any tokens and converted into LINK. Fees generated from Chainlink SVR, recapturing oracle MEV, will be converted to LINK as well.
Gensyn launched its testnet. The protocol uses a "probabilistic proof-of-learning" system to verify the accuracy of AI inferencing, and incentivises solvers, verifiers as well as whistleblowers to deliver high quality inference results to users.
Morpho introduced Morpho Prime, providing better experiences for curators and users with the new Curator and Reward Apps.
Jupiter has acquired DRiP, a collectible platform with over 200 million collectibles minted on the platform.
Kamino launched Meta-Swap, aggregating multiple routes available on Solana via Pyth Express Relay (RFQ), Jupiter and more. The swap aggregator features Active Simulation Mechanism, providing significantly accurate price quotes and reducing failed transactions.
Kaito partnered with Noise to create a trading marketplace for mindshare. Currently, the feature is accessible by invite-only.
ParaSwap has rebranded to Velora, refocusing on intent-based cross-chain transactions with hooks and advanced order features.
0x's DEX aggregator, Macha, expanded its support on Solana and cross-chain between EVM and SVM.
Barter, the DeFi solver team, introduced Superposition, a new approach to decentralised trading and liquidity provision. Superposition enables token holders to provide liquidity without asset locking or gas, delegating position management to asset managers, and MEV-free transaction for traders.
0xbow launched its Privacy Pools on the Ethereum mainnet. The Privacy Pools screen depositor addresses before depositing the funds into the pools, and withdrawn funds are able to demonstrate that the funds have not been co-mingled with illicit sources with "Proof of Association".
Superseed, a purpose-built Ethereum Layer-2 with a native collateralised-debt-position (CDP) protocol, is now mainnet live. Superseed repays the loans from the CDP protocols with sequencer profits, interest generated from loans backed by non-supercollateral assets and revenue from Proof of Repayment (PoR). Supercollateral assets enjoy 500% collateralisation ratio with no interest required on the loan. 2% yearly emission is distributed daily in the form of auction or PoR, proceeds received from the auction are used to repay the loans.
Flux released ArcaneOS, the full operating system for enhancing security and privacy in the Flux Cloud network.
f(x) Protocol introduced fxSAVE, the yield-bearing stablecoin representing the v2 stability pool. Users are able to earn ETH staking rewards, FXN emissions and trading commissions while holding fxSAVE.
Vertex is now live on Avalanche, bringing unified cross-chain liquidity (Arbitrum, Blast etc) on spot, perpetuals and money market to Avalanche.
Definitive Finance, the non-custody advanced trading platform, released its EDGE token on Base with approximately $60 million FDV. The next significant cliff unlocks are expected in April 2026. EDGE stakers are able to enjoy fee discounts.
TreasureDAO announced discontinuing support for game issuance and Treasure Chain due to financial deterioration, and focusing on marketplace, Bridgeworld, Smolworld and AI agent technology instead.

Upcoming Alpha and Governance

MultiversX is expected to launch Andromeda upgrade this week, which will reduce the transaction finality time by half.
IVX, the option strategy protocol on Berachain, announced launching a public round on Ramen Finance on April 7. The sales will be conducted at a fixed price with a $10 million valuation in FDV.
3 Liquity V2 forks are expected to go live in April, particularly Felix Protocol, which is expected to launch on April 8 on HyperEVM.
Neutron is expected to launch its largest upgrade, Mercury, on April 9. The upgrade will make Neutron a sovereign PoS network (from Interchain Security) and enable NTRN staking.
EigenLayer is expected to launch a slashing mechanism for AVSs on April 17.
Gearbox is expected to launch a v3.1 upgrade in April, featuring permissionless market curation and deployment.
Vana proposed to reform the DataDAO incentives distribution. Instead of directly distributing VANA to the top 16 DataDAO, the team proposed VRC-14, rewarding DataDAO based on trading volume, unique contributors and data access fees. Half of the emission rewards will be used to purchase the DLP token of DataDAO and add to the DEX liquidity pool.
Usual Protocol passed a proposal to raise the USD0++ floor price from $0.87 to $0.92.
Ethereum is expected to implement the Pectra upgrade on May 7.
Sei Network is expected to launch a v3 or Sei Giga upgrade within Q2 2025. Sei Giga aims to create a 50x throughput or 5 gigagas/sec.

Token Unlock

JTO token unlocked on April 8, amount representing 2.04% of the token supply.
IO token unlocked on April 12, amount representing 2.09% of the token supply.
APT token unlocked on April 13, amount representing 1.88% of the token supply.
STRK token unlocked on April 16, amount representing 4.65% of the token supply.
ARB token unlocked on April 17, amount representing 2.01% of the token supply.
VANA token unlocked on April 17, amount representing 1.47% of the token supply.
IMX token unlocked on April 18, amount representing 1.36% of the token supply.
TRUMP token unlocked on April 18, amount representing 19.9% of the token supply.
PLUME token unlocked on April 21, amount representing 5.48% of the token supply.
RON token unlocked on April 27, amount representing 5.28% of the token supply.
GRASS token unlocked on April 30, amount representing 1.35% of the token supply.
OP token unlocked on April 30, amount representing 1.99% of the token supply.

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