The cryptocurrency market is cooling off after Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies began undergoing a correction.
Bitcoin dropped to $102K, and Solana experienced 8% volatility after the recent SOL ETF news.
The SOL market eagerly awaits the regulatory green light for Solana ETFs after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a year after the regulator approved spot exchange-traded funds for Bitcoin.
The TRUMP memecoin on Solana also pushed SOL’s price near the $300 mark. Solana is currently exchanging hands at $247 at the time of publication.
The global cryptocurrency market cap is down to $3.7T, a 3.02% drop from yesterday.
Bitcoin’s dominance also dropped to 58.68%, a 0.07% 24-hour drop. The Fear and Greed Index rose to 75 greed in the market.
Small-cap gainers included BABYSHARK, which rose 100%. TRON also gained 72.4% from yesterday. MEMDEX100 (MEMDEX) increased in price by 60.1%, while KIP Protocol (KIP) and Dotcom (Y2K) increased by 56.8% and 44.7%, respectively, in the past 24 hours.
Ultima (ULTIMA) is one of the large-cap gainers in the last 24 hours, with a realized 29.2% gain in price, reaching $13,970.
POPCAT’s price also gained 10.1% to reach $0.573. Chintai (CHEX) is another large-cap gainer that saw an 8.32% rise in price and is currently trading at $0.523.
GateToken (GT) also surged in price by 5.31%, while Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) rose by 4.39%. At the time of publication, GT was trading at $22.90, while PENGU was trading at $0.025.
Bitcoin’s price plummeted by 3% in the last 7 days and is currently trading at $102,200 at the time of publication.
World Liberty Financial spent $9.84M to buy 94.94 WBTC in the past two hours amid the price dip in the cryptocurrency market. The Trump-linked Fund has invested $56.82M in 534.1 WBTC in the past 3 days, at an average price of $106,379, now down $1.74M (-3%).
In the same period, the fund has also spent a total of $178.2M on 6 tokens, including ETH, WBTC, TRX, AAVE, LINK, and ENA.
Binance announced that ANIME will be listed on its platform today at 14:00 UTC and will offer trading pair support alongside USDT, USDC, BNB, FDUSD, and TRY. The CEX also said it will add the seed tag to ANIME because it is a freshly launched token.
Binance revealed it will give away 500 million ANIME tokens for the HODLer Airdrop, which is around 5% of the maximum token supply.
The cryptocurrency will launch on Ethereum and Arbitrum, with 50.5% of tokens allocated to the community and more than 20% to the team, advisors and company.
Meanwhile, Ethereum (ETH) is going through another drawdown of staked tokens. This time, the withdrawals are not so sharp, but they have been going on for months.
More Ethereum (ETH) is getting unstaked in the past months, coinciding with a leadership controversy surrounding the Ethereum Foundation. The recent outflows totaled over 788K ETH, more than a year’s supply of new tokens.
Since November 7, 2.3% of all staked ETH has been sent back to circulation. Still, over 28% of the supply of ETH has been staked, most often through LidoDAO.
The withdrawals add to the loss of confidence in Ethereum’s long-term governance. After recent controversy about selling ETH and the launch of a second Ethereum Foundation, the chain is now starting to lose its biggest claim to primacy, the large-scale value locked.
The withdrawals also follow a decrease in the ETH reward to 2.19% annualized after holding for one year.
At the same time, holding ETH comes with the risk of negative price action. Most ETH staked is based on legacy inflows at a lower price range under $2,000. However, the past year saw inflows of ETH at a higher price.
Deposits into Beacon Chain are still happening, though inflows slowed down since August 2024. There are also more days with complete withdrawals of stakes from the Beacon Chain contract.
Ethereum’s chain has selected the metric of ‘economic security’ as its leading indicator of success. A 32-ETH stake is valued at over $125K, a significant barrier against rogue validators and network attacks. After the initial rapid expansion, the chain also carries more than 1M validators.
Ethereum still has $64.37B in total value locked. However, the metric of economic security does not match recent economic activity. In the first month of 2025, Ethereum lagged behind Solana in terms of fee generation.
Additionally, the value of SOL staked is almost catching up with the ETH held in the beacon chain. The mix of security and recent economic value shows Solana may finally start to displace Ethereum as the go-to chain for fast tokenization.
In January, Ethereum produced $122.9M in fees, surpassed by Solana with $167M in fees.
One of the sources of staking outflows was the Coinbase staking program. While more ETH flowed through Binance staking, Coinbase saw peak outflows.
Coinbase is the third-largest entity, with over 3.4M ETH staked, valued at over $10B. The centralized exchange is the leader among other market operators, drawing in more than 38% of user deposits.
In the past month, Coinbase saw more than 331K ETH withdrawn from staking, showing the shift of interest toward Solana.
LidoDAO saw the second-biggest outflows, with more than 124K ETH unstaked. A small part of the ETH flowed back into Ether.Fi, Kiln, and Galaxy Digital. LidoDAO is still the biggest liquid staking entity, carrying 89% of ETH for this category of staking, leaving the rest to its smaller competitors.
Ethereum relies on its legacy status, to be used for asset tokenization and institutional chains. Recently, Ethereum became the carrier for Soneium, a new L2 chains of the Sony Corporation. Currently, the Ethereum Foundation is seeking a convincing narrative for holding ETH, as it has found no other use case for the token than liquidating for current expenses.
Despite the growth of L2, ETH still cannot break into a higher price range, hovering at $3,100 even as BTC and other assets post new price records.
ETH traded at $3,228.86 after another week of downward price pressure, extending its long trend of losing against BTC. ETH kept sinking as Ethereum supporters switched their avatars to Miladies and tried to move between the ‘ultrasound money’ narrative and being a platform for computation.
Crowd money is currently neutral on ETH, while smart money is slightly bearish. Ethereum sales also accelerated in January, with pressure from whales and a lower number of buyers.
Finally, The market cap for Circle USDC stablecoin has surpassed $50 billion, continuing its rapid growth from last year.
USDC now has a circulating supply of $51 billion after seeing more than 11% growth in the past seven days.
The stablecoin’s massive growth this year only continues a positive trend for 2024 when it outperformed all its competitors, including Tether USDT, in market cap growth.
Despite this growth, USDC remains below its all-time high market cap of $55.9 billion from June 2022. However, the steady increase in its supply means it is back to challenging Tether USDT after the struggles of 2023.
USDC was one of the major victims of the banking collapse in 2023 when Circle faced challenges withdrawing some of USDC’s reserves from Silicon Valley Bank. The incident caused USDC to briefly depeg from the US dollar, leading to a massive sell-off by several holders who opted for USDT.
Interestingly, USDT also recorded around 50% growth in its market cap, going from $91.7 billion to $137.5 billion between 2023 and 2024.
The leading stablecoin has seen its market cap grow by over 550% since 2020, while USDC has recorded more than 1,100% growth.