Crypto Markets Daily Feb 26 2025

Daily Updates:

• According to the Conference Board’s February survey, consumer confidence in February fell by 7 points to 98.3 – the largest single month fall since August 2021 and the third consecutive monthly decline.
• The report also stated that the “proportion of consumers anticipating a recession over the next 12 months increased to a nine-month high”. 
• The 10Y US treasury yield fell to its lowest level year-to-date yesterday, and markets are now also fully pricing in two rate cuts over the course of 2025 (see this in the ‘Charts of the Day’), compared to earlier in the year where robust US labour market data strengthened the US exceptionalism narrative. 
• As Chair Powell highlighted in the January FOMC meeting, the Fed is looking for further progress on inflation or weakness in the labour market before it adjusts rates. At that time, Powell said “right now we don’t see that, so no hurry to make adjustments”. 

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• As US treasuries surged, risk-on assets struggled yesterday – the S&P 500 closed 0.47% lower at the end of the day, the Nasdaq-100 dropped 1.24%, and BTC continued its grind down from $99K to $86K. 
• Since then however, BTC has pared back some of those losses, trading shy of $89K currently. 
• ETH is also seeing a slight relief rally and is up 4% on the day. 
• With those spot price moves, ETH’s implied volatility term structure has flattened, from its inversion yesterday, with implied vol levels at the front-end for both majors having fallen by 8 points and 3 points for ETH and BTC, respectively. 

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• The U.S. SEC has officially closed its multi-year investigation into Uniswap Labs without taking any action, following a Wells Notice issued last year that alleged Uniswap Labs operated an unregistered securities exchange, engaged in unregistered broker or clearing firm activity, or issued an unregistered security.
• Jupiter has officially started its first JUP token buyback, with on-chain data showing that 4.88 million JUP (approx $3.33 million) has been repurchased. This comes as part of the plan to create steady buying pressure, by using 50% of protocol fees for future buybacks and  locking repurchased tokens for three years.
• The SEC has officially acknowledged Grayscale’s Cardano ETF proposal and NYSE Arca’s filing for a spot Cardano exchange-traded fund. This starts a 240-day review process that begins once the filing is published in the Federal Register, which is typically within a few days of the acknowledgment, before the SEC decides whether to approve or reject the ETF.
• The ETH upgrade finalisation issues during the roll out on the Holesky testnet have been attributed to its specific testnet configurations. This issue is not expected to affect the mainnet.

This Week’s Calendar:

Charts of the Day: