Rangebound Spot, Falling Vol

Daily Updates:

• The rangebound movement in crypto spot prices that began last Friday continues into today. BTC briefly rose close to $85K yesterday evening before the open in Asia reversed the trend, now trading at $83K. 
• Yesterday’s compressed term structure of volatility has now dis-inverted for both majors, BTC and ETH, resulting in a normal upward-sloping structure. At-the-money implied volatility levels at the front-end dropped by 3 and 6 points, respectively, whilst volatility at the back-end for both assets remains largely unchanged from Monday.
• The drop in volatility expectations has been accompanied by a recovery in BTC’s volatility smiles skew towards calls – tenors beyond 90 days are all positively skewed and shorter-term tenors have lost much of the downside premium they had priced in earlier in the month when President Trump’s blanket 25% metals tariffs took effect on March 12. 

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• Spot BTC ETFs also posted considerable inflows yesterday of $274.6M. This is the largest single-day of inflows since the 4th of February and comes following their strongest streak of weekly outflows since their January launch. The Spot ETH ETFs on the other hand, continued their streak of outflows, with yesterday marking the 9th consecutive trading day of net outflows. 

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• President Trump’s tariff policies have been a central driver of volatility and price action over the past few weeks. The President said he still intends to impose both broad-based reciprocal tariffs and additional sector-specific tariffs from April, telling reports that “they charge us and we charge them and then besides that on autos on steel on aluminium, we are going to have additional tariffs”. Trump also claimed the potential start date for the reciprocal tariffs, April 2nd, will be “a liberating day” for the US. 

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• Trump's World Liberty Financial (WLFI) has acquired 103,911 Avalanche (AVAX) tokens for $2M ($19.25 per token) and invested another $2M in 2.45M Mantle (MNT) tokens ($0.81 per token), diversifying its digital assets. With these acquisitions, WLFI's crypto portfolio now exceeds $340M, diversified across 11 assets.
• Ethena Labs and Securitize have unveiled Converge, an EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain designed as the first purpose-built settlement network for TradFi and DeFi. It will be centred on USDe & USDtb and secured by ENA, with a developer testnet launching soon and mainnet in Q2 2025 and will integrate key infrastructure providers like LayerZero, Pyth, Wormhole, and RedStone, offering a familiar developer experience while facilitating digital dollar and tokenized asset settlements.
• Canary Capital Group has filed to launch an ETF tied to the spot price of Layer-1 blockchain Sui with the SEC – marking the first ETF product related to Sui, the 20th largest cryptocurrency token by market capitalization. 
• Standard Chartered slashed its 2025 ETH price target by 60% to $4,000, citing competition from Ethereum killers like Base, which it estimates has removed $50B in market cap. Despite this, their longer-term outlook on ETH remains positive with a forecast of $7,500 by 2028-2029, a major underperformance compared to BTC.

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