Trakx Weekly Update: February 26

Key Crypto Market Figures

CTIs Weekly Performance

Crypto markets stayed in the green for a fourth successive week as evidenced by the 1.8% rise in the Trakx Top 10 Crypto CTI. Whereas Bitcoin has been the cheerleader for much of the recent rally, last week attention switched to Ethereum. The SEC has until May to decide whether or not to approve several spot ETH ETF products and, judging by the 10% price rally, it seems crypto players are becoming more confident the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap will follow in Bitcoin’s footsteps.

The best performer though amongst the Trakx family of CTIs, by some margin, was the AI CTI. Its value surged 40% after tradfi darling Nvidia gave a upbeat earnings estimate and its CEO, Jensen Huang, claimed accelerated computing and generative AI have hit “the tipping point” amid surging demand. Such a bullish assessment not only helped drive up Nvidia’s market cap by $277bn – the largest daily gain in history (and people say crypto prices are volatile!) – but it reinvigorated optimism about the sector’s prospects.

Currently, the leaders in AI are centralized entities. However, as outlined in our latest research note (see link below) there is considerable potential for disruption from decentralized players due to user concern about reliability and bias. Certainly, last week’s Chat GPT fail, when the model started started outputting nonsense, and Google’s new Gemini AI image generator, which was temporarily pulled after heavy criticism of politically biased outputs, did nothing to alleviate such concerns.

Last week’s price action certainly suggests crypto investors are also anticipating a more decentralized future and not just in AI. Our newly launched DePin CTI also generated positive returns, up 5% w/w. Meanwhile, the Top 10 DeFi CTI and the DEX CTI gained 13% and 12% respectively, as they received an additional boost from the 40% jump in the value of UNI, the native token of Uniswap after the foundation behind the DEX issued a proposal to change its fee mechanism to reward UNI holders who have staked or delegated their tokens.

Sources: Trakx, Coingecko, Alphavantage

Market Trends

• Spot Bitcoin ETF cumulative trading volume exceeds $50 billion: The Block.
• Nvidia Rises Most in About Nine Months as AI Drives Sales: Yahoo Finance.
• Bitcoin ETF Approval Comparable to ‘Naked Emperor’s New Clothes,’ ECB Officials Say: CoinDesk.
• Uniswap UNI token soars 50% amid DAO proposal to flip on $3.3bn ‘fee switch’: DLNews.
• Adam Back files previously unseen Satoshi Nakamoto emails in Craig Wright trial: CryptoSlate.

Trakx News

• Ryan Shea published “DePin: Bringing Decentralization to Infrastructure Networks” examining this emerging use-case for crypto.

Trakx CTIs Performance

Sources: Coingecko and AlphaVantage

*Return of bitcoin is calculated since 01/05/2020, while CTIs performances were calculated since their respective launch date.
**Includes simulated performance.