Fantom Ramps Up, Short-Term BTC Holders in Losses, Perp Markets Undecided

FTM Overtakes AVAX on Daily Transactions

• Fantom surpassed Avalanche in daily transactions at the start of 2022. As the narrative rotates from Avalanche to Fantom, it’s not surprising to see it reflected in transactions. Opportunistic capital moved over to yield farm on Fantom with high yields on stablecoins of around ~30-60% APR.
• New projects launching on Fantom are adding to the momentum. Daniele and Andre Cronje are teaming up for an upcoming new project launch, although details are scant. Additionally, Hundred Finance has garnered attention recently and leverages the buzzy ve-token model. (For more context on ve-token dynamics, see our recent post on the Curve Wars.) Hundred Finance is led by vfat0, the creator of vfat.tools, a popular data dashboard for yield farmers.

Short-term BTC Holders In Loss Is Spiking

• As BTC trends downward in recent weeks, more short-term holders (STH) of spot BTC have been holding at a loss. Currently, only 11% of STHs are in profit. This has been devastating for BTC investors and may partly be due to funds closing positions to take year-end profits plus the narrative around China-based exchanges shuttering.
• Furthermore, long-term holders (LTH) have been affected as holders in loss went up to near-September highs. But as the picture stands, 87.4% of long-term holders are still in profit following the run-up last year.
• Note: Glassnode categorizes long-term holders as UTXOs that have not moved coins for more than 155 days. Short-term holders are UTXOs that moved coins within the last 155 days.

BTC Open Interest Climbs, Funding Rate Slows

• BTC perps open interest (OI) has started to recover following the mass liquidations we saw in late November and early December. In USD terms, BTC perps OI remains ~28% below its November high while BTC is down ~30% from its recent price peak. (However, if measured in BTC terms, perp OI is back to prior highs as the recent pickup in OI has coincided with further price weakness for BTC.)
• While crypto markets remain extremely fearful, it seems bearish sentiment the past month has somewhat dissipated among some traders. However, short-term technicals don’t look pretty at current levels.
• Funding rates have remained relatively low but are still positive as traders opened more longs than shorts. Still, this alone doesn’t give a strong indication of where the market is heading in the short run.

ETH Open Interest Stable with Flat Funding

• ETH perps open interest has also moved a bit higher, but compared to BTC, ETH OI has stagnated somewhat over the last couple of weeks, hovering between ~$8B to $9B.
• Funding rates have also remained flat at near 0%, implying traders are uncertain of how the market will move in the near term.
• Typically, high funding rates indicate that leveraged traders are bullish, with more longs opened than shorts (and vice versa when funding rates turn negative).

Notable Tweets

Pyth 2021 Review

Welcome to 2022! Thank you to all the Pythians for this incredible past year: your support, collaboration, and camaraderie allowed the Pyth network to accomplish so much in 2021. Let’s reflect on some #Pyth metrics for 2021! https://pythnetwork.medium.com/5e1f4c1743cc

—Pyth (@PythNetwork) January 3, 2022

Boba WAGMI Incentive Program

1\ Introducing Boba’s WAGMI incentive program for builders and developers. In collaboration with @UMAprotocol, we will be distributing WAGMI options on $BOBA token to promising projects building on Boba.

on this below:

— Boba Network ($BOBA) (@bobanetwork) January 4, 2022

Terra Hints of News in January

There’s quite possibly 2 separate {REDACTED}’s this month. January is gonna be fun innit

—Terra (UST) Powered by LUNA (@terra_money) January 5, 2022