Foresight Ventures: Institutions Fully Enter, Meme Season Quietly Arrives
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Foresight Ventures: Institutions Fully Enter, Meme Season Quietly Arrives
"Only AI and meme narrative altcoins can outperform BTC in the short term; other 70% of altcoins basically underperform."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsA. Market Outlook
1. Macro Liquidity
Monetary liquidity has improved. The U.S. Q4 core PCE was revised upward to 2.1%, exceeding expectations and highlighting persistent inflationary pressures. Investor expectations for the scale of Fed rate cuts continue to weaken, with market pricing now reflecting only 75 basis points of rate cuts in 2024. U.S. equities remain strong, supported again by earnings reports from tech giants led by NVIDIA, showing no signs of a significant correction. The crypto market surged, with the U.S. spot ETFs seeing consecutive days of substantial inflows.
2. Overall Market Performance
Top 100 gainers by market cap:
BTC surged this week, approaching its all-time high and triggering a "blood-sucking" phase. BTC dominance rose to 55%, a recent historical high, with only 30% of altcoins outperforming BTC. Market interest is primarily focused on AI and meme coins—AI being driven by institutional investors, while retail investors are heavily involved in meme speculation.
1. PEPE: Memecoins align well with major exchanges' interests by helping attract new users. In the previous cycle, meme coins accounted for 5% of total market cap; if this cycle conservatively assumes 2%, it could still reach a $120 billion valuation. DOGE and SHIB are in defensive positions, but PEPE—which is already listed on major exchanges—appears to have greater potential. 2. AR: Originally the leader in permanent storage, Arweave has transitioned into an Ethereum-killer L1 public chain. It recently launched the public testnet Arweave AO, designed as a compute layer for AI. 3. COTI: Originally a 2017 payment project founded by a team from Israel, COTI has recently pivoted to become a privacy-focused L2 for Ethereum using fully homomorphic encryption technology, claiming superiority over Fhenix, which is backed by Multicoin Capital. With a market cap in the hundreds of millions, it offers a more attractive risk-reward profile compared to ZK L2s valued at tens of billions.
3. BTC Market Analysis
1) On-chain Data
The new spot ETF products have created a fresh source of demand for BTC. Net inflows into ETFs exceeded 90,000 BTC, amounting to $6 billion and bringing the total ETF assets under management to $40 billion.
Stablecoin market cap increased by 2% week-on-week, maintaining an upward trend.
The long-term trend indicator MVRV-ZScore, based on the market's total cost basis, reflects the overall profitability of the market. A reading above 6 indicates a top zone; below 2 indicates a bottom zone. The MVRV has dropped below the critical level of 1, meaning holders are generally in loss. The current value is 2.67, placing it in a neutral range.
Crypto investment products targeted at institutions have seen net inflows for four consecutive weeks, surpassing $6 billion year-to-date.
2) Futures Market
Funding rates: This week, funding rates spiked to a one-year high, reflecting strong market FOMO sentiment. Rates between 0.05%-0.1% indicate excessive long leverage, often signaling a short-term top; rates between -0.1% to 0% suggest heavy short leverage, typically marking a short-term bottom.
Open interest: BTC open interest surged this week, rising alongside price.
Long/short ratio: 1.1, indicating normal market sentiment. Retail sentiment often acts as a contrarian indicator—below 0.7 suggests fear, above 2.0 suggests greed. However, due to high volatility, the long/short ratio has diminished predictive value.
3) Spot Market
BTC surged close to its previous high of 69,000, posting six consecutive green monthly candles. Continuous inflows from spot ETFs are prompting many mainstream U.S. institutions to passively allocate strategically. In the short term, only AI- and meme-themed altcoins can outperform BTC, while about 70% of other altcoins lag behind.
B. Market Data
1. Total Value Locked (TVL) Across All Chains
2. TVL Distribution by Chain
This week, total TVL reached $92.5 billion, up $17.8 billion (23.8%) from last week. BTC surged past $60,000, nearing its all-time high. All major public chains saw significant TVL increases this month, and all continued to rise this week. ETH chain TVL increased by 4%, TRON and ARB by around 9%, BSC and Solana by 15%, and the BTC chain skyrocketed by 38%. Over the past month, ETH chain TVL has nearly tripled, reaching $52.6 billion—five times that of the second-largest chain.
3. Protocol-Level TVL Analysis
1) ETH TVL Overview
2) BSC TVL Overview
3) Polygon TVL Overview
4) Arbitrum TVL Overview
5) Optimism TVL Overview
6) Base TVL Overview
7) Solana TVL Overview
4. NFT Market Data Trends
1) NFT-500 Index
2) NFT Market Overview
3) NFT Marketplace Share
4) NFT Buyer Analysis
The NFT market declined slightly this week, with blue-chip NFT floor prices showing mixed results. Pandora rose 1.5%, BAYC gained 1.8%, MAYC fell less than 1%, Milady surged 13%, and Azuki dropped 5.4%. Trading volume increased slightly compared to last week, with Pandora continuing to lead in trading activity. Notably, the number of first-time NFT buyers hit a three-month high, although the overall NFT market remains sluggish.
5. Latest Project Fundings
6. Portfolio Updates
1) ORA — Verifiable Oracle Protocol
ORA (formerly Hyper Oracle) has launched its on-chain Optimistic Privacy AI solution "opp/ai".
According to the team, opp/ai combines zkML (Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning) and opML (Optimistic Machine Learning), offering both privacy and performance advantages. In tests, opp/ai improves zkML performance by 2–5x while preserving privacy and decentralization. Additionally, opp/ai can integrate any zkML solution, meaning improvements in zkML will directly benefit opp/ai.
2) EthStorage — Infrastructure
EthStorage has integrated with Celestia, the modular data availability network. This integration provides a complete long-term data availability (DA) solution for Ethereum L2/L3s. Celestia’s Blobstream bridges Celestia’s modular DA layer to Ethereum, while EthStorage, powered by its proprietary time-sampled data availability proof algorithm, serves as the permanent storage solution for DA blobs. Together, Celestia and EthStorage enable a high-throughput, programmable dynamic storage interface for Rollups. This functionality not only provides long-term DA for Rollups but also supports emerging full-chain applications such as on-chain gaming, decentralized social networks, and on-chain AI applications.
3) Merlin — Bitcoin L2
Within 14 days of launching its staking campaign this month, Merlin Chain achieved a TVL of $1.97 billion, surpassing Blast, which launched in November last year. On February 26, the total value of NFTs within the Merlin Chain ecosystem exceeded $420 million, making it the blockchain with the highest NFT market cap outside of Ethereum. On February 5, Merlin Chain announced a successful funding round with participation from 24 institutions including OKX Ventures, ABCDE, Foresight Ventures, and Arkstream Capital.
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