Data Points
AI-token trade volume hits all-time high.
The weekly trade volumes of the top AI tokens by market capitalization hit an all-time high of $13bn last week, led by Worldcoin’s WLD. The surge comes on the back of record revenues for chip maker Nvdia, which contributed to a wider stock market rally.
AI-related crypto tokens are linked to projects that use artificial intelligence as a tool to improve security, user experience, power decentralized exchanges, or image and text generation services. They have outperformed Bitcoin by a large margin this year with average returns of over 105% YTD compared to 22% for BTC.
While Binance is still the largest market for AI tokens, its dominance has declined significantly over the past year, with exchanges such as Poloniex, OKX, and HTX, as well as U.S. exchanges seeing growing trading activity.
Is ETH finally catching-up?
Last week, the ETH to BTC ratio — measuring the relative performance between the two assets — rose to its highest level since early January as ETH briefly traded above $3k for the first time since April 2022. The ratio has been volatile this year, surging to a multi-month high of 0.6045 on January 12, before falling back to 0.5125 in early February.
ETH has re-gained momentum since February 12 on hopes that a potential spot ETH ETF approval will boost demand amid shrinking available supply. ETH perpetual futures open interest hit a multi-year high of $7.7bn on February 25, suggesting new capital inflows. The daily ETH spot trade volume has also been robust, surpassing $5bn for the longest period since early 2023. This suggests that the recent rally has support.
TUSD discount against USDT hits all-time low.
True USD’s TUSD has been trading at a persistent discount against USDT this year, hitting a record low of 0.974 USDT over the weekend. Earlier this year Binance removedTUSD as one of the staked tokens from its Launchpools, causing mass selling of the stablecoin.
However, the selling pressure has intensified in February with a net selling volume of more than USD 16 million for TUSD against USDT on Binance in the last 30 days. Selling also outweighed buying on other exchanges such as Poloniex and HTX, indicating a broadening lack of demand now that the stablecoin has lost its dominant use case.
STRK sees sluggish volume after controversial airdrop.
Starknet airdropped its long-awaited STRK token to 1.3 million addresses last week, with a special emphasis on distributing tokens to Ethereum stakers and to developers who had contributed to the network. While the airdrop went smoothly given its size, the airdrop faced criticism regarding its vesting schedule, under which early investors’ and team tokens would unlock in April 2024. The team reversed course following the blowback, creating a more linear unlock schedule.
Despite the hype around the airdrop, volumes were relatively sluggish on centralized exchanges, registering under $750mn in spot volume in the first full day of trading. As usual, Binance led the way, this time trailed by OKX. Bithumb continued its run of success in Korea, registering decent volumes while competitor Upbit has not listed the token. Trading on U.S. exchanges was limited despite listings on Coinbase and Kraken.