Plus: Solana joins the ETF club

GM. This market’s more mixed than a fruit punch – let’s sip slowly and see what hits first.

What’s wrong with the altcoin market?

News drops: talking to dolphins, a Solana ETF + more

Market flavor today

Ay yo, what’s that rocket flying past us?..

Is it… crypto?..

Nope. False alarm. Just Katy Perry. Crypto’s still down here with the rest of us, nowhere near liftoff yet.

But hey, even if it isn’t mooning, Bitcoin’s been holding up pretty well lately.

Santiment’s analyst Brian says this recovery is thanks to fewer worries about tariffs – at least for now – and some improvements in how the Bitcoin network is working.

Now, if we’re being honest with ourselves, most traders don’t really care about network upgrades and or macroeconomic policy – they’ve just been desperate for the downturn to stop. And it looks like this rebound was enough to give people a bit of hope again.

Matter of fact, the vibes haven’t been this bullish since the tariff drama started on April 2.

But before we get too excited: the uncertainty around tariffs is still very real, and it continues making it hard for investors and companies to plan ahead.

‘Cuz even though Bitcoin’s price has bounced a bit, no one knows if this rally will last – any new tariff news could mess with the market all over again.

That said, a few on-chain signals are helping Bitcoin’s case:

• Network Realized Profit/Loss: more people are locking in profits, which usually supports more upward movement;

• BTC on exchanges: there’s less Bitcoin sitting on exchanges, which usually means more people are holding instead of selling;

• Whale wallets: wallets with 10+ BTC hit a record high, while smaller traders keep panic-selling (which is generally a good sign).

And if you’re more of a zoom-out, “where’s this all going?” kind of person – good news there too.

Corporate adoption is growing: according to Bitwise, the number of public companies holding BTC went up by around 18% in Q1 of 2025.

So no, Bitcoin hasn’t blasted off yet – but it’s definitely not dead. It’s just waiting for the right moment…

Memecoin harvest

Memecoins: outperforming your serious bags with nothing but a silly mascot and a dream

Data as of 08:10 AM EST.

Check out these memecoins and plenty more here.

Idk ‘bout y’all, but I’m still mentally recovering after the OM situation.

Because we all know that this isn’t just one token having a breakdown – it’s a way deeper problem across the entire altcoin market.

It’s scary. But we can’t ignore it. So let’s discuss.

Altcoin prices can look normal for weeks, even months… and by the time retail investors realize something’s wrong, we’ve got OM-style 90% crashes.

Now, what makes this worse is how hard it is to figure out whether something’s wrong.

Arthur Cheong, founder and CIO of DeFiance Capital, dropped this take: one of the biggest problems in crypto rn is that tokens can be artificially priced.

How that works:

When a new crypto project launches a token, they often work with market makers. These are companies or bots that help provide liquidity (in other words, they help make sure there’s always someone for you to trade with).

Sounds good. But the issue is that they can also make a token look healthy when it’s actually being kept alive with hopes, dreams, and duct tape.

And there’s no way for regular investors to distinguish whether a token’s price is being driven by legit market forces – people actually buying, selling, and believing in the project – or by the team and market makers.

Basically, we can’t trust the price.

And centralized exchanges, despite being the gatekeepers of token liquidity, seem to be ignoring this.

Matter of fact, sometimes they benefit from this behavior. Fake demand means more trading, more hype, more fees. Win-win… for them.

But long term? It’s a disaster for the altcoin market:

• The market becomes impossible to trust;

• Good projects get ignored because investors assume everything’s trash;

• Only insiders and gamblers stick around, while serious investors either quit or become BTC maxis.

And if you wanna see how big of an issue it is, just look at Binance. In 2025, they listed 27 new tokens. Only three of them are still in the green.

When things are like this, why would anyone new wanna join?

Cheong says if the big players – like exchanges, funds, and infrastructure providers – don’t step up, the altcoin market might become straight-up uninvestable.

And what can be done here?

• Projects should be upfront about how much of their liquidity is being supported artificially, and for how long;

• Projects should be required to publish honest tokenomics: real numbers, clear vesting schedules, and honest info about how much of the token supply is actually circulating;

• Exchanges should enforce stricter listing requirements;

• An industry-wide code of conduct – covering launch practices, lockups, and market integrity – would also help rebuild trust.

This isn’t just a reputational issue – this is the kind of structural rot that could stop the whole crypto industry from growing long-term.

Time to fix that.

News drops

The CEO of an NFT marketplace got scammed out of over $100K in crypto. Someone who claimed to be the founder of a crypto mining company got him on a Zoom call and convinced him to install malware that drained his wallets.

Kraken now lets you trade US stocks and ETFs, not just crypto. Basically, they wanna make it easy to manage everything in one place.

Wanna speak dolphin? It’s possible (kinda) – Google made an AI tool called DolphinGemma that studies dolphin sounds and can even make dolphin-like noises based on what it learns.

Nvidia’s spending $500B to build AI-focused factories across the US. The Trump team cheered it on, saying it’s proof their plan to bring manufacturing home is working.

Solana ETFs are launching in Canada tomorrow. In the US, they’re still stuck waiting for approval.

Juicy memes

In the past few days, the price of Bitcoin has been under significant bearish pressure, falling by more than 10% in the past week. The US-based spot Bitcoin ETFs (exchange-traded funds) registered significant withdrawals in the same period, begging the question of whether the funds are responsible for the market downturn.

The spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds ended the run of significant daily outflows on Friday, February 28, with nearly $100 million added in value to close the week. However, it might be too early to tell whether this latest capital influx to these crypto-based products represents a shift in investor sentiment.

Bitcoin ETFs Lose $3.2 Billion In Eight Days

According to the latest market data, the US-based spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded a total daily net inflow of $94.34 million on Friday. This latest capital inflow put an end to the funds’ eight-day streak of consecutive net outflows.

The ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (with the ticker ARKB) was responsible for a substantial portion of the day’s total inflow, posting  $193.7 million in capital influx. ARKB was followed by Fidelity Wise Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) on Friday, adding more than $176 million to its net assets to close the week.

Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) and Grayscale Mini Trust (BTC) were the only other exchange-traded funds that saw net inflows ($4.57 and $5.59 million, respectively) on Friday. BlackRock’s IBIT (the largest Bitcoin ETF by net asset) accounted for most of the total withdrawals ($244.5 million), continuing its recent trend of outflows.

Source: SoSoValue

The $94.34 million single-day net influx did little to alleviate the US-based Bitcoin ETFs’ weekly performance, which stood at a record negative outflows of over $2.61 billion. Up until the past Friday, the last time the US Bitcoin ETF market saw a daily net positive inflow was on Friday, February 14.

More than $3.265 billion was withdrawn from the spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds within these eight days. Most notably, the Bitcoin ETFs registered over $1.1 billion in its daily net outflow on Tuesday, February 25 — the first time withdrawals have ever crossed the billion-dollar mark since launch.

Bitcoin Price And The Spot ETFs

There is undeniably a relationship between the performance of the spot Bitcoin ETFs and the BTC price. According to CryptoQuant’s Head of Research Julio Moreno, exchange-traded funds have disappeared as a source of demand growth for Bitcoin so far in 2025 relative to 2024.

The net cumulative inflows into Bitcoin ETFs on day 58 of 2025 stand at 12,100 Bitcoin ($1.7 billion), which pales in comparison to 128,700 Bitcoin ($6.3 billion) in 2024. This trend somewhat explains the Bitcoin price struggles since the start of this year.

As of this writing, BTC is valued at around $85,400, reflecting a 1.5% price increase in the past 24 hours.

The price of BTC on the daily timeframe | Source: BTCUSDT chart on TradingView

Featured image from iStock, chart from TradingView