TLDR: BTC is down but ETH is up. Bitcoin dominance is down. The hot coin we look at this week is TIA.

BTC & ETH Market Update 📈

Crypto is down this week, with BTC being down 2.6% and ETH down 2.5%:

Last week ETH saw a price surge of almost 15%, so its natural to see a little bit of a pullback. However, BTC and its decrease looks to be a general offloading of BTC due to the spot Bitcoin ETF.

Bitcoin dominance has been somewhat stagnant this week, peaking at 48% ending the week at 47.7%. It seems that capital initially this week flew to Bitcoin as the BTC spot ETF was getting approved, and then either moved back or continued over to altcoins like ETH, where capital usually flows to up until when Bitcoin dominance has peaked and starts to decrease, moving capital into more risky mid- or low-cap coins.

The Bitcoin halving is coming up end of March or beginning of April 2024. If history is any guidance we will continue to see BTC dominance climb up until after Bitcoin halving, whereafter people start to look for higher return moving further on the risk curve entering altcoins. This typically starts with ETH, and then on to mid- and low cap coins. Other coins being moved into are typically “ETH killers” like SOL, AVAX and other other L1s. Yet ETH is still the king amongst altcoins, as price action this week also shows.

With BTC dominance being stagnant, the BTC/ETH ratio is trending downwards to 16.8 ETH per BTC, underlining that BTC continues to be king in crypto, but alts like ETH are gaining momentum.

Hot Coin: TIA 🔥

In this week’s newsletter we dive into Celestia’s token with the ticker: $TIA.

The price action and volume is has been growing consistently, and doesn’t seem to stop any time soon:

What is the project about?

Celestia is a modular blockchain network that decouples consensus from data availability and execution. This is done to create a more scalable and flexible foundation for decentralized applications (dApps) and other blockchain platforms.

Here's the kicker: With Celestia, developers can deploy their own blockchains without the need to bootstrap security or set up their own validator set because Celestia provides the necessary infrastructure. It’s like the DJ of the blockchain party, keeping the beat going for everyone to dance to their own tunes.

Get a more in-depth overview of Celestia in our deep dive articles:

Why is the project exciting now?

There are three main reasons why we feature this project in this week’s newsletter:

• Data Availability Is The Hot New Thing

• The “real” Cosmos Hub

• Airdrops

Data Availability Is The Hot New Thing

Celestia differentiates itself from its competitors as a modular data availability network designed to enhance blockchain scalability and improve the developer experience. Its design allows it to provide a scalable data availability layer for other blockchains, also known as “rollups.”

One metric that is used to assess the scalability of blockchains is transactions per second (TPS). Celestia is currently totaling 14 TPS. Meanwhile, Arbitrum (with a current market cap of $2.4b) has a daily average of 13.31 TPS, according to L2Beat.

This is a notable performance given that Celestia only rolled out less than 4-months ago and the network’s adoption is yet to match that of Arbitrum, which has been operational since May 2021.

The “real” Cosmos Hub

Celestia makes it easy to spin up new chains known as “rollups”, similar to Cosmos’ approach to spinning up “app chains”. Despite the Cosmos Hub now allowing chains to rent its security and create “consumer chains” that resembles app chains - but don’t need its own validator set - the Celestia tech stack is getting adoption across web3 development.

On-chain activity has grown tremendously, as MintScan data shows that the network has so far facilitated 6,649,287 transactions since its debut on Oct. 31, 2023.

By comparison, Cosmos Hub has averaged between 2.3 million transactions over the past 30 days against Celestia’s 5.9 million! This is why bulls are starting to call Celestia the “real” Cosmos Hub.

Celestia’s activity grew 85% within just two weeks, according to data from Santiment. Despite the decrease in social volume and development activity over the last few weeks, these metrics have started picking up in 2024 according to data from Santiment, an on-chain analytics firm.

If this kind of on-chain activity continues throughout the next cycle, we are in for a hell of a ride in the coming years for TIA!

Airdrops

Arguably, many investors and degens alike are hunting for airdrops these days, and TIA seems to be a true gem in that hunt.

The demand for TIA has grown tremendously not just due to the big staking incentives earning 16% for just staking TIA locking it up in 21 days. In addition, staking TIA comes with the potential that projects using Celestia tech will issue token airdrops, similar to how Solana's Jito and Marinade DeFi protocols rewarded users with tokens in December 2023.

This is mere speculation, there are plenty of airdrops already confirmed coming to TIA stakers, including but not limited to:

• DYM from Dymension

• HYPR from Hypr Network

• MILK from MilkyWay

• MOV from Movement Labs

• SAGA from Saga Network

And this is just the beginning!

Comparing to other Ethereum L2s and comparable chains like Celestia, CCN has made a price prediction of TIA where three analysts - optimistic, pessimistic and neutral - came up with the following price predictions for 2024, 2025 and 2030:

As shown, the optimistic case for TIA in 2023 is a staggering $192, while the pessimistic case is $100!